Matching Items (12)
Description
Performance is a public speech act that can present the experience of difference and generate relations across lines of difference. In personal narrative performance, performers do not just tell stories, the stories they tell are strategic hailings that call attention to discourses that produce the conditions of their exclusion and form intimate relations in public. Personal narrative performance renders the private public. Performers take to the stage, the space of the public, to offer their stories, their bodies, and their relations to audiences for collective consideration. In turn, the act of performance generates further relations: among performers and audiences, and between performance and discourse. This study analyzes these two layers of relation in performance through looking at the ways neoliberalism and performance interanimate one another. Through looking at three sites of neoliberal relationality--same-sex marriage, family, and immigration and multiculturalism, it asks questions of how performers narrate and represent non-normative experiences within neoliberalism, the historical and cultural context through which they are living and narrating. In order to understand the cultural work, the resistive and relational potential, of the relations that occur in and through personal narrative performance, we also need to understand the political, cultural, and historical conditions under which narratives in performance are produced. My argument is that in and through performance intimacy is queered: it takes the private--the stuff of the personal presented as aesthetic communication--and renders that private very public. In public and through relations, performance can raise awareness and shift consciousness, reify orders of relation or generate alternate imaginaries. This is to say that a lot of different types of work are done in performance, and although performance is often seen as resistance, under the weight of neoliberalism, it is important to tend to what arguments performances are making and how in turn that shapes the relations that occur in the site of performance. Queer intimacy offers a way of engaging performance, an analytic that considers the text of performance as well as the relational context among performers and audiences, and turns back on larger cultural questions of belonging. The potential of performance, of the concept of queer intimacy, provides a lens to read performance, to tend to the conditions that give rise to and inform performance in the current historical moment. It brings together the critical impulse of intercultural communication and cultural studies with performance studies. From a critical cultural perspective, it tends to the structural in performance, and through performance emphasizes the lived experience as narrated and embodied as and through communication. Coupled with the impulses of queer theory, queer intimacy offers both resisting normativity and imagining beyond it. To consider queer intimacy in performance is not only to recognize that relations are made possible, but to tend closely to the belongings we are making.
ContributorsPérez, Kimberlee (Author) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Honegger, Gitta (Committee member) / Langellier, Kristin M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
ABSTRACT
This study examines the ways in which employees experience moral emotions that violate employee treatment and how employees co-construct moral emotions and subsequent expressions of dissent. This qualitative study consisted of 123 full-time employees and utilized open-coding, content analysis, constant comparison analysis, and concept mapping. The analysis revealed that employees expressed dissent laterally as a series of sensemaking processes, such as validation of feelings, moral assessments, and assessing the fear of moral transgressions. Employees also expressed dissent as a series of risk assessments that overlapped with the ways in which employees made sense of the perceived infraction. Employees' lateral dissent expression manifested as a form of social support which occasionally led to co-rumination. Employees expressed dissent upwardly when seeking a desired action or change. Circumvention was utilized as a direct reflection to the type and degree of moral transgression related to the person responsible for the mistreatment. Results indicated that experiencing moral emotions that led to expressing dissent with a designated audience was determined by where employees were situated in the cyclical model of communicating moral emotions and in relation to the co-construction of both the infraction related to employee mistreatment and the experience of moral emotions. Results contribute to the existing body of literature on dissent and emotions. A discussion synthesizing the findings and analysis is presented, in addition to the implications for future research.
