Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation examines how "modern literacy" and "contemporary writing" are increasingly influenced by technology from a critical pedagogical perspective. The study develops a definition of literacy that takes into account a reliance on technology, particularly computers, in our writing classes and writing lives. With a focus on one particular institution of higher education, and an emphasis on a qualitative, narrative perspective, the dissertation traces how "traditional" perspectives concerning writing and the job of a writing class influence the technological resources at instructors' disposal. The study focuses on the well-known critical pedagogical work of theorists such as Freire, hooks, and Giroux in order to tease out the critical and political imperative of developing a modern literacy attuned to a more broadly defined kind of modern writing. More specifically, the dissertation focuses on the work of Henry Giroux, by utilizing his theory of "border pedagogy" in a way that centers on borders of different literacies in different mediums, rather than borders between different social groups. As a series of "texts" for examination in order to develop the practical applications of techno-critical pedagogy, Multi-User Domains Object-Oriented (MOO) technology is explored in a qualitative study. The dissertation also explores a techno-rich freshman composition course, focused on matters of online representation (from MOO to Second Life to violent videogames), as a text for elucidating techno-critical pedagogy and its relation to our students' compositions and in composing themselves in electronic environments.

Committee: Sherrie Gradin (Advisor); Linda Rice (Committee Member); Jennie Nelson (Committee Member); Marjorie Dewert (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

While scholars from a wide range of disciplines have analyzed thematic development, iconography, narrative, characterization, and animation style of Japanese anime, the music of anime programs is largely ignored or trivialized. This dissertation fills the gap in critical intercultural communication and media studies research by examining original anime soundtracks and their roles as narrative devices. Anime is explored as a site of global cultural resistance, while maintaining articulations of gender and cultural ideals in their stories and reflected in the lyrics of their theme songs. Employing critical intercultural communication, critical media studies, Affect Theory, with textual analysis and rhetorical criticism, this dissertation analyzes how music is intrinsic to the narrative and an expression of cultural values in anime. Analysis focuses on Hibike! Euphonium (2015-present) by Tatsuya Ishihara and Naoko Yamada, from the studio of Kyoto Animation, a slice-of-life drama involving the coming-of-age stories of high schoolers in a competitive concert band, and Vivi -Furoraito Aizu Songu- (2021) by Tappei Nagatsuki and Eiji Umehara, produced by Wit Studio, which follows an autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmed to entertain humans with her voice, and who discovers her humanity through music while trying to save the world from destruction. Each anime illustrates how musical scores, lyrics, and instrumentation are incorporated into narratives of gender, agency, culture, and humanity. The dissertation also analyzes compositional style, structure, instrumentation, and lyrics encoded with hegemonic messages and constructions of gendered, raced, and cultural distinctions. It provides a critical analysis of how music is used as a narrative tool in media and communication studies involving anime and how the rhetorical messages encoded in texts, via lyrics and instrumentation, are forms of intercultural communication of Japanese anime viewed by a Western aud (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lara Lengel Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Alberto González Ph.D. (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member); Wendy Watson Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: American Studies; Asian Studies; Communication; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Music; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

The history of imperialism in the Americas is one that entwines colonial interests with carceral power. Marginalized populations are dehumanized, displaced, and subjected to different forms of incarceration to secure political, economic, and cultural aims. This dissertation examines the role of rhetoric and literacy in the long historiographic arc of carceral-colonialism's development. From the new world turn, when European settler colonialism first took root in the Caribbean, to the transatlantic slave trade in the centuries that followed, I argue that carceral-colonial power was historically exercised by systematically denying the rhetoricity of dehumanized populations. At the core of my analysis is my theory of rhetorical debility, which describes the relationship between rhetoricity and the subjugation of populations marginalized by settler colonization, labor exploitation, and national security. Taking up contemporary questions in rhetorical studies surrounding new materialism, posthumanism, and marginalized global rhetorical traditions, this dissertation puts forward a series of Critical Discourse Analysis-based case studies and comparative rhetorical analyses of carceral-colonialism's rhetorical historiography. I find that humanity has historically been defined and contested according to perceived capacities of rhetoricity – of practicing rhetoric and being rhetorical in ways that suit dominant social, economic, and political interests.

