Matching Items (11)
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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
- Creators: Goggin, Maureen D
Description
This project draws on sociocognitive rhetoric to ask, How, in complex situations not of our making, do we determine what needs to be done and how to leverage available means for the health of our communities and institutions? The project pulls together rhetorical concepts of the stochastic arts (those that demand the most precise, careful planning in the least predictable places) and techne (problem-solving tools that transform limits and barriers into possibilities) to forward a stochastic techne that grounds contemplative social action at the intersection of invention and intervention and mastery and failure in real time, under constraints we can't control and outcomes we can't predict. Based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Sudanese refugee diaspora in Phoenix, I offer a method for engaging in postmodern phronesis with community partners in four ways: 1) Explanations and examples of public listening and situational mapping 2) Narratives that elucidate the stochastic techne, a heuristic for determining and testing wise rhetorical action 3) Principles for constructing mutually collaborative, mutually beneficial community-university/ community-school partnerships for jointly addressing real-world issues that matter in the places where we live 4) Descriptions and explanations that ground the hard rhetorical work of inventing new paths and destinations as some of the Sudanese women construct hybridized identities and models of social entrepreneurship that resist aid-to-Africa discourse based on American paternalism and humanitarianism and re-cast themselves as micro-financers of innovative work here and in Southern Sudan. Finally, the project pulls back from the Sudanese to consider implications for re-figuring secondary English education around phronesis. Here, I offer a framework for teachers to engage in the real work of problem-posing that aims - as Django Paris calls us - to get something done by confronting the issues that confront our communities. Grounded in classroom instruction, the chapter provides tools for scaffolding public listening, multi-voiced inquiries, and phronesis with and for local publics. I conclude by calling for English education to abandon all pretense of being a predictive science and to instead embrace productive knowledge-making and the rhetorical work of phronesis as the heart of secondary English studies.
ContributorsClifton, Jennifer (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Gee, James Paul (Committee member) / Paris, Django (Committee member) / Warriner, Doris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
ABSTRACT For many years, difference scholars, such as Cornel West, Iris Marion Young, and Janet Atwill have been reminding humanities scholars that if social equity is ever to be realized, difference needs to be reconfigured and reframed. As Janet Atwill puts it, "difference can no longer be the anomaly, the enemy, or the problem to be solved. Difference is the condition" (212). While these scholars insightfully recognize that difference needs to be accepted, welcomed and loved rather than merely tolerated, they have not sufficiently addressed the perceptual change that must occur worldwide if difference as an intrinsic underlying condition of human existence is to be embraced. This project provides a point of departure for carrying out such a dramatic epistemic change by arguing that hierarchical thinking, not difference, is the real agent underwriting societal violence and discord. Hierarchical thinking delineates a more appropriate critical space than does difference for social justice inquiry, invention, and intervention. This project also rhetorically theorizes the realm of intersubjectivity and provides two novel contributions to contemporary rhetorical theory: 1) privilege as a rhetorical construct and 2) the untapped inventional potential of the postmodern understanding of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the embodied and performative aspects of hierarchical thinking, this work draws upon the writings of Lillian Smith, a white southerner (1897-1966) whose descriptive analyses of the Jim Crow South allude to large systems of privilege of which Jim Crow is merely representational. Illustrating the invidious nexus of privilege, Smith's writings describe the ways in which individuals embody and perform practices of exclusion and hate to perpetuate larger systems of privilege. Smith shows how privilege operates much as gender and power--fluidly and variously and dependent upon context. Viewing privilege as a rhetorical construct, operating dynamically, always in flux and at play, provides rhetoricians with a theoretically important move that un-yokes privilege from specific identities (e.g., white privilege). When viewed through this more dynamic and precise lens, we can readily perceive how privilege functions as a colonizing, ubiquitously learned, and variegated rhetorical practice of subordination and domination that, as a frame of analysis, offers a more fluid and accurate perspective than identity categories provide for discussions of oppression, social justice, and democratic engagement.
ContributorsHoliday, Judy (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study is a feminist historiography of Al-Raida, a Lebanese feminist journal introduced in 1976 by the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University. This study recovers foundations of modern Lebanese feminist discourses as they are articulated in the journal by employing Foucauldian CDA as a means to trace discourse strands, or conversations, which include Family Planning, development, politics and narratives of the Lebanese civil war. This study explores, by situating each discourse strand within dominant and local historical contexts, the shifting rhetorical function of the journal through various historical moments. Tracing the dominant discourse strands within the first decade of the journal, this study rhetorically analyzes the ways in which arguments are positioned, research studies are presented, and methodologies are employed to forge viable solutions to Middle Eastern women's issues. First, the study traces the conversation on Family Planning in Lebanon and its relevance to the economic and social situation during the late 70s. Second, the study presents the shift in the early 80s towards a discourse on development and explores how Al-Raida presents the issue of development, attempts to define it, and in doing so outlines some of the concerns at this time, including illiteracy, access to health care, access to paid employment, and women's access to developmental opportunities. Third, the study presents the discourse in the mid-80s on the civil war in Lebanon and highlights Al-Raida's rhetorical function by documenting trauma and war narratives through personal interviews, testimonies, and ethnographies. The shift in the methodologies of the research articles published in the first decade, from quantitative studies towards qualitative studies, indicates the journal is rhetorically situated within both the dominant international discourse and within the local context, exhibiting an ability to respond to the nuances in the local Lebanese women's movement while simultaneously maintaining international visibility.
