Matching Items (38)
Description
The topos of home is fraught with ideological baggage. This piece works alongside others that labor to rework home as a space for rhetorical topos. I spend the majority of my text analyzing three books from which I explicate the topos of "home." These books are Mike Rose's 1989 work Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of American's Educational Underclass, Victor Villanueva's 1993 Bootstraps: From and American Academic of Color, and Ellen Cushman's 1998 The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. I've chosen these books for two interrelated reasons. First, these texts aided in establishing working-class rhetoric as a field of study within the paradigm of rhetoric and composition. And second, in their individual ways, each of these books is anchored in a profound sense of "home." Each of the texts also experiments and resists scholarly conventions to include some autobiographical passages. Central to these passages is the topos of home, a theme that both enriches the author's autobiographical account and informs his or her theory forwarded in that work. These features add fruitful theory building to both the authors' individual texts and the paradigm as a whole. I ground my work in working-class theory, analyzing the work of Steve Parks, Nick Pollard and Nancy Welch, alongside scholarship that analyzes those labeled as "other" in higher-level academia. The stories that Parks, Pollard and Welch quote, the works of Rose, Villanueva, Cushman and even myself, all work toward discussing and creating not only a "home" for working-class academics but also room for more working-class research and theory-building. As I argue in this project, through these very acts of rhetorical/scholarly experimentation, Rose, Villanueva, and Cushman defied conventional standards for what counts as "good scholarship" in order to initiate a scholarly trajectory for working-class rhetoric in the academy. These authors' discussions of the "home" -specifically personal and political references to working-class homes--were instrumental tools in creating a public homeplace and space for further working-class theory building for rhetoricians in our field.
ContributorsMunson, Margaret (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Roen, Duane (Committee member) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Scholars have diversified notions of sovereignty with indigenous frameworks ranging from native sovereignty to cultural sovereignty. Within this range, there exists only a small body of research investigating technology in relation to indigenous sovereignty, excepting the colonial implications of guns, germs, film, and literacy. Furthermore, there is a lack of inquiry on how indigenous peoples operationalize their sovereignty through designs and uses of technology that combine emerging digital media technologies, old electronic media, and traditional indigenous media. This “indigenous convolution media” leads to what is referred to in this research as Indigenous Technological Sovereignty or “Tecno-Sovereignty.”
This dissertation begins to address knowledge gaps regarding the dynamic relationship between technology and indigenous sovereignty, and it posits that Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized when indigenous groups exercise their own self-determined designs and uses of mediums and media to address their particular needs and desires. Therefore, Tecno-Sovereignty is comprised of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of indigenous technology. This dissertation, a compendium of essays, presents an indigenous theory of media and sovereignty: defining a vision of Tecno-Sovereignty; arguing the purpose and importance of Tecno-Sovereignty; demonstrating how Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized; and revealing capacity-building recommendations for the further development of indigenous technological sovereignty. Additionally, this research, through an exhibition of indigenous convolution media, calls attention to indigenous praxes of art, technology, and learning that are both grounded by and support the theories proposed in this research.
This dissertation begins to address knowledge gaps regarding the dynamic relationship between technology and indigenous sovereignty, and it posits that Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized when indigenous groups exercise their own self-determined designs and uses of mediums and media to address their particular needs and desires. Therefore, Tecno-Sovereignty is comprised of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of indigenous technology. This dissertation, a compendium of essays, presents an indigenous theory of media and sovereignty: defining a vision of Tecno-Sovereignty; arguing the purpose and importance of Tecno-Sovereignty; demonstrating how Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized; and revealing capacity-building recommendations for the further development of indigenous technological sovereignty. Additionally, this research, through an exhibition of indigenous convolution media, calls attention to indigenous praxes of art, technology, and learning that are both grounded by and support the theories proposed in this research.
ContributorsMartinez, Christopher (Author) / Brayboy, Bryan Mck. J. (Thesis advisor) / Gee, James P. (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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
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
The Adult Basic Education/Literacy (ABEL) system in America can suffer critique. In a system that is staffed mostly by volunteers and plagued by funding woes, the experience of adult learners as participants within the institutional structure can be easily overlooked. Adult students are described as transient and difficult to track. Even so, and maybe because of this characterization, leaders within the local ABEL discourse make it their mission to reach these students in order to assist them to a better quality of life. However, there is more than one discourse circulating within the system. A discourse of outreach and intervention is one strand. The complex relationships education centers engage with more powerful government institutions causes another, more strident political discourse that constrains and influences the discourse within ABEL education centers, down to the classroom level. Within the vortex of motivations and needs created by institutional discourse, an institutional critique may give voice to those who experience the discourse in a way that hinders their education. This paper pursues critique, not through direct reconstruction, but through the encouragement of alternative discourses as additional institutions enter the system. AmeriCorps is presented as an institution that allows for more democratic participation through its distinct organizational features. The features that emerge in AmeriCorps projects offer hope for alternative models of participation within the highly politicized ABEL discourse.