Committee: Christa Teston (Committee Chair); Beverly Moss (Committee Member); Wendy Hesford (Committee Member); Pranav Jani (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; History; Literacy; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Classroom-based simulations act as both reflections and deflections of reality. Nonetheless, their purpose is to enculturate students into a professional community through an experiential learning activity that asks students to adopt the mindset, mannerisms, and expertise of a professional. As such, students are molded into professionals through these experiences, and once they enter the workplace, they take part in shaping it, helping to subsequently craft the reality mirrored in future simulations. In other words, simulations create a feedback loop between the simulation and reality, each always shaping and reflecting a version of each other. Because of this, instructors and researchers need to take seriously not only the pedagogical implications of simulations, but also the sociopolitical. Guided by the methodological approach of abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), this dissertation, through a mixed-methods case study of the pseudonymous Simulation for Raising Interprofessional Aptitude (STRIA) Program, examines how interprofessional healthcare students—social work students, in particular—are trained, through simulation, to provide patient-centered care in a simulated hospital setting. Specifically, building upon rhetorical theory, technical and professional communication, and critical disability studies, this study asks: How do interprofessional healthcare students work across divisions (in knowledge, experience, and language), together and with patients, to enact patient-centered care? How can rhetorical theory be put into practice to help interprofessional healthcare students prepare for working in unpredictable environments? How might pre-professional healthcare training, specifically simulation-based learning, respond to humanistic critiques about the efficacy and ethics of simulations? And what can rhetoricians learn from conducting in-situ research in complex workplace simulations? Key findings from this project offer rhetoric resea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christa Teston (Advisor); Lauren McInroy (Committee Member); Margaret Price (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: English

This dissertation explores the relationship between genre and identity in college-level writing. It investigates how genres facilitate or hinder the expression of students' identities, focusing on how identity expression affects student-writers' relationship with writing, particularly those student-writers from racially marginalized communities. Drawing on critical race theory and cultural rhetoric, the study examines the increasing use of diverse genres that allow scholars to address their experiences within a racist society and challenge the boundaries of traditional academic writing genres. By analyzing students' writing topics across different college writing genres, the research aims to uncover the epistemological affordances of these genres, specifically their ability to empower marginalized students in confronting racism and structural inequality. The dissertation engages with debates surrounding genres labeled story in rhetoric and composition, explaining the history of these debates and highlighting current tensions over the role of story in rhetoric and composition scholarship and teaching. Ultimately, this research contributes to the understanding of the role genres play in shaping students' rhetorical challenges within racist structures and in finding their identities.

Committee: Laura Micciche Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christina LaVecchia Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christopher Carter Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation examined media rhetoric in the Los Angeles Times about 51 murdered marginalized women in the “Southside Slayer” serial killer cases. The “Southside Slayer” was five different Black men who did not fit the profile of a serial killer and were able to continue murdering women from 1983 to 2007. The victims and/or killers were all associated at one point with the “Southside Slayer” moniker and/or task force, even though some of the killers were later given different nicknames in the press. The goal of this study was to identify harmful narratives against marginalized women victims, and how they were perpetuated through the Los Angeles Times. Through qualitative archival research and a feminist social constructionist lens, language and word/phrase choices in 126 articles from the Los Angeles Times dating from 1985 to 2020 were examined for the use of synecdoche, derogatory language, and negatively connotative language when referring to the fifty-one women. In addition, use of the victims' names, use of the killers' names, and use of killer-friendly language were examined. Using critical discourse analysis and grounded theory, harmful narratives and dehumanization of the women were perpetuated through the underuse of victims' names combined with overused combinations of synecdoche, derogatory, and/or negatively connotative words/phrases. Digital media of today was also examined, and perpetuation or disruption of the harmful narratives and dehumanization varied.

