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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
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 research conducts two methods of rhetorical analysis of State of the Union Addresses: 1. Computational linguistic analysis of all State of the Union Addresses from 1790-2007, and 2. Close-readings and rhetorical analyses of two addresses: one by President Truman and one by President Reagan. This research shows the following key findings: 1. I am able to see general shifts in the authors' approaches to the State of the Union Address through historical computational analyses of the content of all speeches, and 2. Through close readings, I can understand the impact of the author's ethos and the historical context on the addresses, something that would not be readily revealed in a computational analysis. This study starts with a historical computational linguistic analysis of all State of the Union Addresses between 1790 and 2007. The study follows with close-readings of two State of the Union Addresses from the early and late Cold War period in-context: 1. Harry Truman's 1951 Address and 2. Ronald Reagan's 1986 Address. The main conclusions drawn from this research are that close-readings of State of the Union Addresses cannot be replaced by computational analyses, but can work in tandem with computerized text analysis to reveal shifts in rhetorical and topical features. This paper argues that there must be more close analyses in coordination with large-scale text analysis in order to understand the complexities of rhetorical situations.
ContributorsWegner, Peter (Author) / Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Goggin, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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 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
ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literate practices of women reading and writing in the press during the civil rights movement in the 1950s/60s. Through a textual analysis of literacy events (Heath) in the memoirs of Sarah Patton Boyle (The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition), Anne Braden (The Wall Between), Daisy Bates (The Long Shadow of Little Rock) and Melba Pattillo Beals (Warriors Don't Cry), this dissertation highlights the participatory roles women played in the movement, including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. Contributing to scholarship focused on the literate lives of women, this study focuses on the uses of literacy in the lives of four women with particular emphasis on the women's experiences with the literacy they practice. Drawing on ideological views of literacy (Gee, Street) and research focused on the social, cultural and economic influences of such practices (Brandt), the women's memoirs served as the site for collecting and analyzing the women's responses and reactions to literacy events with the press. Through an application of Deborah Brandt's notion of sponsor, literacy events between the women and the press were recorded and the data analyzed to understand the relationship the women had with the literacy available and the role the sponsor (the press) played in shaping the practice and the literate identities of the women. Situated in the racist climate of the Jim Crow South in the 1950s/60s and the secondary role women played in the movement, the women's memoirs and the data analyzed revealed the role the women's perception of the practice, shaped by personal history and lived experiences, played in how the women experienced and used their literacy. This dissertation argues that their responses to literacy events and their perceptions of the power of their reading and writing highlight the significant public role women played in the movement and argues that, although the women remain relatively unremembered participants of the movement, their memoirs act as artifacts of that time and proof of the meaningful public contributions women made to the movement.
ContributorsAdams, Kelly R (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
ABSTRACT The early twentieth century saw changing attitudes in gender roles and the advancement of the "New Woman." Despite the decline in the availability of homesteading land in the US West, homesteading still offered a means for women to achieve or enact newfound independence, and the letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Elizabeth Corey, and Cecilia Hennel Hendricks offer a varied view of the female homesteading experience. This dissertation focuses upon the functionality of epistolary discourse from early twentieth century homesteading women within a literary and historical framework in order to establish the significance of letters as literary texts and examine the methodology involved in creating epistolary identities. Chapter one provides background on the history of the letter in America. It also as introduces a theoretical framework regarding life writing, feminism, and epistolary discourse that inform this study, by scholars such as Phillipe LeJeune, Leigh Gilmore, Janet Altman, Julie Watson, and Sidonie Smith. Chapter two delves into the published letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and the way in which her writing, when situated within a US western literary framework, serves as a reaction to the masculine western hero. Chapter three considers the epistolary relationships evident in the letters of Elizabeth Corey and the construction of gender identity within epistolarity. Chapter four focuses upon Cecilia Hennel Hendricks and the historical and feminist context of her letters, with a particular emphasis upon the "love letter." The conclusion examines the progression of the letter in the twentieth century and forms of online discourse that can be directly linked to its evolution. Far from being simply a form of communication, these letters reveal the history of a time, a place, a people, function as narrative literary texts, and aid in developing identities. For readers and scholars they tell offer a glimpse into life for women in the early twentieth century and highlight the significance of letters as a literary form.