ContributorsFoy, Christine (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Daer, Alice (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation theorizes nineteenth-century public performance of spiritual media as being inherent to the production of autobiography itself. Too often, dominant social discourses are cast as being singular cultural phenomena, but analyzing the rhetorical strategies of women attempting to access public spheres reveals fractures in what would otherwise appear to be a monolithic patriarchal discourse. These women's resistant performances reap the benefits of a fractured discourse to reveal a multiplicity of alternative discourses that can be accessed and leveraged to gain social power. By examining the phenomena of four nineteenth- century Spiritualists' mediumship from a rhetorical perspective, this study considers how female spirit mediums used their autobiographies to operate as discursive spaces mediating between private and public spheres; how female mediums constructed themselves in the public sphere as women and as spiritual authorities; how they negotiated entry into volatile and unpredictable publics; how they conceived of the vulnerability of the female body in the public sphere; and how they coped with complications inherent to Victorian era constructions of feminine corporeality. In conclusion, this dissertation offers a highly situated performative theory of subaltern publicity.
ContributorsLowry, Elizabeth (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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
At its core, this dissertation is a study of how one group of ordinary people attempted to make change in their local and national community by reframing a public debate. Since 1993, over five thousand undocumented migrants have died, mostly of dehydration, while attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Volunteers for No More Deaths (NMD), a humanitarian group in Tucson, hike the remote desert trails of the southern Arizona desert and provide food, water, and first aid to undocumented migrants in medical distress. They believe that their actions reduce suffering and deaths in the desert. On December 4, 2008, Walt Staton, a NMD volunteer placed multiple one-gallon jugs of water on a known migrant trail, and a Fish and Wildlife officer on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge near Arivaca, Arizona cited him for littering. Staton refused to pay the fine, believing that he was providing life-saving humanitarian aid, and was taken to court as a result. His trial from June 1-3, 2009 is the main focus of this dissertation. The dissertation begins by tracing the history of the rhetorical marker "illegal" and its role in the deaths of thousands of "illegal" immigrants. Then, it outlines the history of NMD, from its roots in the Sanctuary Movement to its current operation as a counterpublic discursively subverting the state. Next, it examines Staton's trial as a postmodern rhetorical situation, where subjects negotiate their rhetorical agency with the state. Finally, it measures the rhetorical effect of NMD's actions by tracing humanitarian and human rights ideographs in online discussion boards before and after Staton's sentencing. The study finds that despite situational restrictions, as the postmodern critique suggests, subjects are still able to identify and engage with rhetorical opportunities, and in doing so can still subvert the state.
ContributorsAccardi, Steven (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This longitudinal exploratory research study examines a Russian language online community of creative writers who refer to themselves as Real Padonki. Grounded theory was used as the method of data collection and analysis. Based on analysis of the texts published on udaff.com and interactions between the members of this community several conclusions were made. It is proposed that udaff.com should be viewed as an online resource for writers who have created a new form of literature: post-Soviet Russian literature. This new of form literature is characterized by several features that distinguish it from previous forms. This new form of literature is based on the cultural model of a Real Padonak - a new kind of person that embodies both the writer and the hero (a new archetype) created by this writer. In the same way as dissident writers made criminal argot a part of Russian literature, the writers of udaff.com rely on the use of Albanskij, a linguistic innovation, a variation of the Russian language that they have created. Finally, this new literature uses the Internet as its main medium of publication. As a new archetype, Real Padonak represents a continuum of characters (real life people as well as invented literary characters) created by udaff.com writers. From the perspective of Discourse analysis, the cultural model of Real Padonak is shown as multiglossia of Discourses that represent beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices that exist in contemporary Russian society.
ContributorsOliynyk, Olena (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Margolis, Eric (Committee member) / Gee, James P (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life.
ContributorsFlores, Carlos A (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Hess, Aaron R (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018