Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
- All Subjects: Civil rights movements
- Creators: Miller, Keith D.
Description
Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that underpin the design and development of internet technologies, as well as commonplace assumptions about who is an online user, who is an active maker of internet technologies, and who is a passive consumer of internet technologies. Applying these critical lenses to these inequities and assumptions enables a re-seeing of commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender performativity and digital cultures and practices. Together, these lenses provide a useful set of tools for methodically resisting the mystique of technologies that are, simultaneously, represented as so highly technical as to be opaque to scrutiny, and as ubiquitous to everyday life as to be beneath critical examination.
Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content.
This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.
Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content.
This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.
ContributorsTekobbe, Cindy (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Anne Moody's use of the autobiographical genre as an extension of her political activism. Noting consistent values and conventions that govern the writing of political activists, this study asserts that Moody's narrative is best situated in the genre of political autobiography--a term coined by Angela Davis. Using Margo V. Perkins' text as a base to define autobiography as activism, this dissertation illustrates the consistent values that characterize Moody's narrative as political autobiography, resistance literature, and ultimately Black Power literature. Building on the works of Joanne Braxton, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, bell hooks, Margo V. Perkins, Assata Shakur, and Johnny Stover, this project demonstrates the use of Moody's autobiography as a collective form of resistance that is reflective of autobiography as activism. To frame its argument, this study theorizes how one comes into revolutionary consciousness, demonstrating the move toward activism as a process. Drawing on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's autobiographical theory that the "narrated I" is distinguished from the "narrating I," this study asserts, as Francoise Lionnet suggests, that the "narrating I" is the vehicle to deliver recollections relevant to the autobiographer's agenda. This study emphasizes that the early version of the self Moody creates is consciously linked to her role as a future activist, ultimately demonstrating her political evolution through the emphatic linking of the personal and political. Most importantly, this dissertation demonstrates that Moody's text represents a continuity--an autobiographical bridge--between representations of the Christian nonviolent civil rights movement and the Black Power movement of the late 1960's. This study argues that Moody's autobiography is ideologically poised at the intersection of civil rights and Black Power; therefore, it serves as both a civil rights autobiography and a Black Power autobiography. Coming of Age in Mississippi offers a unique contribution to the genre of Black Power autobiography for the way it facilitates unprecedented insight into the transition from non-violent civil rights ideology to revolutionary consciousness.
ContributorsFlanagan, Melissa A (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Stancliff, Michael (Committee member) / Anokye, Duku (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation investigates the origins of dual enrollment (DE) writing courses that give students the opportunity to receive college credit for writing in high school. While no previous research dates DE programs to before the 1970s, this dissertation analyzes the development of the self-proclaimed “longest-running” DE program that began at the University of Connecticut in 1955. In this work, I contend that the University of Connecticut’s DE program began as a complacent act that further advanced already privileged (white affluent) students and further marginalized students of color, which extends marginalizing aspects of the origins of the first-year writing requirement.
I first establish the historical, social, and political context for the development of DE programs at the University of Connecticut with an overview Brown v. Board of Education, whites’ resistance to integration, and the white complacency of citizens in Connecticut in the 1950s. Using whiteness theory and feminist research methods, archival research conducted at the University of Connecticut focused on the development of DE programs shows an institutional absent presence, that is, there is an absence of reference to Brown, integration, or race of students where it concerns the construction, inception, and operation of the first DE writing courses. And finally, an attempt at a disparate impact analysis of current assessment practices that determine enrollment in DE writing courses highlights access and assessment as a connection between the history and the present state of DE programs and DE composition courses. With the inclusion of DE composition, my dissertation project fills at least some of the identified gap in historical research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies during the 1950s and extends arguments of how white complacency has and continues to influence the field and first-year writing.
I first establish the historical, social, and political context for the development of DE programs at the University of Connecticut with an overview Brown v. Board of Education, whites’ resistance to integration, and the white complacency of citizens in Connecticut in the 1950s. Using whiteness theory and feminist research methods, archival research conducted at the University of Connecticut focused on the development of DE programs shows an institutional absent presence, that is, there is an absence of reference to Brown, integration, or race of students where it concerns the construction, inception, and operation of the first DE writing courses. And finally, an attempt at a disparate impact analysis of current assessment practices that determine enrollment in DE writing courses highlights access and assessment as a connection between the history and the present state of DE programs and DE composition courses. With the inclusion of DE composition, my dissertation project fills at least some of the identified gap in historical research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies during the 1950s and extends arguments of how white complacency has and continues to influence the field and first-year writing.
