Matching Items (20)
Description
This creative project is a portfolio of accessible science communication. It consists of three multimedia texts, each one written and designed for a different audience about a different topic. The first project is an article/report about the recent launch delays and cost increases for the James Webb Space Telescope, written for adults in their 40s-50s. The second project is a children’s picture book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, written for homeschoolers in 6th grade. The third project is an educational animated video about the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves, written for students in 7th grade.
ContributorsShafer, Christiana (Author) / Wheeler, Jacqueline (Thesis director) / Foy, Joseph (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This project emphasizes a complex, holistic, and additive view of content knowledge in the Discipline of Writing, advocating for balanced and affirming scholarship and pedagogy rather than a competitive approach that leads to an epistemology of erasure. As a composite project, the introduction contextualizes three articles linked by their articulation of holistically and additively thinking for students and scholars in the discipline of writing, preparing the reader to see the rhetorical steps that I attempt to take in each article along these lines. Article 1, “The Collaborative Work of Composition,” uses Marxian language of production to highlight the complexities of collaborative writing in a social microcosm drawing focus to the difficulties some students have collaborating, particularly those of linguistic and cultural minority groups, because they or their collaborators struggle to adopt an additive valuing system to position themselves and one another as part of a team with varying strengths. In Article 2, “An Integrative Translingual Pedagogy of Affirmation,” I build on this valuing of writers by advocating for an affirming pedagogy that allows teachers to help students see the complexity and value of their shared languages and their individual (L)anguage as well as the identity connected to these. Article 3, “Familia Académica: Translingual History and the Epistemology of Erasure,” draws on a deep and overlooked history that provides a more complex holistic lens for the current socio-politics of the discipline of Writing’s interaction with the translingual approach, re-orienting to a more additive blend of the extreme perspectives that key scholars have taken between second language writing and translingual writing. Finally, the last section of the dissertation acts as a metaconstruction of the discipline of Writing, pointing to moments within the previous three articles that indicate a sustained effort to complicate binaries and then provide an alternate symbiosis of scholarly perspectives for disciplinary discourse and identity in Writing. Most importantly though, the final section of the dissertation synthesizes the partial approaches introduced in the previous three articles which inform my understanding of disciplinarity. Further, this final section attempts to find equity in the variety of partial approaches developed in the previous articles and which I have since matured into what I call the 8 Aspects of Writing. The 8 aspects and their components move beyond individual issues presented in each article and synthesize a more holistic, additive, and systematic model of defining the content knowledge for the discipline of Writing.
ContributorsFields, Gregory Dale (Author) / Rose, Shirley K. (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Becoming a researcher not only involves the acts of contributing to the body of knowledge in a field, but it also involves constructing the image or identity of a researcher. Doctoral students who aim for positions within academia upon graduation see doctoral education as a phase where they develop their research skills and prepare for publication. An existing body of literature in the field of writing has explored the publishing practices of graduate students, with extensive attention given to the role of external factors such as the adviser/advisee relationships, resource access, issues of authority, and so on. However, less attention has been given to exploring the role of internal motivators or intrinsic factors in graduate writing and how it relates to research work and research productivity. Conducting semi-structured interviews with four doctoral students who have published research articles in peer-reviewed journals, this study explores the process through which doctoral students develop a researcher identity, the challenges they face, and the role of the doctorate program in developing a researcher identity. Using a narrative approach and by first-person accounts of experiences told in the story form, the process of identity formation is elicited through individual stories focusing on the narrated experiences, thoughts, and actions. The findings of this study showed that validation and recognition are crucial factors in helping doctoral students see themselves as researchers and persevere through the challenges faced in publishing. All participants in this study recognized collaboration opportunities as experiences that helped them become a researcher. In working with others, they felt like they had a valuable voice and insight, creating a positive attitude toward their work by realizing that their work is meaningful. The most significant challenge discussed by all participants was receiving negative comments or criticisms that inhibited their motivation. Having a better understanding of the experiences, perspectives, and challenges of doctoral students in identity development brings attention to points of conflict and how these conflicts can be resolved or mediated for doctoral students. It offers insights into doctoral students' training and advising by illustrating how research productivity can be enhanced at the doctoral level.