ContributorsSkipper, Alicia (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / Wertheimer, Eric (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
Institutions of higher education pride themselves on their commitments to access, inclusion, and care. However, when motivated by neoliberal goals of productivity, such initiatives may confuse inclusion with normative assimilation by attempting to align all individuals with an ableist status quo. In other words, neutral documents, discourses, and design practices may contribute to the rhetorical and material circulation of systemic ableism by encouraging compulsory alignment with able standards and norms. To examine how the systemic force of neoliberal ableism may move across higher educational spaces, this dissertation engages understandings of rhetoric as complexly circulating across trans-situational, everyday sites in universities. Further, I show that neoliberalism relies on the rhetorical circulation and normalization of ableist rhetorics across seemingly neutral university documents, discourses and design practices like those aimed to promote access, inclusion, and care. This dissertation thus follows the social justice call in technical and professional communication to interrogate participation in documentation, design, and discursive practices that may contribute to larger systems of oppression. Specifically, I apply a mixed-methods, qualitative approach of corpus linguistic analysis, semi-structured interviews grounded in user-experience design, and thematic, concept, and in vivo coding to examine and disrupt the circulation of ableist rhetoric across composition program mission statements, self-care documents, and digital classroom interfaces. Drawing from technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, disability studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, social justice, and disability justice scholarship, this dissertation explores theoretical frameworks for interrogating ableism’s material-discursive implications and provides guidelines for university stakeholders to engage in more equitable communications. Ultimately, I offer a theory of “cripistemological coalition” that calls for transdisciplinary, coalitional measures that position disability as integral to university inclusion, access, and care.
ContributorsBennett, Kristin (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark A. (Committee member) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation is about African Americans’ transnational rhetorical and literate social practices of reclaiming Black humanity. To this end, it asks: How is the humanity of African Americans rhetorically constituted in relation to Ghana? To reclaim Black humanity, what do African Americans do down the ground and to what end? For those who turn to Ghana to reclaim their humanity, what do they say they need to learn, and need to unlearn in the process of re-education? What does this re-education make possible? Where do they locate (if any) healing in this process of re-education? Currently, people, including those of African descent, are moving across transnational borders at a rate never seen before. In response, scholars in transnational rhetorical studies such as Rebecca Dingo and Blake Scott have challenged the field to account for the workings of “vectors of power” – colonial histories, nation-state power, and the operations of global capital—in people’s lives (Dingo and Blake 524). In relation to such movement among people of African descent, leaders in Global Black Rhetorics, Ronisha Browdy and Esther Milu, direct special attention to matters of healing, re-education, and the reclamation of Black humanity. Given its own experiences of brutal colonial histories of chattel slavery, resource exploitation, and current economic challenges, the nation-state of Ghana has become a contested transnational site to theorize African Americans’ inventive practices of negotiating these globalized forces which continue to dehumanize them in multiple ways. Heeding the call of cultural icons including W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou to “return home” to Ghana, the participants in this study enact everyday rhetorical and literate social practices such as taking Indigenous Ghanaian names, wearing Indigenous clothing, and engaging in somatic practices at contested historic sites. This dissertation has sought to honor these difficult and yet necessary rhetorical and literate social practices that African Americans deploy on-the-ground in Ghana to achieve their purposes of making a homeplace conducive for their humanity, honoring their ancestral heritage, re-educating themselves, and healing from epistemic and ontological harm as feats towards reclaiming Black humanity. In honoring these rhetorical and literate social practices of African Americans returning home to Ghana, I invoked bell hooks’ concept of homeplace and African philosophical and epistemic concepts of Ubuntu relationality and Sankofa. And yet the call to return home is not without its challenges–challenges that underscore the contributions of participatory rhetorical research in such transnationally complex domains.
ContributorsIddrisu, Mohammed Sakip (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Anokye, Akua Duku (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Current economic and social realities of higher education have placed increasing emphasis on using Teaching Assistants (TAs) in the classroom. However, missing from the discussion is how prepared these TAs are for the rigors of teaching and the effects of the increasing emphasis on their education and the education of their future students. To better understand the process a TA underwent to learn to teach in a higher education classroom, the following study explores what teaching assistants within a Writing Program (WP) at a research-one university say about how they learned to teach writing. The study aims to explore what strategies future TAs relied on and how they experienced their training to teach in hopes of exploring the problem space of learning to teach writing. The literature review explores some themes researched in the history of TA training. The study itself is a focus group of 9 Graduate Student TAs at a research one facility. The research suggests that the complex negotiation of learning to teach is situated within the framework of multiliteracies in that future TA’s utilize available designs from all over their lived experiences, design them for their own course, and eventually redesign their courses and pedagogies with selected available designs. This research offers new ways to conceptualize TA training and make it more scalable to better serve future TA’s.
ContributorsDuston, Trevor (Author) / Friedrich, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Long, Eleanore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023