Committee: Lee Nickoson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christopher Ward Ph.D. (Other); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member); Chad Iwertz-Duffy Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Rhetoric; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Media and Communication

This project examined traditional gendered discourses surrounding the ends and means of sexuality, the emerging role of digital sexual technologies in purported sexual empowerment, and the socio-material aspects which revolve around these technologies, sexual medias, and sexual discourses. Combining critical feminist insights with media ecology, this project explored happenings within the sociosexually violent pre- and present-COVID-19 United States ecology, documenting novel and rigorous contributions in our increasingly algorithmic world. This study of the U.S. context critiques foundational constructs created by Enlightenment decisionmakers who rationalized colonial rhetorics and logics built into each preceding iteration of capitalisms from industrialism into neoliberalism since national origin. As such, it extends critiques of mechanistic models of the human body and sexual communications and situates them within the vastly uncriminalized sexual violences, as well as insufficient sexual education standards. Theoretically, I argue that a mechanization of humans has occurred, been pushed to its extreme, and is flipping into a humanization of objects. To demonstrate this, I critical feminist rhetorically analyzed 75 biomimetic sextech advertisements from the brand Lora DiCarlo, contextualizing them in salient discourses within 428 present-COVID-19 TikTok videos, investigating: “What rhetorical themes occur within advertisements for biomimetic sexual technologies marketed to vulva-havers in the late-stage present-COVID-19 neoliberal U.S. landscape?” “How have biomimetic sexual technologies marketed to vulva-havers effected how their sexual experiences are created and maintained in the sociosexual U.S. landscape?” and “How are biomimetic sextech changing vulva-havers sexual sense-making, experiences, and relations within the sexually violent late-stage capitalist present-COVID-19 U.S. landscape?” Using a feminist eye, this brings to media ecology a contextualization (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ellen W. Gorsevski Ph.D (Advisor); Kristina N. LaVenia Ph.D (Other); Lara M. Lengel Ph.D (Committee Member); Terry L. Rentner Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; American History; American Studies; Bioinformatics; Black Studies; Communication; Economic History; Education; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Health Education; Higher Education; Individual and Family Studies; Information Systems; Information Technology; Marketing; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Medical Ethics; Middle School Education; Modern History; Organizational Behavior; Personal Relationships; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Public Health; Public Health Education; Rhetoric; Science Education; Secondary Education; Social Research; Social Structure; Sociology; Systematic; Systems Design; Technical Communication; Technology; Web Studies; Womens Studies

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Arts and Sciences: Communication

In this study, I used an Afrocentric rhetorical approach to analyze the rhetoric of mothers of slain children advocating for social justice and police reform after the deaths of black males and females at the hands of police and vigilantes. The speeches include Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin and the Democratic National convention speech of the self-proclaimed group called the Mothers of the Movement. Using the metatheory of Afrocentricity and paradigmatic adaptation of Afrocentricity, the study will serve as an Afrocentric rhetorical analysis to uncover ways in which a rhetoric of social resistance can be empowering and motivating to its audience members.

Committee: Ronald Jackson II Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Eric Jenkins Ph.D. (Committee Member); Carlos Morrison Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2020, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

In 2008 Kosovo gained independence and began to transition into statehood. During that transition a new constitution was created providing an opportunity for new leadership roles for Kosovar women. In 2017, Kosovar Ambassador Teuta Sahatqija gave a speech at Ohio Northern University's College of Law titled “The Leadership Roles of Women in Transitional States.” It was at this speech that she shared many stories and photos illustrating the ways in which Kosovar women were breaking silences during this transition period. This dissertation applies the lens of the rhetoric of silence and feminist rhetoric to the rhetorical moves made by women in Kosovo that Ambassador Sahatqija described in her speech. Four discussion points of the Ambassador's speech (artifacts) were chosen for analysis. The artifacts chosen were a story she told about the parliament women protesting a diplomatic assignment list that was only comprised of men, Articles 7, 22, and 37 of the new Kosovo Constitution, and a memorial and an art installation both dedicated to the estimated 20,000 rape victims of the Kosovo war. Heuristic analysis of these artifacts explored the ways in which these artifacts helped women overcome silences previously placed upon them, prevent future silencing, and amplified Kosovar women's voices. The analysis found that each artifact gave women in Kosovo agency and empowered them to make global changes and amplify the voices of women. It found that each of the artifacts utilized social circulation, globalization, critical imagination, and strategic contemplation in ways that allowed them to de-silence women. This dissertation concludes that the implications of these rhetorical moves to overcome silences and amplify marginalized voices can have impact on a larger more global scale. It also suggests ways that we can incorporate the same movements in our classrooms in order to continue to amplify previously silenced voices and help our students find their own voice.