ContributorsKhoury, Nicole (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Ali, Souad T. (Thesis advisor) / Roen, Duane (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
I will examine the relation between techne and virtue as it appears in Plato‘s dialogues and suggest that in order to adequately confront our greatest political and social challenges our understanding must move beyond mere scientific and technical knowledge and our practices must move beyond the political art taught by Gorgias and Protagoras. It is my belief that the Platonic conception of virtue and the political art that aims toward that conception of virtue offer a paradigm that can help remedy today‘s arguably technocratic political condition. I begin this work by exploring the nature of techne as it was understood in ancient Greece, and arguing (contra Irwin) that Plato did not hold a technical conception of justice. Whereas each techne establishes an eidos (idea, form, blueprint) in advance, which can be clearly known and uniformly applied in each particular case, I argue that Plato‘s conception of justice leaves all substantive content to be filled out in each concrete situation, precluding the possibility of the anticipatory disposition that techne affords and demanding a certain degree of deliberation in each situation, with attention paid to the unique aspects of each particular set of circumstances. I argue that this conception of justice informs Plato's notion of a "political art" and suggest that this art requires constant attention to the unique attributes of each particular situation in which we find ourselves, and that the pre-interpretive prejudice of many modern ideologies and political-economic perspectives hinders our ability to see the particularity in each situation and thereby reduces our capacity for achieving justice in the historically-situated, concrete moment within which we always must act.
ContributorsOlsen, Tyler (Author) / Crittenden, Jack (Thesis director) / Ramsey, Ramsey Eric (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The Islamic State also known as ISIS is an organization and a self-proclaimed state that emerged from many diverse factors. Its roots lie with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966—2006), the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ideologies of various modern-day Jihadi-Salafist. ISIS proclaimed a world-wide Caliphate in 2014 and named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as its Caliph. Muslim, non-Muslim states and Islamic authorities however, rejected its claim to statehood or caliphate. The goal of this thesis is to understand the development of this new phenomenon by analyzing its history, rhetoric, ideology and practice. Prior to its creation, the tensions in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein regime and its relationship to the first and the second Iraq war in 1990-91 and 2003 as well as the creation of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that led to the emergence of a new phenomenon, global jihadism. The main ideology that the Islamic State promotes is a form of Jihadi-Salafism that claims to unite Muslims against all non-Muslim governments in order to bring “true Islam” back into the world. To do this, jihadists justify the establishment of the Caliphate in an effort to provide legitimacy to their actions, appealing to young people who often times are seduce by their eschatology. Once individuals join, they are taught concepts pertaining to martyrdom to establish loyal to the organization and its cause. To win people over, the Islamic State employs modern methods of communication that includes social media such as Youtube and Twitter, as well as magazines such as Dabiq. These resources address the online community and specifically attract individuals who feel isolated from their communities, or individuals who wish to create an impact on the world. Overall, the Islamic State, although it employs Islamic symbols and scriptures in their claim of representing all Muslims, does not adhere to, nor respect the historical and intellectual discussions of Islam in favor of their own political agenda. Its adherents utilize concepts from certain Salafi and Wahhabi ideals, emphasizing jihad as defensive war against the West in an attempt to isolate parts of society so that they can retain control. They ignore the main concept of mercy within the Islamic faith. Muslims in the Arizona community agree that the Islamic State is not a representation of Islam in this world and should not be equivocated with the Islamic practices that more than 1.6 billion Muslims practice in their daily life.
ContributorsMonawar, Saadh Ahmed (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis director) / Kefeli, Agnes (Committee member) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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
Description
The position of Dean of Women was created in response to novel exigencies rising from women’s acceptance to coeducational institutions of higher learning in the late nineteenth century. While these early women administrators had a profound impact on women’s higher education in the United States, their work has received relatively little attention. In response to this discriminatory erasure, this dissertation applies feminist historiographical approaches and qualitative methods that center these women and their rhetoric within the historical narrative. In particular, this dissertation explores, synthesizes, and analyzes the archived rhetorical documents produced by the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) and Evelyn Jones Kirmse, an early University of Arizona dean of women, between 1922 and 1942. By privileging the rhetoric of these women and positioning them as authorities of their own experience within hegemonically masculine coeducational systems and administrations, this dissertation brings to light their own theories, debates, and arguments concerning how to best make room for women in higher education professionally, physically, and intellectually.