ContributorsMoreland, Casie Rachelle (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Farris, Christine R. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation develops a heuristic—one I call the iterative narrative reflection framework—for rhetorically engaged, data-driven teacherly theory building using Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance and rejection. Teacher-scholars regularly develop curricula and lesson plans informed by theory and prior experience, but the daily practice of teaching and learning with students rarely plays out as expected. In many cases, institutional constraints and the unpredictable lives of students interact with teachers’ plans in surprising and sometimes confounding ways. Teachers typically make sense of such challenges by constructing post-hoc narratives about what happened and why, attributing motives and agencies to other participants in ways that suggest how to respond, move forward, and get back on track. Whether such narratives are part of a deliberate practice of reflection or an informal and largely unnoticed mental process, they are rarely thought of as constructed accounts and therefore as rhetorical acts that can be subjected to serious review, criticism, and revision. Yet these stories are shaped by familiar genre conventions that influence interpretations of events and motives in ways that may or may not serve well as teachers consider how best to respond to unfolding events. Using the iterative narrative reflection framework to guide my analysis of my own teacherly narratives through multiple layers of reflection and criticism, I demonstrate across the dissertation’s three cases how such deliberate, methodical analysis can reveal tacit assumptions and additional interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, such a process of iterative reflection enables the teacher-scholar to choose from among a wider range of available means of persuasion and pedagogical possibilities.
ContributorsRobinson, Rebecca Joanna (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In 1981, Fernando Valenzuela had one of the most unlikely rookie seasons for theLos Angeles Dodgers. Originally from a rural farm town in northern Mexico, he left an enduring legacy that persists within Mexican/American and Latinx fans and communities throughout Los Angeles. Not only did Fernando help the Dodgers capture the World Series, he captured the hearts of the people and the communities who had shunned the Dodgers for decades. This act of protest was a response to the destruction of three neighborhoods—La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop—that were destroyed amid a protracted legal battle with the city of Los Angeles throughout the 1950’s that culminated in coercion, violence, and a new baseball stadium. This project intends to remember the neighborhoods of La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop and those who lost their homes alongside the public memory of Fernando Valenzuela’s unlikely rookie season, dubbed Fernandomania, and his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. I illumine how the public memories of Fernandomania, a moment of communitas, and Fernando Valenzuela have facilitated the public forgetting of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop by making Chavez Ravine into a novel public idiom for American baseball rather than a site of violence and resistance. In the process of facilitating the public forgetting of these neighborhoods, the sports media commits a pernicious discursive violence upon Fernando Valenzuela’s hyper-visible brown body that reveals the workings of a white racial frame designed to protect American baseball’s white masculine ideology. Ultimately, the Los Angeles Dodgers benefit from Fernando’s unmistakably cultural and racial Mexican identity—the source of his otherization and incongruity with American baseball’s white heroism—as the transgressions of the past are slowly forgotten.
ContributorsZamora, Erin Victoria (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Meân, Lindsey J. (Committee member) / Ore, Ersula J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This study contributes to the literature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by offering rhetorical and discourse analysis of political graffiti on a wall built by Israel in Palestine. The analysis attempts to answer the urgent questions of why, who, when, how and for whom these graffiti exist. The data collected for the analysis consists of personal photos of graffiti taken randomly in 2010 and 2013 in Bethlehem, on the Palestinian side of the massive wall. Several theories in rhetoric and discourse analysis were consulted to perform the technical rhetorical and linguistic analyses of the graffiti utterances, images, and messages in selected photos of the graffiti. Social, physical, psychological and political factors that affect communication between the wall graffitists and their readers is discussed to assist in the interpretation of the messages of these graffiti from a Palestinian perspective. The findings of this qualitative study show that graffiti on such a high profile site are not typical of violent gang graffiti as commonly interpreted in the US, but rather contribute a universal interactive rhetorical mode employed by local and international graffitists to show their solidarity and demands for basic human rights for a misrepresented culture. Moreover, the wall graffiti function as evidence that graffiti has evolved into a formal performing art that can be found in respected art galleries. The wall graffiti create a dialogue between uncoordinated actors who come from different orientations to produce an array of positions not usually present in corporate media outlets. The analysis of the wall shows that these graffiti promote deep cultural and historical understanding, as well as break down boundaries and stereotypes. The collective threefold result of the analysis is the following: First, graffiti on the wall have a collective universal motive; second, the graffiti give voice to the voiceless; and third, the graffiti can prompt a sociopolitical change that can lead to a long overdue peaceful resolution to the conflict.