Committee: Sue Carter Wood PhD (Advisor); Danielle Kuhl PhD (Other); Neil Baird PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Communication Studies (Communication)

This project is concerned with the historical legacy of settler colonialism on indigenous-occupied lands and the ways in which land rights are rhetorically constructed and enacted across transnational geopolitical terrain. I utilize pan-historiography to develop Michael McGee's theorization of the ideograph towards what I term an “ideomap” – a place-based approach to comparative ideology that recognizes the rhetorical agency of subaltern collectives. In exploring four indigenous communities, I analyze the ways in which land is not only reflective of ideology but also produces culturally distinct possibilities for decolonization: first, the Standing Rock Sioux's Dakota Access Pipeline protest as a case for land as economy; second, Aboriginal Australia's Stolen Generations campaign as a case for land as family; third, Palestine's Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a case for land as law; and fourth, Brazil's Terra Livre camp as a case for land as environment. The connective thread among these cases explores the spatial rhetorics of indigenous land and the practice of place-making as one that ideologically disrupts settler invasion and physically exercises anticolonial resistance on physical, digital, and hybrid spaces. In particular, I argue these four movements speak to the possibility of collapsing colonial structures and redefining civil societies that not only acknowledge but actively build upon indigenous perspectives.

Committee: Devika Chawla (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Native Studies; Rhetoric

Master of Humanities (MHum), Wright State University, 2019, Humanities

In this thesis, I illustrate how epistemic injustice functions in the divide between white working-class men and the educated elite by discussing the discursive ways in which working-class knowledge and experience are devalued as legitimate sources of knowledge. I demonstrate this by using critical discourse analysis to interpret the underlying attitudes and ideologies in comments made by Clinton and Trump during their 2016 presidential campaigns. I also discuss how these ideologies are positively or negatively perceived by Trump's working-class base. Using feminist standpoint theory and phenomenology as a lens of interpretation, I argue that white working-class men are increasingly alienated from progressive politics through classist and ableist rhetoric. If progressives wish to win over white working-class men, they will need to ameliorate this division, otherwise this gap will continue to grow. Finally, I suggest class-sensitive approaches for moving forward and bridging this gap.

Committee: Kelli Zaytoun Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jessica Penwell-Barnett Ph.D. (Committee Member); Donovan Miyasaki Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Demographics; Epistemology; Gender; Gender Studies; Philosophy; Political Science; Rhetoric; Sociology; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing​, University of Findlay, 2019, English

Findlay, Ohio's nineteenth-century newspapers published crime reports, legislative actions, and opinion pieces about prostitution within the city. Victorian ideology was inherently rigid and imbalanced between men and women, which is why nonconforming sexual activity, specifically sex for sale, represents a rhetorically significant phenomenon. When considering Findlay's historical and contemporary reputation as a politically conservative and traditional family-focused municipality, the newspaper articles show that some residents resisted gendered behavioral standards that city leaders sought to uphold during its most socioeconomically formative years. This thesis critically looks at previously unstudied, male-authored Victorian prostitution articles to determine how journalists ideologically situated and represented the female-centric trade within the community. The project also identifies new information that reflects the women's rhetorical presence. This paper argues that, despite the phallocentric nature of the newspaper articles, prostitutes' voices can still be “heard” and recognized for their rhetorical contributions, thereby encouraging historical revisioning.