ContributorsNouri, Melika (Author) / Matsuda, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Prior, Matthew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
A creative project seeking to incorporate rhetorical theory into speculative fiction. Tales From Beyond the Breach is a series of five stories set in a post climate apocalypse, all dealing in some way with rhetorical understandings of truth. Each chapter or story draws on a different philosopher, though there is some overlap and reflection of my own personal beliefs. The project is meant to entertain as well as provoke thought, taking what we know and imagining what could be.
ContributorsLee, Jasmine (Author) / Hannah, Mark (Thesis director) / Bell, Matthew (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2023-05
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
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
This thesis analyzes how Arizona State University’s disability resource center, Student Accessibility and Inclusive Learning Services (SAILS), impacts access fatigue among students with disabilities. Access fatigue is rhetorical fatigue borne from the continuous need for people with disabilities to perform accommodation negotiations, or requests for practices that will grant them access to certain spaces. This study theorizes access fatigue as an intersection between scholarship about embodied rhetorical fatigue and interactional rhetorical phenomena that occur during accommodation negotiations. This research is guided by user experience (UX) methodologies, including a textual heuristic analysis of two SAILS documents; stakeholder interviews with students, teachers, and a SAILS representative; and a comparative analysis situating SAILS in relation to other disability resource centers. This thesis frames accommodation negotiations and access fatigue through the lens of institutional relationality and identifies four key dimensions of institutional relationality that affected participants’ experiences with access fatigue, including: burden sharing between students and SAILS, misfitting between students and SAILS, institutional culture shaping facilitated by relationships between non-registered stakeholders and SAILS, and institutional access fatigue resulting from design inconsistencies between SAILS and other disability resource centers. To relate this theorization to design practices, this thesis includes UX-informed guidelines for designing disability resource centers that promote fatigue relief through the integration of theories of institutional relationality.
ContributorsCaputo, Courtney (Author) / Hannah, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Lauer, Claire (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This thesis examines the rhetoric that binds the Grateful Dead Community, a collective of millions who participate in the musical rituals surrounding the San Francisco-based band. The study analyzes multiple rhetorical spaces found within the Grateful Dead Community, the way in which the community hierarchy influences discourse, and the patterns in rhetoric found within the discourse in the community’s spaces. Through analysis of the lyrics, interviews with community leaders, and interactions among community members, the thesis uses the Grateful Dead Community as a foundation for exploring the function of rhetoric in community building and how different, sometimes contradictory types of rhetoric can bind communities—especially communities that exist without geographically-defined territory. This essay aims to fill a research gap by taking already existing theories on conflicting forms of rhetoric within communities and fortifying them by applying them to a modern context, specifically with the Grateful Dead Community.
ContributorsLane, Thomas Paul (Author) / Webb, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Lamp, Kathleen S. (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
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
This dissertation is a detailed rhetorical analysis of interviews with rice farmers in central Java, Indonesia and documents published by the global NGOs United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and CGIAR. Using theories of materiality, literacies, and environmental rhetorics, I examine how seemingly distinct and disparate humans, organizations, and inanimates are actually entangled agents in a dynamic conversation. I have termed that conversation the discourse of rice farming. Studying local and global together challenges conventional dichotomous thinking about farming and food. Looking at this conversation as an entanglement reveals what Karen Barad has defined in Meeting the Universe Halfway as the intra-relatedness of all agents. I focus on rice farming because rice is a food staple around the world and a major component of global agriculture initiatives by FAO and CGIAR. I argue that farmers construct their jobs in terms of production, food sovereignty, and community. The NGOs construct agriculture in terms of consumption, food security, and poverty alleviation. In my project I emphasize the need for global agents to better account for how farmers construct agriculture. Accounting for how all agents impact the discourse of rice farming is the only way to come to an objective understanding rice farming's impact on local and global scales. My argument adds to the field of environmental rhetorics because most published case studies are about the United States and thus are limited in their applicability. And it enriches global conversations about food security and food justice because it shares accounts from actual farmers who are often conspicuously absent from literature on those topics.
ContributorsCooney, Emily (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015