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

This dissertation explores the contrast between the Athenian and metic rhetorical paradigms through the lens of the hacker. Arguing the dominant Athenian rhetorical paradigm is marked by public, persuasive, often-disembodied rhetorics in pursuit of epistemic truths, I argue the metic paradigm focuses on stealthy, deceptive, embodied rhetoric in pursuit of advantages over adversaries. Noting how today's digital rhetorical situation is largely adversarial, this dissertation points to the hacker as an exemplar of metic rhetorics. Through three case studies, each focusing on a different type of computer hack, this dissertation explores how the hacker subjectivity is produced and describes its beneficial lines of flight, discusses the interplay of metaphor and physicality in digital activism and cyberwar, and shows how metic rhetorical practices can be leveraged to create a safer and more just world and thus improve personal and organizational cybersecurity.

Committee: John Jones (Committee Chair); Ben McCorkle (Committee Member); Jonathan Buehl (Committee Member) Subjects: Information Technology; Rhetoric

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, Case Western Reserve University, 2017, English

New media technologies, particularly touchscreen interfaces, are playing a highly visible role in new exhibition practices within museums. Many museum studies scholars see the participatory experiences mediated by such technologies as potentially redefining relationships between the institution and the public by allowing museum visitors access to roles and discourses traditionally reserved for a cultural elite. In these pages, I employ rhetorician Gregory Clark's (2010) theory of rhetorical experience to investigate the claim by museum studies scholars that a “paradigm shift” is being enacted by digital technologies within museums. I show that digitally mediated experiences, particularly those facilitated by touch, can induce actions on the part of the visitor that shift their engagement in the museum from the private, solitary practices of viewing and interpretation, to the documented, public roles of educator, curator, researcher, and critic. I also show that the rhetorical nature the experiences that invite visitors to participate in such activities can effect changes in attitude and identity on the part of the visitor from visitor-as-spectator to visitor-as-co-producer. This qualitative study takes place in two public institutions with recent installations of groundbreaking exhibition technologies, the Cleveland Museum of Art, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. I use ethnographic methods, including participant observations and interviews, to identify what I term the “habits of interaction” afforded by the touchscreen interfaces in these hybrid spaces of physical and digital activity. Interrogating the integral relationship between one's ability to take up new interpretive positions through participation in digitally mediated experiences and one's previously existing digital literacies, I closely examine the rhetorical experiences visitors engage in through interaction with touchscreen interfaces. Museum visitors interac (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: T. Kenny Fountain (Advisor) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation is a study of Wikipedia's collaborative, open access culture and the opportunities for writing pedagogy it provides. Because the encyclopedia showcases productive writing processes in radically transparent ways, Wikipedia enables rich opportunities for students to observe, practice, and learn about writing. Wikipedia can help students gain social and procedural writing knowledge as well as more traditional learning outcomes related to research, writing and rhetoric. Engaging students in Wikipedia's interactive community can also lead to an increase in rhetorical knowledge as students practice negotiation and collaboration with authorities outside the “traditional” classroom. Additionally, the encyclopedia provides opportunities for cultural studies projects that involve students in the recognition of identity politics of representation and cultural marginalization as they work to rectify missing articles and topics that are underrepresented. Discussion of these opportunities provides a range of pedagogical insights into how writing instructors can approach and teach with the encyclopedia, by asking students to join the Wikipedia community and—through their writing—improve existing articles and create new ones. Such insights are supported by three information-rich classroom case studies, made available through a qualitative research design that emphasizes student and instructor experience by re-creating classroom contexts. In addition to asserting and describing the pedagogical benefits of Wikipedia writing assignments, these classroom studies interrogate the cultural politics of access and representation that emerge when students and others try to join and write in this community. Despite its ambitions for global representation and its open access editorial ethos, Wikipedia's project is hindered by problems of homogenous editorship, troubling issues of editorial access, and gaps in coverage of already marginalized topics. Examination of how these i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Albert Rouzie PhD (Advisor); Mara Holt PhD (Committee Member); Jennie Nelson PhD (Committee Member); Howard Welser PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Composition; Cultural Anthropology; Educational Theory; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2010, English/Rhetoric and Writing