Committee: Christine Denecker (Committee Chair); Sarah Fedirka (Committee Member); Diana Montague (Committee Member); Christine Tulley (Advisor) Subjects: American History; Communication; Cultural Anthropology; Gender Studies; Journalism; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Communication Studies (Communication)

Illness can strike a person and family at any time. Although American culture is beginning to shift in how we talk about illness, there is still a cloud over how we communicate about illness; specifically that of our ill/aging parent(s). This study explores how personal experiences intersect with illness and family combining autoethnographic accounts of caring for an ill/aging parent with the works of three comic memoir authors. Seeking to address and analyze the experiences surrounding caring for an ill and/or aging parent, a critical rhetorical framework guided by the works of Raymie E. McKerrow and Michel Foucault is applied to our sociocultural understandings of health, illness, and caregiving. Findings explore both the experiences surrounding caring for an ill/aging parent as well as the systematic structures embedded in the caregiving experience. Chapter Two focuses on personal experiences from an `other' and `self” orientation through autoethnographic accounts, specifically the influential nature of Pastoral Care (Foucault) of the body. Chapter's Three and Four explore these same orientations `other' and `self' through a critical rhetorical analysis of three comic memoirs: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast, Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies, Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath. The analysis identifies key similarities and differences between each authors' lived experiences. Chapter Five advances the central argument that each author is predispositioned to confirm to and operate within the power structures embedded in our sociocultural understandings of health. I conclude with a discussion of the two major discoveries connected to my central argument, and follow that following with the major contribution of the analysis, the significance of the stories told and used for the analysis, implications for future research, and lastly final reflections.

Committee: Raymie E. McKerrow (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Health; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Media and Communication

The popularity of modern comic books has fluctuated since their creation and mass production in the early 20th century, experiencing periods of growth as well as decline. While commercial success is not always consistent from one decade to the next it is clear that the medium has been and will continue to be a cultural staple in the society of the United States. I have selected this type of popular culture for analysis precisely because of the longevity of the medium and the recent commercial success of film and television adaptations of comic book material. In this project I apply a Critical lens to selected comic book materials and apply Critical theories related to race, class, and gender in order to understand how the materials function as vehicles for ideological messages. For the project I selected five Marvel comic book characters and examined materials featuring those characters in the form of comic books, film, and television adaptations. The selected characters are Steve Rogers/Captain America, Luke Cage, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Jean Grey, and Raven Darkholme/Mystique. Methodologically I interrogated the selected texts through the application of visual and narrative rhetorical criticism. By using this approach, I was able to answer my guiding research questions centered around how these texts operate to reinforce, subvert, and modify socio-cultural understandings related to the race, gender, and economic class in the United States.

Committee: Alberto González PhD (Advisor); Eric Worch PhD (Other); Joshua Atkinson PhD (Committee Member); Frederick Busselle PhD (Committee Member); Christina Knopf PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Gender; Mass Media; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

This dissertation intervenes in antiracist scholarship's recent trend of acknowledging/openly critiquing whiteness as primary means to dismantle white supremacy in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy (Ratcliffe, Inoue). I use intersectional Black Feminist thought (Lorde, Cohen), buttressed by Black Studies (DuBois, Godwin-Woodson, Weheliye) and Afrocentric philosophy (Asante, Mazama), to interrupt that trend by examining marginalized antiracist agency, through analysis of meanings of blackness in the US vis-a-vis institutional power. In centering blackness, I apply “a critical method” that “presents a positive rather than a reactionary posture” (Asante) in mobilizing generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts that often paradoxically center whiteness. At the crux of this project is an attempt to establish a lens for reading rhetorical ecologies of race—race relations interrelated through space, culture, and context. I use that lens to undertake a case study of a large Midwestern historically white institution, Midwestern State University, during a defined cultural moment (post-Ferguson). “Black or Right” foregrounds its Black feminist rhetorical analysis with an eye toward a fracturing multiplicity through a relational methodology, building from Sara Ahmed's work in On Being Included. In doing so, I expand Ahmed's focus on diversity practitioners by emphasizing different positions/locations within the historically white educational institution under scrutiny while adopting differing vantage points or roles from which I analyze material: through a concentration on graduate student positionality (autoethnographist) in Chapter 2; in undergraduate student work in my antiracist composition classroom (critical pedagogue) in the following chapter; via the cultural context of historical, populist, and pedagogic meanings of #BlackLivesMatter (cultural rhetorician) in the fourth chapter; and within the praxis of policy (a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Wendy Hesford (Committee Chair); Beverly Moss (Committee Member); Margaret Price (Committee Member) Subjects: Black Studies; Composition; Literacy; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

