Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Rhetoric
- Creators: Rose, Shirley
Description
California's Proposition 8 revoked the right to marriage for that state's gay and lesbian population. Proposition 8 was a devastating defeat for gay marriage movements across the nation. The primary rhetorical strategy of the No on 8 campaign was a reliance on a Civil Rights analogy that constructed the gay and lesbian movement for marriage as a civil right akin to those fought for by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Analogizing the gay and lesbian struggle for gay marriage with the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement exposed a complicated relationship between communities of color and gay and lesbian communities. This project reads critical rhetoric and intersectionality together to craft a critical intersectional rhetoric to better understand the potentialities and pitfalls of analogizing the gay rights with Civil Rights. I analyze television ads, communiques of No on 8 leadership, as well as state level and national court decisions related to gay marriage to argue alternative frameworks that move away from analogizing and move towards coalition building.
ContributorsKelsey, Michelle L (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Milller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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
The purpose of the study is to examine how a multimodal composition assignment can be configured to create opportunities for writing development among second language students. In the field of second language writing, where linguistic development has long been prioritized in research and pedagogy, there are concerns that engaging with modes other than language would take away the opportunity to development writing skills. This study intends to address this concern by investigating how second language students interact with language, employ writing strategies, and develop knowledge about writing during a multimodal and a traditional assignment. To this end, I designed two assignments, a traditional written proposal assignment and a video proposal assignment, that were taught by the same instructor in two parallel sections of first-year composition for multilingual students. Five participants were recruited from each section. The data were collected from students’ screen-recordings with think-aloud protocols, writings produced during the two assignments, class observation notes, and semi-structured interviews at the end of the assignments. The findings suggest that students in both groups have engaged in similar ways of translating their ideas into written English with appropriate grammatical, syntactical, and lexical choices. The participants also employed various writing strategies at different stages of the assignments. Students in both groups reported a growing understanding of rhetorical appeals and research-based writing. The video assignment, however, seems to create additional learning opportunities by mobilizing students’ problem-solving skills and a wider range of literacy experiences. At the same time, two students in the video group were observed borrowing online texts verbatim without making attribution, which could be a potentially risky act in the academic context. Based on the findings, I argue that multimodal writing pedagogy should be discussed in relation to the specific design features and learning outcomes. Future research could continue the investigation of students’ multimodal composing processes, with a special focus on the textual borrowing practices across contexts. There is also need for a systematic review that discusses how the concept of multimodal writing is embodied in different assignments, tasks, and genres.
ContributorsTan, Xiao (Author) / Matsuda, Paul Kei (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Lauer, Claire (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Both law and medicine are interpretive practices, and both systems have historically worked in tandem, however ineffectively or tumultuously. The law is, by social mandate, imagined as a "fixed" system of social control, made up of rules and procedures grounded in a reality that is independent of language; although we know that law is both revised and interpreted every day in courtroom practice, to imagine the law, the system that keeps bad people behind bars and good people safe, as indeterminate or, worse, fallible, produces social anxieties that upend our cultural assumptions about fairness that predate our judicial system. This imaginary stability, then, is ultimately what prevents the legal system from evolving in consonance with developments in the mental health professions, as inadequate as that discursive system may be for describing and categorizing the infinite possibilities of mental illness, specifically where it is relevant to the commission of a crime. Ultimately, the insanity plea raises the specter of the endless interpretability of the law and mental illness and, therefore, the frailty of the justice system, which makes each insanity defense trial emblematic of larger social anxieties about social control, fairness, and susceptibility to mental illness or the actions of mentally ill people.
ContributorsAlden, Andrea Lisa (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, A. Cheree (Committee member) / Roberts-Miller, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
In June 2013, United States (US) government contractor Edward Snowden arranged for journalists at The Guardian to release classified information detailing US government surveillance programs. While this release caused the public to decry the scope and privacy concerns of these surveillance systems, Snowden's actions also caused the US Congress to critique how Snowden got a security clearance allowing him access to sensitive information in the first place. Using Snowden's actions as a kairotic moment, this study examined congressional policy documents through a qualitative content analysis to identify what Congress suggested could “fix” in the background investigation (BI) process. The study then looked at the same documents to problematize these “solutions” through the terministic screen of surveillance studies.
By doing this interdisciplinary rhetorical analysis, the study showed that while Congress encouraged more oversight, standardization, and monitoring for selected steps of the BI process, these suggestions are not neutral solutions without larger implications; they are value-laden choices which have consequences for matters of both national security and social justice. Further, this study illustrates the value of incorporating surveillance as framework in rhetoric, composition, and professional/technical communication research.
By doing this interdisciplinary rhetorical analysis, the study showed that while Congress encouraged more oversight, standardization, and monitoring for selected steps of the BI process, these suggestions are not neutral solutions without larger implications; they are value-laden choices which have consequences for matters of both national security and social justice. Further, this study illustrates the value of incorporating surveillance as framework in rhetoric, composition, and professional/technical communication research.
ContributorsYoung, Sarah (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Wise, J. MacGregor (Committee member) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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
My dissertation contributes to the field of rhetoric and composition by introducing “folk pedagogy,” a pedagogical approach grounded in rhetorical theory that effectively prepares students to write for public audiences. This pedagogical theory answers calls from scholars of rhetoric and composition for teaching in a manner that encourages civic engagement. Folk pedagogy is a pedagogical approach that views folk music as a metaphor for public writing in order to prepare students to write impactfully on social issues. The approach is derived from my analysis of the folk music of Bob Dylan and Odetta, in which I utilize close textual analysis in order to better understand the ways in which their music was able to constitute activist communities around the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Through this analysis, I argue that Bob Dylan and Odetta constituted audiences through appeals to American civic identity, including references to travel across U.S. landscapes and rearrangement of traditional American folk songs. In making this argument, I engage the scholarship of Gregory Clark, Michael Calvin McGee, Maurice Charland, and Rachel Donaldson, among others. I then use this analysis to build folk pedagogy, a subgenre of writing for publics that uses folk music as a metaphor for public writing in order to effectively prepare students to engage audiences through composition. In creating this approach to teaching composition, I draw on the work of scholars such as Brian Gogan and Laurie Gries. This pedagogical approach is inspired by my own teaching experiences in both the university and prison setting and is therefore designed in a manner that is accessible and adaptable for different learning contexts. Finally, I share a syllabus that engages folk pedagogy at the university level. Through this dissertation, I hope to inspire other educators to adapt folk pedagogy for their own classrooms. I also aim to extend our field’s understanding of the civil rights movement by drawing attention to the essential role that folk music played in constituting activist communities around it.
ContributorsWilkowski, Colleen (Author) / Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Burrows, Cedric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021