Matching Items (34)
Description
The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory.
ContributorsChabot, Shersta A (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In this anthology, I will delve into two spheres of my personal and professional life: how my gender has inhibited my authority in the workplace, and how my gender has impacted the assumptions others make of my aptitude and worth. In each entry, I explore the intersection of poetry and literary criticism regarding internalized gendered assumptions. My headnote offers questions to consider upon reading each poem, and I have taken techniques and examples from Mary Oliver’s handbook on writing poetry, to then offer my own poem in response. Finally, I then analyze relevant scholarship to the gender-based issue I am referencing, alongside a personal explanation of how this issue materializes in my poems.
ContributorsNikoomanzar, Lilia (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis director) / Moran, Stacey (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2022-05
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
A handbook consisting of scholarship and social media included to frame the six experiences around which this handbook is organized: getting in the zone, a thought process in overdrive; impulsivity; a distinct relationship to creativity; difficulties with transitions, especially the transition to and from sleep; and a complex relationship to medication. Following the initial framing, I then describe what each of these experiences feel like to me. To render these experiences for the purpose of a shared inquiry, I followed the critical-incident interview method that Flower describes in Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. I first learned to use this interview technique in ENG 205: Introduction to Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies and practiced it further in ENG 390: Methods of Inquiry. The crux of my project is the insights of research participants as they read and responded to the six critical incidents and respective follow-up questions I designed for this study. The full interview protocol–approved by ASU’s Internal Review Board in December of 2022–is included in the appendix. Following IRB approval, I recruited four participants for a critical-incident interview, the results of which enliven this handbook’s portrait of thriving with ADHD.
ContributorsClark, Sydney (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis director) / Boyd Webb, Patricia (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Much of the public discourse promoting Navajo (Diné) language revitalization and language programs takes place in English, both on and off the reservation, as in many other indigenous communities whose heritage languages are endangered. Although Navajo language is commonly discussed as being central to the identity of a Navajo person, this ideology may lie in contradiction to the other linguistic and social means Navajos use to construct Navajo identities, which exist within a wide spectrum of demographic categories as well as communities of practice relating to religion, occupation, and other activities (Field, 2009; Baker & Bowie, 2010).
This dissertation examines two sets of data: 1) interviews with eight Navajo individuals whose interests, academic studies, and/or occupations relate to the promotion of Navajo language use in connection with cultural and linguistic revitalization; and 2) public statements made in online forums discussing the language used by Navajos. The interview data gathered consist of ten sociolinguistic (and open-ended conversational) interviews, culminating in over 13 hours of recorded interviews. The findings of this study show enregistered (i.e., imbued with social meaning) features of the dialect of Navajo English as well as insights into the challenges Navajos face while advocating for programs and policies supporting the teaching of their heritage language.
This dissertation examines two sets of data: 1) interviews with eight Navajo individuals whose interests, academic studies, and/or occupations relate to the promotion of Navajo language use in connection with cultural and linguistic revitalization; and 2) public statements made in online forums discussing the language used by Navajos. The interview data gathered consist of ten sociolinguistic (and open-ended conversational) interviews, culminating in over 13 hours of recorded interviews. The findings of this study show enregistered (i.e., imbued with social meaning) features of the dialect of Navajo English as well as insights into the challenges Navajos face while advocating for programs and policies supporting the teaching of their heritage language.
ContributorsMoss, Meredith Genevieve (Author) / Adams, Karen L (Thesis advisor) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation develops a heuristic—one I call the iterative narrative reflection framework—for rhetorically engaged, data-driven teacherly theory building using Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance and rejection. Teacher-scholars regularly develop curricula and lesson plans informed by theory and prior experience, but the daily practice of teaching and learning with students rarely plays out as expected. In many cases, institutional constraints and the unpredictable lives of students interact with teachers’ plans in surprising and sometimes confounding ways. Teachers typically make sense of such challenges by constructing post-hoc narratives about what happened and why, attributing motives and agencies to other participants in ways that suggest how to respond, move forward, and get back on track. Whether such narratives are part of a deliberate practice of reflection or an informal and largely unnoticed mental process, they are rarely thought of as constructed accounts and therefore as rhetorical acts that can be subjected to serious review, criticism, and revision. Yet these stories are shaped by familiar genre conventions that influence interpretations of events and motives in ways that may or may not serve well as teachers consider how best to respond to unfolding events. Using the iterative narrative reflection framework to guide my analysis of my own teacherly narratives through multiple layers of reflection and criticism, I demonstrate across the dissertation’s three cases how such deliberate, methodical analysis can reveal tacit assumptions and additional interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, such a process of iterative reflection enables the teacher-scholar to choose from among a wider range of available means of persuasion and pedagogical possibilities.
ContributorsRobinson, Rebecca Joanna (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Keith D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This thesis examines the rhetorical relationship between migrant death and American culture, with an emphasis on how postmortem treatment of the deceased gives shape to anti-migrant attitudes. By isolating one instance of death on the border and considering the discourse that ensued in the following two months, this research assesses mechanisms of a rhetoric of death (necrorhetoric) as they relate to sociopolitical constructions of the migrant. The political apparatus of the State as a natural extension of biopower confers upon it the authority to produce sacred life or bare life (homo sacer). This process of production creates conditions of being which precede the potential to kill without allegation of murder, constructs the content of sovereign power, and results in a social sense-making, or public doxa, that informs cultural values and justifies collective attitudes. As the process is perfected, meticulous and calculated demonstrations of force become a crucial exercise of sovereignty. Efforts to enforce and maintain control of the border develop into increasingly streamlined methods, placing the state on an incremental trajectory of power that inaugurates ritualized and state sanctioned violence. The aggrieved take on a sociopolitical role that renders their lives less than fully human, allowing further alienation and segregation to occur. The desire to maintain sovereign power is the typifying force around which United States history has been shaped, and this desire continues to inform contemporary American policy. Analysis of legal, presidential, and news documents pertaining to the deaths of Oscar Martinez Ramirez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Valeria, reveals a network of rhetorical maneuvering that gives evidence of a necropolitical environment defined by its intentional and obscure brutality.