This research project seeks to establish the degree to which morality and ethics are implicated in writing pedagogy. While writing, rhetoric, and ethics have long been interlinked in the traditions of rhetorical pedagogy, perhaps most famously in Socrates' admonishment of the Sophists, postmodern skepticism has, in part, diminished the centrality of morality and ethics to college writing instruction. I arrive at this project prickled by my own assumptions that writing might well be taught aside from moral and ethical considerations. To this end, I curate a collection of representative work applying the concepts of ethics to composition pedagogy research and scholarship from 1990 to the present. This work is necessary because the theory and practice of ethics in composition studies is diverse and diffuse. While a few scholars have made ethics a primary concern (for example, Marilyn Cooper; Peter Mortensen; James Porter) and others who have sought to map the disciplinary engagement (for example, Paul Dombrowski; Laura Micciche), treatments of ethics in composition scholarship remain fragmented and idiomatic. This research project draws together the streams of thought informing composition's diverse engagement with ethics to provide a representative sampling of approaches and ethical treatments pertaining to writing pedagogy. My approach is to seek to understand what prompts scholars to engage ethics: What problems and questions drive writing scholars toward ethics? And what do these scholars hope to accomplish by doing ethics? Employing a descriptive method grounded in feminist interpretations of pluralist ethics, this research project collects ethical interventions into writing scholarship interested in writing tradition, theory, research methods, and social advocacy. This research projects concludes by considering how writing ethics has transformed my writing praxis.

Committee: Sherrie Gradin (Committee Chair) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Issues of environmental risk and representations of that environmental risk often cross socially constructed borders. These borders are both physical and ideological in nature and emerge in patterns of spoken and written text. This dissertation explores patterns of environmental risk representation within public deliberation about High Volume Hydraulic Fracking (HVHF) in three neighboring states. My research reveals socially situated constraints and affordances surrounding literacies that activist participants navigate in an effort to represent environmental risk as related to the HVHF industry. In this study, I employ rhetorical and critical discourse analysis to highlight public participant constraints. When public participants are stymied in deliberation while using institutional environmental risk participatory mechanisms rooted in industry ideology, I explore, through literacy studies, how participants turned to various counter-literacies informed by precautionary and environmental justice ideologies to represent HVHF environmental risk. I argue that that incorporating precautionary and environmental justice frames signals a shift towards procedural justice, or a focus on encouraging public participant engagement in complex deliberation about their local environments.

Committee: Pamela Takayoshi Dr. (Committee Chair); Patricia Dunmire Dr. (Committee Member); Sara Newman Dr. (Committee Member); Emariana Widner Dr. (Committee Member); Thomas Schmidlin Dr. (Other) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Media and Communication