Keywords: Political rhetoric, discourse analysis, Burke, Halliday, Banksy, political graffiti, street art, Arab graffiti, rhetorical and linguistic patterns, dramatistic, identification, universality, Palestine divisive wall, intertextuality
Keywords: Political rhetoric, discourse analysis, Burke, Halliday, Banksy, political graffiti, street art, Arab graffiti, rhetorical and linguistic patterns, dramatistic, identification, universality, Palestine divisive wall, intertextuality
ContributorsDahdal, Sylvia Hanna (Author) / Adams, Karen L (Thesis advisor) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / Miller, Keith D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
While the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is one of the most famous and celebrated parts of American history, rhetoric scholars have illuminated the ways this subversive movement has been manipulated beyond recognition over time. These narrative constructions play a role in preserving what Maegan Parker Brooks calls the "conservative master narrative of civil rights history," a narrative that diminishes the work of activists while simultaneously promoting complacency to prevent any challenge to the white supremacist hegemony. This dissertation argues that the graphic memoir trilogy March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell challenges this conservative master narrative through visual rhetoric, in particular through the comics techniques "braiding" and "weaving."
Braiding occurs when authors create "webs of interrelation" (Miodrag 134) by repeating a technique throughout the text, which can sometimes involve a secondary narrative (Groensteen). Braids are associations in the network of panels of the comic that go beyond the parameters of strictly linear storytelling as panels echo those the reader has encountered before. The braids in March compare the past and present through a direct juxtaposition of January 20, 2009—the inauguration day of Barack Obama—with John Lewis' activism from 1959 to 1965. While this juxtaposition risks reinforcing a progress narrative that suggests racism is in the past, in fact, the braided inauguration scenes help the reader connect the moments of the past with their present, calling to mind the ways white supremacy endures in contemporary America. Weaving refers to the reader’s action of moving back and forth in the comics narrative to create meaning, and artists use techniques that facilitate this behavior, such as leaving out or minimizing significant cues and creating a sense of ambiguity that leads the reader to become curious about the events in the sequence. Weaving can disrupt an easy linear narrative of depicted events—such as Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the Democratic National Convention—as artists present several opportunities for the reader to interpret these stories in ways that challenge a conservative master narrative of the events in the trilogy.
Braiding occurs when authors create "webs of interrelation" (Miodrag 134) by repeating a technique throughout the text, which can sometimes involve a secondary narrative (Groensteen). Braids are associations in the network of panels of the comic that go beyond the parameters of strictly linear storytelling as panels echo those the reader has encountered before. The braids in March compare the past and present through a direct juxtaposition of January 20, 2009—the inauguration day of Barack Obama—with John Lewis' activism from 1959 to 1965. While this juxtaposition risks reinforcing a progress narrative that suggests racism is in the past, in fact, the braided inauguration scenes help the reader connect the moments of the past with their present, calling to mind the ways white supremacy endures in contemporary America. Weaving refers to the reader’s action of moving back and forth in the comics narrative to create meaning, and artists use techniques that facilitate this behavior, such as leaving out or minimizing significant cues and creating a sense of ambiguity that leads the reader to become curious about the events in the sequence. Weaving can disrupt an easy linear narrative of depicted events—such as Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the Democratic National Convention—as artists present several opportunities for the reader to interpret these stories in ways that challenge a conservative master narrative of the events in the trilogy.
ContributorsBoykin, Jessica (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Lamp-Fortuno, Kathleen (Committee member) / Ore, Ersula J. (Committee member) / Serafini, Frank (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019