While positing the complexity and efficacy of their rhetoric, this dissertation also marks critical ideological negotiations within the deans’ arguments in response to socio-cultural shifts and opportunities born of the Progressive Era. By locating paradoxical navigations of traditional essentialist values and burgeoning progressive ideas within the deans’ rhetoric, this dissertation provides an important illustration of the awkward stage of growth within feminism’s development. It provides insight to deans of women’s own rhetorical explorations on how their identity and success should be constructed, attained, and measured in the new academic territory of coeducation.
ContributorsPrice-McKell, Cheryl (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K (Committee member) / Ratcliffe, Krista (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation explores findings from a year-long investigation of the context-driven practices, strategies and beliefs of five multilingual Cultural Health Navigators (CHNs) working in a local pediatrics clinic serving large numbers of refugee families from a variety of cultural backgrounds who are experiencing a range of healthcare challenges. Grounded in a methodology of engagement (Grabill, 2010), this inquiry systematically documents and analyzes the range of ways in which the CHNs assist refugee families and their healthcare providers, their rationale for the decisions made and actions taken, and their concerns about the challenges they encounter. I show that while much of what the CHNs do to assist refugee families and their healthcare providers is routine and can be expected, CHNs also tend to manage complex work involved in mediating refugee families’ interactions with healthcare providers and the healthcare system in ways that cannot always be anticipated in advance. Through a close analysis of their practices and reflections, I show how their various interactions, actions and decisions are responsive to specifics of the situation at hand, informed by their lived experiences as CHNs and immigrants/refugees, and influenced by a dynamic, emergent and embodied notion of context. The findings of this study demonstrate how the CHNs’ collective and distributed knowledge production work shapes experiences with acquiring health literacy, and the material consequences of such efforts and practices.
Drawing on ethnographic research methods and critical-incident methodologies that involved the CHNs in the inquiry process, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the different kinds of work they do, the constraints they encounter, and how they creatively respond to such constraints in real time. The findings demonstrate that a collaborative engagement with critical incidents as a method of intercultural inquiry facilitates a more robust and dynamic understanding of the distributed nature of decision-making practices and ways of knowing. Embodying sensitivity to situated ways of knowing and dynamic practices in institutional settings, this study demonstrates the value of combining social science methodologies with rhetorical inquiry methods to conduct interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research to address pressing social problems in ways that benefit historically marginalized groups.
Drawing on ethnographic research methods and critical-incident methodologies that involved the CHNs in the inquiry process, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the different kinds of work they do, the constraints they encounter, and how they creatively respond to such constraints in real time. The findings demonstrate that a collaborative engagement with critical incidents as a method of intercultural inquiry facilitates a more robust and dynamic understanding of the distributed nature of decision-making practices and ways of knowing. Embodying sensitivity to situated ways of knowing and dynamic practices in institutional settings, this study demonstrates the value of combining social science methodologies with rhetorical inquiry methods to conduct interdisciplinary and cross-institutional research to address pressing social problems in ways that benefit historically marginalized groups.
ContributorsMorelli, Katherine Elizabeth (Author) / Warriner, Doris (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Goggin, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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
Rhetoric has traditionally enjoyed a close connection with ideals of citizenship. Yet, the rhetorical traditions of the medieval period have generally been described as divorced from civic life, concerned instead with theories of composition in specific genres (such as letters and sermons) and with poetics. This view is the product of historiographical approaches that equate rhetoric either theories and practices of speech and writing intended for state-sponsored civic forums, or alternatively with rules governing future speech or literary production. Consequently, the prevailing view of the medieval period in rhetorical studies is a simplified one that has not evolved with changing practices of analysis in the field of rhetorical studies. This dissertation contends that by employing alternative modes of historiography, historians of rhetoric gain a more accurate conception of medieval rhetoric’s civic roles, revealing the discipline’s role in shaping the individual and their relationship to civic and political institutions.
Organized around an introduction, a broad discussion of later medieval rhetoric and political thought (950-1390), four case studies, and a conclusion, this dissertation begins by identifying historiographical trends that have associated medieval rhetoric with technical treatises, minimizing connections to civic life. Challenging these assessments through a close reading of texts of rhetorical theory, political philosophy, and technical treatises, it contends that medieval rhetoric influenced activities such as grammatical education, didactic art, and political theory to inform practices of citizenship. Focusing specifically on representations of labor, this dissertation show that these venues idealized the political participation of manual laborers within an otherwise discursive theory of civic life that drew from both Aristotelian and Ciceronian sources.
Organized around an introduction, a broad discussion of later medieval rhetoric and political thought (950-1390), four case studies, and a conclusion, this dissertation begins by identifying historiographical trends that have associated medieval rhetoric with technical treatises, minimizing connections to civic life. Challenging these assessments through a close reading of texts of rhetorical theory, political philosophy, and technical treatises, it contends that medieval rhetoric influenced activities such as grammatical education, didactic art, and political theory to inform practices of citizenship. Focusing specifically on representations of labor, this dissertation show that these venues idealized the political participation of manual laborers within an otherwise discursive theory of civic life that drew from both Aristotelian and Ciceronian sources.
ContributorsLoveridge, Jordan Thomas (Author) / Lamp, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Goggin, Maureen D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017