This manuscript attempts to broaden previously explored concepts about the nature of whiteness in order to describe and analyze its influence on past and current K-12 education policy discussions. From an orientation of critical rhetoric, I attempt to advance the critical intercultural communication project by taking seriously Kent Ono (2013) notion that assumptions about nation-states as homogeneous entities vastly undertheorize how nations and the people who embody them actually work. That said, my project makes use of Colin Woodard's (2011) mapping of 11 American nations. These nations, or dominant cultural hearths, as Woodard argues, reflect the embedded attitudes, deep seated preferences, and governing practices of the various EuroAtlantic colonizers who controlled them (p. 2). I assemble discursive fragments into a text directed at demystifying how--within these colonized lands--whiteness operates uniquely as a cultural practice. Taking education as a form of governmentality, as Foucault suggests (Foucault as cited in Lemke, 2002), I analyze deliberation on K-12 education that takes place where the borders of whiteness as a cultural practice meet. My goal is to shed light on rituals and strategies that work to maintain and/or challenge whiteness within these settings. The two overarching research questions guiding this work are: (1) what can critics learn about the connections between place, whiteness and cultural practices by analyzing deliberation about K-12 education at different locales within the U.S.? (2) How does whiteness intersect, influence, and mediate boundaries of civic identity and national belonging?

Committee: Alberto González (Advisor); Catherine Stein (Other); John Dowd (Committee Member); Ellen Gorsevski (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Education Policy; History; Rhetoric

MA, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Scholars have neglected the topic of or pathos, or emotion, in the classroom particularly student emotion; usually it is only the emotional labor of instructors that is analyzed at length. It is my belief that student emotion is at the core of their resistance in the classroom; when a student resists a teacher's instruction, it is not necessarily “something to be overcome.” According to critical pedagogical endoxa/values students must eventually accept the teacher's critical goals, but this perspective does not consider the potential for emotion-based resistance. My thesis demonstrates that critical pedagogy neglects student emotion rather than addressing this resistance. I also consider how and why pathos is underutilized in the composition classroom and suggest it as a way to understand resistance. To these ends, I use Laura Micciche's definition of emotion: “emotions are enacted and embodied in the social world [and] produced between people and between people and things. That is, we do emotions—they don't simply happen to us” (Micciche 2007 1-2). According to Micciche, students must be able to explore the emotions of their fellow classmates and their instructor. Understanding student emotions and acknowledging the need to address them will benefit composition instructors (particularly the inexperienced) and add another dimension to emotion studies; furthermore, I believe acknowledging student emotion will assist instructors in developing effective pedagogies for their classrooms.

Committee: Sara Newman Dr. (Committee Chair); Keith Lloyd Dr. (Committee Member); Bill Kist Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Higher Education; Literacy; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Media and Communication

In 2014, the leadership performances of National Basketball Association (NBA) Commissioner Adam Silver and National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Roger Goodell (both men who occupy White positionality), in response to two critical moments in their respective leagues, offered insight into prevailing racial and gender ideologies between United States (U.S.) professional men's sport, and ultimately, U.S. society. In the NFL, a domestic abuse incident between NFL star Ray Rice and his then-fiance Janay Palmer, two individuals who do not occupy whiteness, and in the NBA, racist comments made by then-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Donald Sterling, a man who occupies whiteness, required responses and disciplinary action from the commissioners. Utilizing critical rhetorical analysis as a method of textual analysis (McKerrow, 1989), this dissertation examines and critiques Commissioners Silver and Goodell's rhetorical performances as leaders in response to these incidents as well as the surrounding global news and sports media reactions to their decisions. Informed by concepts within critical whiteness studies (e.g., Nakayama & Krizek, 1995), intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw, 1989; 1991), Black Feminist Thought (BFT) (e.g., Collins 1991; 2004; Griffin, 2012b; hooks, 2004), hegemonic masculinity (e.g,., Trujillo, 1991), and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Baxter, 2011), this dissertation examines the intersection of whiteness and hegemonic masculinity within the commissioners' performances to explore how whiteness functions dialectically and intersectionally to secure its persuasive power as a strategic rhetoric. The analyses within the two case studies revealed two distinct dialectics: (1) rhetorics of postracism vs. critical rhetorics, and (2) rhetorics of honor vs. rhetorics of shame. Overall, this project extends understanding of how the rhetorics of whiteness work dialectically and intersect with the rhetorics of masculinity within the NBA and NFL via the rhetorical p (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alberto Gonzalez Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Lisa Hanasono Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Christina Lunceford Dr. (Other); Ellen Gorsevski Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric