Matching Items (10)
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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
- Creators: Hannah, Mark
Description
This dissertation is a detailed rhetorical analysis of interviews with rice farmers in central Java, Indonesia and documents published by the global NGOs United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and CGIAR. Using theories of materiality, literacies, and environmental rhetorics, I examine how seemingly distinct and disparate humans, organizations, and inanimates are actually entangled agents in a dynamic conversation. I have termed that conversation the discourse of rice farming. Studying local and global together challenges conventional dichotomous thinking about farming and food. Looking at this conversation as an entanglement reveals what Karen Barad has defined in Meeting the Universe Halfway as the intra-relatedness of all agents. I focus on rice farming because rice is a food staple around the world and a major component of global agriculture initiatives by FAO and CGIAR. I argue that farmers construct their jobs in terms of production, food sovereignty, and community. The NGOs construct agriculture in terms of consumption, food security, and poverty alleviation. In my project I emphasize the need for global agents to better account for how farmers construct agriculture. Accounting for how all agents impact the discourse of rice farming is the only way to come to an objective understanding rice farming's impact on local and global scales. My argument adds to the field of environmental rhetorics because most published case studies are about the United States and thus are limited in their applicability. And it enriches global conversations about food security and food justice because it shares accounts from actual farmers who are often conspicuously absent from literature on those topics.
ContributorsCooney, Emily (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation considers why several characters on the Early Modern Stage choose to remain silent when speech seems warranted. By examining the circumstances and effects of self-silencing on both the character and his/her community, I argue that silencing is an exercise of power that simultaneously subjectifies the silent one and compels the community (textual or theatrical) to ethical self-examination. This argument engages primarily with social philosophers Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Badiou, and Emmanual Levinas, considering their sometimes contradictory ideas about the ontology and representation of the subject and the construction of community. Set alongside the Early Modern plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd, these theories reveal a rich functionality of self-silencing in the contexts of gender relations, aberrant sociality, and ethical crisis. This multi-faceted functionality creates a singular subject, establishes a space for the simultaneous existence of the subject and his/her community, offers an opportunity for empathetic mirroring and/or insight, and thereby leads to social unification. Silence is, in its effects, creative: it engenders empathy and ethical self- and social-reflection.
ContributorsKrouse, Penelope (Author) / Perry, Curtis (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Ayanna T (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora V (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
A pressing question in public policymaking is how best to allocate decision-making authority and to facilitate opportunities for input. When it comes to science, technology, and environmental (STE) policy decisions, persons impacted by those decisions often have relevant information and perspectives to contribute yet lack either the specialized, technical knowledge or the means by which to effectively communicate that knowledge. Consequently, due to a variety of factors, they are frequently denied meaningful involvement in making them. In an effort to better understand why this is so, and how this might change, this dissertation uses an activity systems framework to examine how three factors mediate the circulation of information in STE public engagement mechanisms.
In this project, I examine the transcripts of a 2015 administrative hearing and community meeting about the Santa Susana Field Lab—a former nuclear- and rocket engine-testing facility 30 miles from Los Angeles, where an experimental nuclear reactor suffered a partial meltdown in 1959. Specifically, I identify (1) who was designated as an "expert" versus a member of "the public," (2) the structural features, and (3) the stylistic features of participants' remarks at these events; and I study how these factors mediated the flow of information at each. To do so, I view "expert" and "public" as what Michael McGee has termed ideographs, and consider the structural and stylistic features that prior scholarship has identified to impact information flow.
Based on my analysis, I theorize that role designations, structural features, and stylistic features work together to mediate whose, what, and how information flows in public engagement mechanisms. Based on my findings, I also suggest that this mediation impacts policy outcomes. As such, I contend that better understanding the relationships among these mediational means, information flow, and policy outcomes is an important step towards developing public engagement mechanisms that most effectively use the relevant knowledge and other insights of all who have a stake in policy decisions.
In this project, I examine the transcripts of a 2015 administrative hearing and community meeting about the Santa Susana Field Lab—a former nuclear- and rocket engine-testing facility 30 miles from Los Angeles, where an experimental nuclear reactor suffered a partial meltdown in 1959. Specifically, I identify (1) who was designated as an "expert" versus a member of "the public," (2) the structural features, and (3) the stylistic features of participants' remarks at these events; and I study how these factors mediated the flow of information at each. To do so, I view "expert" and "public" as what Michael McGee has termed ideographs, and consider the structural and stylistic features that prior scholarship has identified to impact information flow.