KEYWORDS: Emotion, Dissent, Moral Emotions, Sensemaking, Risk-Assessment, Social Support, Co-Rumination
This study examines the ways in which employees experience moral emotions that violate employee treatment and how employees co-construct moral emotions and subsequent expressions of dissent. This qualitative study consisted of 123 full-time employees and utilized open-coding, content analysis, constant comparison analysis, and concept mapping. The analysis revealed that employees expressed dissent laterally as a series of sensemaking processes, such as validation of feelings, moral assessments, and assessing the fear of moral transgressions. Employees also expressed dissent as a series of risk assessments that overlapped with the ways in which employees made sense of the perceived infraction. Employees' lateral dissent expression manifested as a form of social support which occasionally led to co-rumination. Employees expressed dissent upwardly when seeking a desired action or change. Circumvention was utilized as a direct reflection to the type and degree of moral transgression related to the person responsible for the mistreatment. Results indicated that experiencing moral emotions that led to expressing dissent with a designated audience was determined by where employees were situated in the cyclical model of communicating moral emotions and in relation to the co-construction of both the infraction related to employee mistreatment and the experience of moral emotions. Results contribute to the existing body of literature on dissent and emotions. A discussion synthesizing the findings and analysis is presented, in addition to the implications for future research.
KEYWORDS: Emotion, Dissent, Moral Emotions, Sensemaking, Risk-Assessment, Social Support, Co-Rumination
ContributorsKamrath, Jessica K (Author) / Kassing, Jeffrey W. (Thesis advisor) / Waldron, Vincent R. (Committee member) / Meân, Lindsey J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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
Sports communication is a vibrant, blossoming research area within the communication discipline. One of the more fruitful directions in sports communication research pertains to social media. Social media has embedded itself in the sports world in a very short period of time. As a result, there is a need for instructional resources that prepare students to understand the nuances and power that social media possess. This research provides the foundation for a case study textbook centered on social media and sports communication. Specifically, four cases dealing with: (a) athletes using social media to encourage input from fans; (b) sports organizations using social media as an agenda-setting tool; (c) negative parasocial interaction expressed to athletes via social media; and (d) athletes using social media to enact image repair are presented. These cases demonstrate that social media is a valuable conduit between athletes and fans that enables athletes and sports organizations to cultivate fan identity and maintain control over public information. The cases also demonstrate that fan behavior via social media can quickly turn problematic, requiring that athletes and sports organizations respond appropriately, yet strategically. The research concludes by offering implications for future social media and sports communication research.
ContributorsSanderson, Jimmy (Author) / Kassing, Jeffrey W. (Thesis advisor) / Ramirez Jr, Artemio (Committee member) / Meân, Lindsey J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Here I explore three varieties of theatrical responses to the cultural amnesia brought about by what scholars have termed “post-AIDS” rhetoric. Specifically, I examine how AIDS history plays, AIDS comedies, and solo plays provide opportunities for theatregoers to participate in, or reflect on the absence of, what I call “AIDS mourning publics.” I understand these publics to be both the groupings of people that gather around a text, film screening, play performance, or event that was created in response to loss due to AIDS, and the text, screenplay, or play text itself when circulated. In these publics participants work through their grief, make political interventions, and negotiate the meanings of AIDS history for gay men whose sexual awakening occurred before and after the development of protease inhibitors. I join theories of grieving, affect in performance, and the public sphere to study these communal events. I use films, plays, and critical reviews to identify how mourning through performance can be therapeutic for cultural and social actors despite activists' and scholars' sole attention to the counterpublicity of these events. Still, counterpublicity remains an important concern because many in the dominant US public sphere consider AIDS to be a benign “manageable condition” in affluent countries like the US. As such, I also present a dramaturgy of mourning and counterpublicity in twenty-first century US AIDS drama and solo performance with attention focused upon how dramatists and solo performers are inviting spectators to engage with, and find new meaning within, this epidemic. For example, I investigate how pairing mourning with genres like comedy produces political interventions within the space between laughing and astonishment. My dramaturgy of mourning also examines recurring themes such as ghosts, the past, intergenerationalism, and AIDS amnesia to interpret how performers have framed individual and collective loss to challenge spectators' understanding of AIDS history. To support my claims I use sources from the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, gay and lesbian community newspapers, personal interviews, and my own experiences as a spectator viewing productions of The Normal Heart, thirtynothing, and The VOID.
ContributorsMorrison, Jayson Abraham (Author) / Underiner, Tamara L. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / McMahon, Jeff D (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
Description
The challenges that face student-athletes when they retire from formal sport participation coincides with their loss of their athletic identity (how much they identify with their athlete role), often geographic upheaval, uncertainty of the future regarding alternate roles, and change in social support systems, which make this period more difficult to adjust to. This study explored the experiences of the retirement transition of graduating student-athletes. The current study aims to examine this unique experience through qualitative investigation into the collective experiences of student-athletes to identify overarching relevant themes common throughout this experience. The participants were 13 student-athletes who graduated in the Spring Semester of 2017 (May- June 2017), played their sport at a National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Institution at the Varsity level, and were not continuing to play their sport at the elite level. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants between five and eight months post-graduation. Thematic analysis was used to categorize participants’ responses and allow for an in-depth investigation of different factors affecting personal adjustment throughout this period. The five overarching themes identified were: the need for social connection, the impact of a goal-oriented mindset, preparedness for the transition, translatable skills from being a student-athlete, and the perspective of their own identity and purpose. The ability to shift perspective to retrospectively appreciate the student-athlete experience, while incorporating it as one part of their overall life journey, is discussed as a protective factor for positive transition outcomes. As the large majority of collegiate athletes do not continue to play their sport professionally, this population is in high need of continued guidance. The present work can inform interventions to aid student-athletes in this difficult transitional period. Mentorship from previously graduated student-athletes, coaches, or administrative programs are suggested as a tangible positive intervention strategy based off of the results.
ContributorsKnizek, Olivia Alison (Author) / Meân, Lindsey J. (Thesis advisor) / Roberts, Nicole A. (Thesis advisor) / Mickelson, Kristin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In this study, I used critical, qualitative methods to explore how the material and symbolic dynamics of milk banking complicate expectations of organizing and (in)effective lactation. Guided by theories of alternative organizing, in/voluntary membership, the structuration of d/Discourse, and corporeal commodification, I conducted document analysis, fieldwork, and interviews with hospital and milk bank staff and maternal donors and recipients. Results trace the (her)story and protocols of the milk banking industry and examine the circumstances of donation and receipt; the d/Discourses of filth, suspicion, and inadequacy that circulate the lactating, maternal body; and the presence or resistance of commodification within each organization.
Milk banking occurs when mothers provide excess breastmilk to parents with low supply or compromising medical conditions. “Milk banking” is used as an umbrella term for different ways of organizing donor milk; organizing evolved from wet-nursing to a continuum of in/formal markets. Formal markets include for-profit and non-profit milk banks that pasteurize and/or sterilize breastmilk for Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Informal markets involve self-organized exchanges online that are driven by monetary ads or donation. Both formal and informal markets elicit questions regarding flows of capital, labor, reproductive choice, and exploitation. However, current research resides in medicine, law, and popular press, so we know little about how milk banking happens in real time or how participation affects maternal identity.
My analysis makes four contributions to organizational communication theory: (1) alternative organizing punctuates the construction of and conflicts between in/formal markets and shows why such theories should be represented as cyclical, rather than linear; (2) membership in milk banking is unintentional and distinct from in/voluntary membership; (3) the obscured organization is a necessary alternative to Scott’s (2013) hidden organizations; and (4) d/Discourses of “safety” are used to discipline and indict, not just represent operational differences. Social-rhetorical implications reveal how milk banking operates as an affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) and mark where privileges and inequalities are present in the absence of data; practical implications suggest consideration of policy changes. Methodologically, this study also offers insight into crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) and participant witnessing (Tracy, forthcoming) and challenges the hegemonic underpinnings of fieldwork.
Milk banking occurs when mothers provide excess breastmilk to parents with low supply or compromising medical conditions. “Milk banking” is used as an umbrella term for different ways of organizing donor milk; organizing evolved from wet-nursing to a continuum of in/formal markets. Formal markets include for-profit and non-profit milk banks that pasteurize and/or sterilize breastmilk for Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Informal markets involve self-organized exchanges online that are driven by monetary ads or donation. Both formal and informal markets elicit questions regarding flows of capital, labor, reproductive choice, and exploitation. However, current research resides in medicine, law, and popular press, so we know little about how milk banking happens in real time or how participation affects maternal identity.
My analysis makes four contributions to organizational communication theory: (1) alternative organizing punctuates the construction of and conflicts between in/formal markets and shows why such theories should be represented as cyclical, rather than linear; (2) membership in milk banking is unintentional and distinct from in/voluntary membership; (3) the obscured organization is a necessary alternative to Scott’s (2013) hidden organizations; and (4) d/Discourses of “safety” are used to discipline and indict, not just represent operational differences. Social-rhetorical implications reveal how milk banking operates as an affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) and mark where privileges and inequalities are present in the absence of data; practical implications suggest consideration of policy changes. Methodologically, this study also offers insight into crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) and participant witnessing (Tracy, forthcoming) and challenges the hegemonic underpinnings of fieldwork.
ContributorsJones, Sarah E. (Author) / Tracy, Sarah J. (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Ellingson, Laura L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation explores the historical development and contemporary deployment of discursive practices that constitute the “truth” of addiction, which in turn serve as the bases for interventions into the lives of people who use intoxicants for any number of reasons. A number of interrelated research questions structure this governmentality analysis. First, what is the evolution of the governmental frames developed and deployed to understand, discipline, and recover addiction in the arena of alcohol and illicit drug use in United States? Second, how does twelve-step serve to transform unruly addicts into self-disciplining citizens? Finally, how does The Meth Project (TMP) exemplify and/or diverge from the dominant addiction governmental frames developed during the Temperance and Progressive eras in the United States? My overall goal is to destabilize our ready understanding of addiction and demonstrate that it is as much a tool of social needs as it is a mental illness by demonstrating: 1) the historically contingent nature of our understandings of addiction and addicts; 2) how these historically contingent understandings are actualized as technologies geared toward “recovering” unruly subjects; and 3) how these historically contingent understandings are taken up as “epistemological scripts” used to conceptualize the “true nature” of certain types of drugs and drug users while simultaneously supporting various regimes of discipline and punishment for those determined to remain “unruly subjects.”
ContributorsWalker, Michael F (Author) / Nadesan, Majia H (Thesis advisor) / Provine, Doris M (Thesis advisor) / Cavender, Gray (Committee member) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The stillbirth of a wanted baby is a devastating and life altering experience that happens more than 26,000 times each year in the United States, but the impacts and implications of this loss on families is rarely discussed in public spaces. While another kind of pregnancy ending, abortion, dominates political discourse about reproduction, the absence of talk about stillbirth prevention or support in those same contexts is worthy of further investigation. This project explores stillbirth as a communication phenomenon and draws upon narrative, performance and rhetorical articulations of testimony to extend our understanding of how narratives of stillbirth circulate in current conditions of discourse. A model for viewing how dominant and counter narratives circulate is explained (Narrative Loop Model) and a new model for illuminating the unique functions of testimony is given (Testimonial Loop Model). This dissertation employs performance and rhetorical methods to explore testimonies of stillbirth, both naturally occurring and solicited through interviews, in order to create several performance texts that put pregnancy-ending narratives in conversation with each other on stage. Analysis of the performance text and choices, as well as reflection on the embodied performance experience and member checking, yielded several findings. The discovery of somatic sentience and its influence on performance ethnography is discussed. Themes of relationality and temporality were found in the performance of testimonies of stillbirth. The implications of these findings add to the communication discipline’s understanding of how and why stillbirth testimony may circulate, its impact on conditions of discourse for pregnancy ending and its potential use as/in intervention, support, and advocacy. Ethical considerations and limitations are addressed.
ContributorsPullen, Suzanne (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C (Thesis advisor) / Corey, Frederick C. (Thesis advisor) / Lederman, Linda (Committee member) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015