ContributorsBaumann, Natalie (Author) / Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This thesis argues that celebrities and celebrity studies should be taken more seriously in writing studies as productive sites for writing instruction in the composition classroom. Historically, celebrity culture has been overlooked for ostensibly lacking in substance or relevance to critical thought. However, academic disciplines, such as cultural studies and celebrity studies, are paving the way for celebrities having a more significant rhetorical relevance as figures in the public. This thesis explores celebrities as cultural figures who are advantageously positioned in the public realm as rhetorical agents. Their increased visibility and the increase in observation of celebrity culture in the public sphere are contributing to how people form opinions and make judgments about the world around them. Yet, despite some of the connections between the public, writing, and celebrity rhetoric, there has been little work in the field aligning celebrity rhetoric as a site for public writing instruction within academia. This thesis seeks to address this gap by aligning celebrity rhetoric with scholarship on public writing pedagogy in composition studies. To model how students might approach analyzing and writing about celebrity rhetoric in the composition classroom, this thesis offers a critical look at the celebrity rhetoric of Taylor Swift. The case study rhetorically analyzes sites of public writing that work intertextuality across various mediums to construct her celebrity as a representation of modern feminism. This thesis concludes with a discussion about the pedagogical implication of implementing celebrity rhetoric in the composition classroom. It concludes that celebrity rhetoric is useful for students in composition classrooms for making personal connections with their work, negotiating an understanding about culture and public issues, and influencing the production of rhetoric, writing and their own identity as scholars.
ContributorsHorton, Kathryn (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Hannah, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation examines the “remembering-forgetting dialectic,” or a common assumption that remembering and forgetting are antithetical acts with opposing values in a public (Blair et al 18). More specifically, it examines this dialectic within the context of settler colonialism, which other scholars have noted is marked by the pervasive “forgetting” (Shotwell 37) and “erasure” (Stuckey 232) of the violent, genocidal acts that enabled a settler-colonial nation to develop. To examine this dialectic’s appearance and high stakes in that “forgetting” epistemic context, I analyzed US public memory of the Frontier, a historic space that references the United States’ settler-colonial westward expansion and a symbolic space that has lasting ties to hegemonic constructions of American civic identity. To do so, I ask, What does public memory of the Frontier suggest about the remembering-forgetting dialectic? To address this research aim, I analyzed three sites that engage in Frontier memory work: (1) the Foy Proctor Historical Park, an outdoor exhibit focused on ranching history at the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas; (2) Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, an exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona that documents the experiences of American Indian students who attended off-reservation boarding schools; and (3) The Oregon Trail, a videogame that simulates a mid-nineteenth century pioneer’s journey across the Frontier. In my analysis, I identified the site’s public memory narrative, discussed how the site rhetorically builds that narrative, and considered the site’s efforts to encourage visitors to identify with the portrayed history. My results show that: (1) the Foy Proctor Historical Park perpetuates a settler-colonial narrative through its rhetorical invention of a Frontier landscape, (2) Remembering Our Indian School Days challenges the “forgetting” and “erasure” of settler-colonial memory through extensive documentation efforts, and (3) The Oregon Trail reproduces an interactive, settler-colonial narrative by positioning players into role-playing as pioneers. I ultimately argue common assumptions about the functionality of remembering and forgetting in a public do not account for the epistemic complexity shown within these sites; the remembering-forgetting dialectic thus remains a significant topic in public memory studies.
ContributorsRobinson, Emily (Author) / Lamp, Kathleen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Greene, Jacob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
RISE Tutoring is an ASU student organization which helps refugee youth achieve academic and personal success through tutoring and mentorship. As a member of RISE Tutoring for three years, the researcher sought to document and analyze the program’s impact on the Phoenix refugee community. It was determined that video documentation, with its ability to capture both visual and verbal testimony, was the ideal holistic approach to assess and share this impact. The researcher hypothesized that RISE Tutoring adds value to the lives of its tutors and students through the multidimensional growth––educational, personal, and cultural––it facilitates for all. Methods of data collection were limited to video and audio, but approval from the Institutional Review Board and consent from all participants were obtained prior to the project’s start. The final video, filmed and edited with the help of a professional videographer, was 20 minutes and 21 seconds in length. The findings derived from the recorded interviews with students, tutors, and community leaders, and from the footage of tutoring and group activities, validated the researcher’s hypothesis. Viewers of the video can witness the bonding of tutors and students; hear the pride in the voices of the tutors and see the passion in their eyes when they speak of their students; and feel the joy and excitement that the program brings to its students’ lives. This project transformed the personal experiences of participants into a collective RISE Tutoring identity which can now be presented, for the first time, to the public. The video also aimed to help RISE Tutoring share its meaningful work and improve its marketing efforts, thereby enabling the organization to recruit more tutors and students, build new partnerships, and fundraise. Through the fulfillment of these goals, the video will empower the organization to effect greater change in the community.
ContributorsMarkowitz, Brenley Paige (Co-author) / Markowitz, Brenley (Co-author) / Klimek, Barbara (Thesis director) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05