Based on my analysis, I theorize that role designations, structural features, and stylistic features work together to mediate whose, what, and how information flows in public engagement mechanisms. Based on my findings, I also suggest that this mediation impacts policy outcomes. As such, I contend that better understanding the relationships among these mediational means, information flow, and policy outcomes is an important step towards developing public engagement mechanisms that most effectively use the relevant knowledge and other insights of all who have a stake in policy decisions.
ContributorsChurg, Emily (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Catlaw, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Ethos or credibility of a speaker is often defined as the speaker's character (Aristotle). Contemporary scholars however, have contended that ethos lies with the audience because while the speaker may efficiently persuade, the audience will decide if it wants to be persuaded (Farrell). Missing from the scholarly conversation is attention to how ethos is performed between speaker and audience under institutional structures that produce inequitable power relations subject to changing political contexts over time. In this dissertation I analyze how ethos is performed that is a function of a specific social and political environment.
My grandfather, Al Foon Lai, was a paper son. As an adult, I learned that paper sons were members of paper families that may or may not actually exist except on paper; furthermore paper immigration was the way many Chinese entered the United States to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Grandfather held legal status, but grandfather's name was fictitious and thus his entry to the United States in 1920 was illegal. Today by some authorities he would be classified as an illegal immigrant. As Grandfather's status as a paper son suggest, Grandfather's credibility as someone with the legal prerogative to reside in the U.S. was a dynamic construct that was negotiated in light of the changing cultural norms encoded in shifting immigration policies. Grandfather constructed his ethos "to do persuasion" in administrative hearings mandated under the Chinese Exclusion Act that produced asymmetrical power relations. By asymmetrical power relations I mean the unequal status between the administrator overseeing the hearing and Lai the immigrant. The unequal status was manifest in the techniques and procedures employed by the administrative body empowered to implement the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigrants. Combining tools from narrative analysis and feminists rhetorical methods I analyze excerpts from Al Foon Lai's transcripts from three administrative hearings between 1926 and 1965. It finds that Grandfather employed narrative strategies that show the nature of negotiating ethos in asymmetrical power situations and the link between the performance of ethos and the political and social context.
My grandfather, Al Foon Lai, was a paper son. As an adult, I learned that paper sons were members of paper families that may or may not actually exist except on paper; furthermore paper immigration was the way many Chinese entered the United States to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Grandfather held legal status, but grandfather's name was fictitious and thus his entry to the United States in 1920 was illegal. Today by some authorities he would be classified as an illegal immigrant. As Grandfather's status as a paper son suggest, Grandfather's credibility as someone with the legal prerogative to reside in the U.S. was a dynamic construct that was negotiated in light of the changing cultural norms encoded in shifting immigration policies. Grandfather constructed his ethos "to do persuasion" in administrative hearings mandated under the Chinese Exclusion Act that produced asymmetrical power relations. By asymmetrical power relations I mean the unequal status between the administrator overseeing the hearing and Lai the immigrant. The unequal status was manifest in the techniques and procedures employed by the administrative body empowered to implement the Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigrants. Combining tools from narrative analysis and feminists rhetorical methods I analyze excerpts from Al Foon Lai's transcripts from three administrative hearings between 1926 and 1965. It finds that Grandfather employed narrative strategies that show the nature of negotiating ethos in asymmetrical power situations and the link between the performance of ethos and the political and social context.
ContributorsCarter, Karen Lynn Ching (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
My dissertation is situated in the speculative—that rhetorical domain of human affairs concerned with conditions we cannot entirely predict or control. Specifically, my research investigates the polarization and unease many of us feel as we imagine a world in which humans are no longer in the driver’s seat. It offers a literate practice of framing to facilitate substantive talk about the possible effects of the impending technology. To pursue this line of inquiry, I draw from Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance and rejection. In particular, I developed a computer-based tool and tested the prototype in a pilot project. The study is designed to assess the technai (rhetorical problem-solving tools that transform limits and barriers into possibilities) I fashioned from Burke’s six frames of acceptance and rejection to prompt participants to articulate epic, tragic, comedic, elegiac, satirical and burlesque driving futures. Findings from the study reveal that the practice of framing helps scaffold participants’ thinking beyond the good/bad binary and toward more realistically complex understandings and expectations of the future of driving. For example, one student commented that “the frames guided discussion and added a well-rounded perspective that we individuals may not have otherwise taken into consideration.” Ultimately, this study demonstrates the power of effectively designed deliberative experiences. Technai teach useful practices to teachers, students, scholars – all of whom need opportunities to critically assess the risks and rewards of our technology-laden lives. This research pushes our scholarship to focus on rhetorics that surround speculative public scientific controversies like the driverless car, in order to advocate for our individual and collective well-being.
ContributorsSantana, Christina Jean (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This project emphasizes a complex, holistic, and additive view of content knowledge in the Discipline of Writing, advocating for balanced and affirming scholarship and pedagogy rather than a competitive approach that leads to an epistemology of erasure. As a composite project, the introduction contextualizes three articles linked by their articulation of holistically and additively thinking for students and scholars in the discipline of writing, preparing the reader to see the rhetorical steps that I attempt to take in each article along these lines. Article 1, “The Collaborative Work of Composition,” uses Marxian language of production to highlight the complexities of collaborative writing in a social microcosm drawing focus to the difficulties some students have collaborating, particularly those of linguistic and cultural minority groups, because they or their collaborators struggle to adopt an additive valuing system to position themselves and one another as part of a team with varying strengths. In Article 2, “An Integrative Translingual Pedagogy of Affirmation,” I build on this valuing of writers by advocating for an affirming pedagogy that allows teachers to help students see the complexity and value of their shared languages and their individual (L)anguage as well as the identity connected to these. Article 3, “Familia Académica: Translingual History and the Epistemology of Erasure,” draws on a deep and overlooked history that provides a more complex holistic lens for the current socio-politics of the discipline of Writing’s interaction with the translingual approach, re-orienting to a more additive blend of the extreme perspectives that key scholars have taken between second language writing and translingual writing. Finally, the last section of the dissertation acts as a metaconstruction of the discipline of Writing, pointing to moments within the previous three articles that indicate a sustained effort to complicate binaries and then provide an alternate symbiosis of scholarly perspectives for disciplinary discourse and identity in Writing. Most importantly though, the final section of the dissertation synthesizes the partial approaches introduced in the previous three articles which inform my understanding of disciplinarity. Further, this final section attempts to find equity in the variety of partial approaches developed in the previous articles and which I have since matured into what I call the 8 Aspects of Writing. The 8 aspects and their components move beyond individual issues presented in each article and synthesize a more holistic, additive, and systematic model of defining the content knowledge for the discipline of Writing.
ContributorsFields, Gregory Dale (Author) / Rose, Shirley K. (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Women are under-represented in engineering, in school and in the workplace. Reasons for this include the socio-historical masculinization of technology, which has been established by feminist technology researchers such as Faulkner, Lohan and Cockburn, and makes developing role models of women engineers difficult. The under-representation of women in engineering is a social problem that typically lies outside the area of interest of rhetoricians. However, my dissertation considers storytelling by women engineers as a powerful rhetorical tool, one that is well-suited for the particular structural inequalities endemic to engineering. I analyze stories told by participants in an oral history project conducted by the Society of Women Engineers, with women engineers who worked between the 1940’s and the early 2000’s. I use a textual coding research method to reveal the claims participants make through stories, themes that are evident across those claims, and how women engineers effectively use stories to advance those claims. My study extends the scholarly understanding of the rhetoric of engineering work. I find that in their stories participants argue for a complex relationship between social and technical work; they describe how technical thinking helps them work through social problems, how technical work is socially situated, that an interest in technical work impacts family and interpersonal relationships, and how making career decisions is facilitated by social relationships. They also demonstrate considerable rhetorical expertise in their use of narrative. As a collection these stories meet a pressing need: the need for an understanding of engineering and women engineers that creates possibilities for change. They meet this need first by helping the audience understand both significant systemic oppressions and the problem-solving individual actions that can be taken in response (in ways that highlight possibilities without placing the full responsibility for change on women engineers), and second by illustrating a heterogenous understanding of engineering and women engineers (in order to avoid essentializing women and essentializing technology). As a result of these qualities, the stories are a way to get to ‘know’ engineers and engineering from a distance, which is exactly the pressing lack felt by so many potential women engineers.
ContributorsMoxley-Kelly, Sean (Author) / Boyd, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This thesis argues that celebrities and celebrity studies should be taken more seriously in writing studies as productive sites for writing instruction in the composition classroom. Historically, celebrity culture has been overlooked for ostensibly lacking in substance or relevance to critical thought. However, academic disciplines, such as cultural studies and celebrity studies, are paving the way for celebrities having a more significant rhetorical relevance as figures in the public. This thesis explores celebrities as cultural figures who are advantageously positioned in the public realm as rhetorical agents. Their increased visibility and the increase in observation of celebrity culture in the public sphere are contributing to how people form opinions and make judgments about the world around them. Yet, despite some of the connections between the public, writing, and celebrity rhetoric, there has been little work in the field aligning celebrity rhetoric as a site for public writing instruction within academia. This thesis seeks to address this gap by aligning celebrity rhetoric with scholarship on public writing pedagogy in composition studies. To model how students might approach analyzing and writing about celebrity rhetoric in the composition classroom, this thesis offers a critical look at the celebrity rhetoric of Taylor Swift. The case study rhetorically analyzes sites of public writing that work intertextuality across various mediums to construct her celebrity as a representation of modern feminism. This thesis concludes with a discussion about the pedagogical implication of implementing celebrity rhetoric in the composition classroom. It concludes that celebrity rhetoric is useful for students in composition classrooms for making personal connections with their work, negotiating an understanding about culture and public issues, and influencing the production of rhetoric, writing and their own identity as scholars.
ContributorsHorton, Kathryn (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This creative project is a portfolio of accessible science communication. It consists of three multimedia texts, each one written and designed for a different audience about a different topic. The first project is an article/report about the recent launch delays and cost increases for the James Webb Space Telescope, written for adults in their 40s-50s. The second project is a children’s picture book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, written for homeschoolers in 6th grade. The third project is an educational animated video about the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves, written for students in 7th grade.
ContributorsShafer, Christiana (Author) / Wheeler, Jacqueline (Thesis director) / Foy, Joseph (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Traditionally, the texts that students produce in first-year composition (FYC) settings have served as the predominant sites for faculty to perceive students’ writerly ethos. It is primarily in these texts where faculty tend to assess the variety of available credibility cultivation practices that students employ as they attempt to increase their discursive authority. Given the breadth of scholarship in writing studies detailing contemporary students’ struggle to engage in the language of the academy and the parallel calls to challenge the kinds of dominant discourses that are privileged in institutions of higher education, in this study, I explore other potential faculty pathways to perceiving ethos. To do so, this dissertation draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of discourse that calls attention to the sociologlical conditions that grant authority to words as well as contemporary feminist rhetorical scholarship that seeks to disrupt classical and contemporary frameworks of ethos through a renewed interest in notions of location, dwelling, and inhabitance. By eliciting six community college faculty perceptions of FYC students, findings from this qualitative study suggest that community college FYC faculty hold tacit perceptions of students that are closely related to past reputation and virtue–two characteristics of ethos. These perceptions reflect what I refer to as students’ prediscursive ethos, which is constituted of the student’s social position that is predominantly shaped by the audience’s prior image of the student. Moreover, reflecting on their perceptions of students, participants often indexed an array of interactions with students, which suggest that student’s prediscursive ethos is partly informed and shaped by certain faculty-student interactions that often precede students’ textual linguistic performances. Thus, I contend that such interactions between faculty and students represent alternative pathways for faculty to perceive students’ writerly ethos. Ultimately, I offer a relational model of ethos that more accurately describes the contexts within which community college writers create texts; one that accounts for the textual features that appear on paper (discursive ethos), the sociological conditions (prediscursive ethos) under which those textual features are assessed, and perhaps most important, the alternative pathways (interactions) where both ethotic realities may be reimagined.
ContributorsArreguin, Alex Sebastian (Author) / Hannah, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Saidy-Hannah, Christina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022