This dissertation examines the extent to which composing practices and rhetorical strategies common to “Web 2.0” arenas may reinvigorate democracy. The project examines several digital composing practices as examples of what Gerard Hauser (1999) and others have dubbed “vernacular rhetoric,” or common modes of communication that may resist or challenge more institutionalized forms of discourse. Using a cultural studies approach, this dissertation focuses on the popular video-sharing site, YouTube, and attempts to theorize several vernacular composing practices. First, this dissertation discusses the rhetorical trope of irreverence, with particular attention to the ways in which irreverent strategies such as new media parody transcend more traditional modes of public discourse. Second, this dissertation discusses three approaches to video remix (collection, Detournement, and mashing) as political strategies facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies, with particular attention to the ways in which these strategies challenge the construct of authorship and the power relationships inherent in that construct. This dissertation then considers the extent to which sites like YouTube remediate traditional rhetorical modes by focusing on the genre of epideictic rhetoric and the ways in which sites like YouTube encourage epideictic practice. Finally, in light of what these discussions reveal in terms of rhetorical practice and democracy in Web 2.0 arenas, this dissertation offers a concluding discussion of what our “Web 2.0 world” might mean for composition studies in terms of theory, practice, and the teaching of writing.

Committee: Kristine Blair Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lee Nickoson-Massye Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michael Butterworth Ph.D. (Committee Member); Louisa Ha Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Literacy; Rhetoric; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English: Composition and Rhetoric

In this dissertation, I articulate and reclaim African rhetorical traditions and apply an African rhetorical lens for examining how contemporary Ga communities can use digital communications to further cultural practices. I examine ancient Egyptian African rhetorical traditions, exploring the theories and practices of Maat so as to articulate themes and characteristics of African rhetoric. I focus on African rhetoric from Ancient Egypt and then highlight some of its practices in contemporary Ghana, including Akan and Ga rhetoric. This dissertation centers and attempts a practice of rhetoric to a local/Indigenous people, The Gas of Ghana, whose cultural and linguistic survival might depend on how they use the Internet and digital technologies to share and celebrate their rhetorics. The Gas, Indigenous to Greater Accra, the capital city of Ghana, have a rich culture similar to the Akans. However, their dwindling population, cycles of poverty, lack of education, and exclusion of their language (Ga) education in the teaching curriculum by successive governments have all contributed to a near-loss of a rich Indigenous cultural heritage. Drawing from interviews with cultural preservationists in Ghana and Ga leaders, I examine how the Gas have used and could use the internet to engage in rhetorical acts of survivance. Some of the research questions shaping this study are: (1) How might minority Indigenous peoples (specifically in this study the Gas of Ghana) use the digital to assert their cultural practices and achieve visibility and survivance? And (2) In what ways can we Africans contribute to the cultural design and decolonizing of our material and digital rhetorics? I apply a combination of local methodological frameworks to understand how local research works with Indigenous communities. These include Indigenous concepts like Sankofa, which means return to the past and fetch from it, Ga samai (symbols), decoloniality, Indigenous storytelling. Finally, I close my diss (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Heidi McKee (Advisor) Subjects: Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

What is the value of code in the humanities class, and what does it do for a humanities education? To what degree does code help us think about and compose texts, and to what degree can we engage with it as a text itself? Guided by these framing questions, this dissertation lies at the nexus of digital humanities; rhetoric, writing, and composition; and teaching, learning and pedagogy. It engages coding as a fixation of the global information economy: a literacy that has joined reading and writing to constitute a foundation of “moral goodness and economic success” signaling “the health of a nation and its citizens” (Vee 3). The larger argument of this dissertation is developed around the notion of seeing the code as a pedagogical framework for teaching and learning with code in the humanities. Scholars have begun to investigate how we can think about code and coding cultures vis-a-vis literacy studies, rhetoric, and the hermeneutical methodologies of the humanities. This dissertation extends the developing humanities framework for analyzing and composing with code into the larger discourse on teaching and learning with code. Just as the past few decades have seen the multimodal turn in writing and humanities pedagogy, this dissertation looks ahead to a coding turn that will just as much naturalize a peculiar medium of representation and agency as part of the teaching mission of our disciplines. The overall goal of the dissertation is to construct a rigorous, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary ethos for digital humanities pedagogy—and code-focused pedagogy in particular—that draws from research and teaching in rhetoric, writing, and textual studies; the (digital) humanities broadly; education studies; and science and technology studies. Chapter one develops a vernacular theory of code by calling on a variety of phenomena and disciplines. I examine how code resonates with and advances learning goals in the humanities, particularly for rhetoric, writing, com (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Scott DeWitt (Committee Chair); Jonathan Buehl (Committee Member); John Jones (Committee Member); Ben McCorkle (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education; Information Technology; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, English

Setting the Table: Ethos-As-Relationship in Food Writing employs methods from rhetoric and technical and professional communication to argue that the rhetorical mode of ethos should be understood as fundamentally relational, rather than as a more discreet property of communication synonymous with the rhetor's authority or character. I argue that reconceiving ethos-as-relationship better accounts for the rhetorical strategies used by the food writers who identify as women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or as part of the LGBTQ+ community whose texts I analyze, which include food memoirs, decolonial cookbooks, and food blogs. Food writing is a valuable place to examine the development of ethos because food writers are especially attuned to hospitality, a structural metaphor that all rhetors can use as a framework for understanding their relationship to their audience. A key focus of my analysis is the development of these food writers' textual personas, or their self-portrayal within the text. Textual personas are crucial to the development of what I call the ethotic relationship between writers and readers because a reader is unlikely to meet the writer in person, and an ethotic relationship can only be formed with another party. Ethos-as-relationship has important implications for understanding expertise and professional identity, especially for those rhetors who occupy historically-marginalized positionalities, as they must often work harder to negotiate a position of authority in relation to their audiences.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Advisor); T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Member); Vera Tobin (Committee Member); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Christopher Flint (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

Using a transdisciplinary, multi-method framework of queer rhetorics paired with kinky empiricism (Rutherford, 2012), this dissertation takes as its central concern the question: How can teachers work with students to invent and orient learning toward queer possibilities without reifying culturally oppressive norms through neoliberal accountability logics? This line of inquiry, established in Chapter 1, orients toward digital and multimodal compositions, which offer rhetorical power within and beyond the classroom. Furthermore, digital media composing, when oriented through queer rhetorics, can be a space for disidentifcation from institutionalized accountability logics and related oppressive systems (Munoz, 1999; Ahmed, 2006). In turn, this project studies assessment practices (Chapter 2), curricular developments (Chapter 3), and pedagogical engagements (Chapter 4) as conduits for queer possibilities in digital media composing classrooms. Chapter 2 troubles current neoliberal accountability logics while tracing counter-histories of assessment. Assessment, a notable concept in education and rhetoric, composition, and digital media studies, is easily positioned and co-opted by neoliberal accountability logics animated by learning outcome regimes. However, by engaging early discussions of assessment ethics, the social justice turn in assessment, and the affect of digital media/multimodal assessment, this project shows assessment can and should be (re)oriented as a tool of queer possibility through an ethic of response-ability. Following the theorization of the opening chapters, the third and fourth chapters are grounded by a practitioner inquiry project (cf. Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1993; Nichols and Cormack, 2017), which collected and analyzed qualitative data in a digital media composing course. The data, when reviewed using qualitative data analysis methods, materialize and triangulate claims of queer possibilities in digital media composing by accounting fo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Scott DeWitt DA (Committee Chair); Beverly Moss PhD (Committee Member); Christa Teston PhD (Committee Member); Eric Pritchard PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Curriculum Development; Education Philosophy; Educational Theory; Higher Education; Literacy; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Technology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Arts and Sciences: English

This research investigated the relationship between digital media composing practices and feelings, specifically turning to authors of digital media texts and books in the field of rhetoric and composition. My primary purpose was to understand the extent to which digital composing is an embodied, felt experience, thereby articulating how authors feel about drafting, coding, designing and revising scholarly projects for digital environments. Theories of digital rhetoric and emotion supported a framework for analyzing a range of authors' behind-the-scenes articles (VanKooten; Sheridan) and “practitioner stories” (Ridolfo) about digital composing. In order to capture the affective complexities and workflows of authors composing digital texts, qualitative methods were necessary for this research. More than 20 authors participated in semi-structured interviews or online questionnaires. Methods that stemmed from digital rhetoric practitioner research and emotion studies positioned me to interview authors, take stock of their composing practices (e.g., sharing screen recordings; drafts of documents), and co-review data generated from interviews and observations (e.g., participants reviewed transcripts and responded). Presenting six case studies supported by ancillary interviews and survey data, my research suggests that responding to reviewer feedback and coding a digital media text are the most painful parts of the rhetorical-affective workflow. Research also suggests that collaborating with vertical and horizontal mentors (e.g., editors and peers) and delivering a text in public are the most pleasurable. Consequently, my research implicates the support systems (or lack thereof) and editorial workflows that make digital media production possible.

Committee: Laura Micciche Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christopher Carter Ph.D. (Committee Member); Russel Durst Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

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

The disconnect between computer-mediated communication (CMC) and face-to-face (F2F) communication has been blamed on the absence of visual and physical nonverbal cues. As a result of the heavy lack of visual and physical interaction, previous research has deemed that F2F provides a richer environment for communication overall (Carter, 2003; Byron & Baldridge, 2005; Kruger J, Epley, Parker, & Ng, 2005; Kalman, Scissors, Gill, & Gergle, 2013). Despite some claims suggesting CMC will never be as fluid nor as rich as F2F (Carter, 2003; Byron & Baldridge, 2005; Kruger J, Epley, Parker, & Ng, 2005), communicating online through the use of various modes such as emoticons, nonverbal vocalizations, memes, stickers, kaomoji, color, and video are here to stay and only enrich CMC. Using a combination of the aforementioned modes, Internet users converse online using textual and visual means which resemble F2F nonverbal cues. Emoticons, nonverbal vocalization, and memes serve as substitutes for F2F nonverbal communication in CMC contexts. This body of work aims to analyze digital nonverbal cue use on Twitter by users of different languages.

Committee: Christine Tulley PhD (Committee Chair); Harley Ferris PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Medjesky PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Foreign Language; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Modern Language; Multimedia Communications; Rhetoric; Sociolinguistics; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

Planning, developing, and assessing sustainable mobile strategies is a challenge that many non-profit organizations face as they build mobile sites, native applications, and mobile experiences with community members. Through interviews with community organization leaders (n=3), community members (n=11), and a survey of a non-profit organization's members (n=266) in the southern Ohio region, this project, Designing Mobile User Experiences for Community Engagement, extends mobile literacy scholarship within the field regarding community-based work and, more recently, mobile communication literacies. Seeking to fill a gap in writing studies research concerning mobile communication strategy in non-profit organizations, this study's research questions include: (1) How do community organizations use mobile technologies and mobile communication practices for community engagement?; (2) What does the mobile technology and strategy development process look like in community organizations? (3) How do community members and leaders define the affordances of mobile technologies?; (4) What purpose do mobile technologies serve in community engagement?; (5) What are the challenges and benefits of using mobile technologies for community engagement purposes? Findings show participants encountered major breakdowns in motivation in using the application regarding three key areas: pertinence, personalization, and duplication of content, rather than issues that would be typically defined as breakdowns in ease of use. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a methodological framework based in activity theory and space as practiced place for studying mobile communication and mobile user experience that highlights identifying motivations and breakdowns that exist across communication ecologies and offers key strategies and practices for building, using, and developing mobile communications for community engagement.

Committee: W. Simmons PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2018, English

As our digital environments—in their inhabitants, communities, and cultures—have evolved, harassment, unfortunately, has become the status quo on the internet (Duggan, 2014 & 2017; Jane, 2014b). Harassment is an issue that disproportionately affects women, particularly women of color (Citron, 2014; Mantilla, 2015), LGBTQIA+ women (Herring et al., 2002; Warzel, 2016), and women who engage in social justice, civil rights, and feminist discourses (Cole, 2015; Davies, 2015; Jane, 2014a). Whitney Phillips (2015) notes that it's politically significant to pay attention to issues of online harassment because this kind of invective calls “attention to dominant cultural mores” (p. 7). Keeping our finger on the pulse of such attitudes is imperative to understand who is excluded from digital publics and how these exclusions perpetuate racism and sexism to “preserve the internet as a space free of politics and thus free of challenge to white masculine heterosexual hegemony” (Higgin, 2013, n.p.). While rhetoric and writing as a field has a long history of examining myriad exclusionary practices that occur in public discourses, we still have much work to do in understanding how online harassment, particularly that which is gendered, manifests in digital publics and to what rhetorical effect. In this dissertation, I critically examine how harassment is enabled and circulated by digital platforms as well as the effects it has on people, online cultures, and social media design and policy. I outline a feminist theory of what I call “volatile visibility,” the correlation between a woman's circulation online and the amount of harassment she experiences. To document and analyze the effects of volatile visibility, I conducted a survey and in-depth interviews with women who have experienced severe forms of online harassment. Their stories reveal how online harassment works to maintain existing cultural boundaries that exclude women from public discourses. Therefore, I argue online har (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jason Palmeri (Advisor); Tim Lockridge (Committee Member); Michele Simmons (Committee Member); Lisa Weems (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; 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, Miami University, 2017, English

This project examines how writers compose research texts, such as reports, infographics, digital content—so that they might circulate. Specifically, I study a group of writers at The Women's Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation (TWF) and their writing processes for their research texts, texts they write both to inform audiences and to motivate those same audiences to share and discuss the texts with others. TWF researches and distributes information on the unique socio-economic challenges women in Cincinnati face. They strive to change the local conversation about socio-economic issues so that everyone from citizens to businesses leaders to local politicians understand the distinct challenges that women face. They want to inform Cincinnatians about these issues and equip them to engage in discussions with others about these issues. Studying TWF's efforts to get their research texts discussed so as to change local conversations affords the opportunity to study how professional writers compose texts both to inform and to circulate. More specifically, it enables an examination of the ways writers compose amidst circulation, both its possibilities to expand conversations and its limitations. Additionally, it enables me to articulate specific strategies that other professional writers can draw upon in their efforts to compose texts for similar public engagements and circulation. To study TWF, I use a Circulation Studies methodology and corresponding methods to perform a multi-part case study of their strategies for a few representative research texts. I first outline the local conversation that TWF works to change, establishing the narrow constraints that influence what texts and information circulate. From there, I study TWF's understanding of that local conversation, particularly its narrow perspective on local social and economic issues. I next present how TWF incorporate that understanding into their research texts—infographics, reports, presentations, digi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michele Simmons Dr (Committee Co-Chair); Jason Palmeri Dr (Committee Co-Chair); Tim Lockridge Dr (Committee Member); James Porter Dr (Committee Member); Glenn Platt Dr (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Composition; Gender; Mass Communications; Public Policy; Rhetoric; Technical Communication; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2017, Communication Studies (Communication)

In this dissertation, I examined how the capabilities of networked digital platforms enable and constrain women as public communicators. Specifically, I studied how female food bloggers can selectively embrace or reject norms of domesticity in order to further their brand and increase their digital sphere of influence (and what influence those tactics have on their audience). After a critical textual analysis of 15 women-authored food blogs and a representative subset of in-depth qualitative interviews, informed by both traditional rhetorical and mass media theories, this project aims to emphasize and strengthen the connections between traditional rhetorical studies and the burgeoning field of social media studies. Three major findings emerged during the course of this research. I discovered that bloggers use the structural capacities of their websites (including hyperlinks and site archives) to create a similar guided reading experience for a variety of visitors; the capabilities of these digital rhetorical platforms alter the processes of rhetoric, particularly invention, arrangement, and Kairos. Bloggers also express some tension between their roles as self-employed businesswomen and the public perception of women who spend the majority of their time in a home kitchen. Finally, I end this study with an exploration on how bloggers use their websites to rhetorically provoke a parasocial relationship with their readers.

Committee: Christina Beck PhD (Advisor); Stephanie Tikkanen PhD (Committee Member); Michael Butterworth PhD (Committee Member); Julie White PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Gender; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing​, University of Findlay, 2017, English

Since the advent of digital composing methods, scholars of first-year writing have produced research exploring the implications of digital writing instruction for writing professionals and students. However, despite extensive consideration of how digital writing instruction may perpetuate societal inequalities, little scholarship has explored how the government's digital surveillance of citizens may jeopardize writing studies' understanding of human agency and its mission to preserve student agency even as students interact with increasingly complex, networked digital interfaces. In the following thesis, I address this gap by examining available information regarding the NSA's surveillance of web users and the role web companies such as Microsoft play in such surveillance. Furthermore, I review composition studies scholarship that examines the implications of the digital interface for writing instruction, scholarship that has recently grown concerned with the potential for the government to exploit networked digital interfaces as a means of surveilling users. I suggest that Cynthia Selfe's argument to writing professionals to pay attention to their technology use reinscribes a democratic humanist vision of agency. Furthermore, I suggest that the correlation of paying attention with increased agency limits scholars' understanding of the insidious, secretive nature of government surveillance as an alien object that resists understanding. Ultimately, I present alien phenomenology as an alternative theoretical lens through which scholars may pay attention to government surveillance without assuming that doing so will increase the agency of writing professionals or students. Finally, I suggest that by paying attention to government surveillance through the lens of alien phenomenology, scholars may consider the possibility that agency is not a sustainable category as writing professionals and students engage with networked digital interfaces implicated in government surve (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christine Denecker PhD (Committee Chair); Ronald Tulley PhD (Committee Member); Megan Adams PhD (Committee Member); Christine Tulley PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Composition; Educational Technology; Higher Education; Information Technology; Legal Studies; Literacy; Mass Communications; Multimedia Communications; Pedagogy; Philosophy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Technology; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

First-year composition pedagogy and course communication (especially as implicitly endorsed by institutionally presented means) is often limiting in modes and modalities, which juxtaposes vibrant composing practices in the daily lives of students. Additionally, writing program requirements tend to value primarily alphabetic texts despite multimodal composing's empirically-supported benefits to students. Many in the General Studies Writing program at Bowling Green State University (a sequence of Academic Composition courses) are also enjoying the affordances of Web 2.0 (an umbrella term for digitally connected platforms including file sharing, video and audio conferencing/commenting, and social networking) while creating ePortfolios. My dissertation takes advantage of this rich learning opportunity given the field's call for published teacher research on digital pedagogy. Based in technofeminism, phenomenology, and grounded theory, this project reveals quantitative and qualitative data from digital surveys and interviews on the practices and preferences surrounding Web 2.0 in GSW. Voicing these likes is part of an ongoing thread on digital composition scholarship and teaching. This project provides examples, ideas, and activities showing how Web 2.0 can explicitly support GSW learning outcomes, university writing program goals, BGSU missions, state regulations such as the Ohio Transfer Module (OTM), and federal right to privacy.

Committee: Kris Blair Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Lee Nickoson Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Sue Carter Wood Dr. (Committee Member); Ernesto Delgado Dr. (Other) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

"Fat Cyborgs: Body Positive Activism, Shifting Rhetorics and Identity Politics in the Fatosphere" is a project that illuminates how activist groups intersect technology with their activism. I observe and investigate the ways that Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size (HAES) supporters and allies build and sustain an activist community online. I do this in order to understand how fat activists negotiate identity and the body online, a space often considered sans corpus. This project involves examining and extrapolating activists' literate and rhetorical practices for creating and sharing knowledge. I am most interested in understanding the ways in which fat activists use the Fatosphere to develop alternatives to oppressive and discriminatory discourses. I explore the issues that are raised by the FA movement, particularly in how FA and HAES takes shape in a subversive way in an online environment. In doing so, I develop a critical skill-set to talk about and negotiate the body and its relationship with technology, and in particular, the digital, personal/political heterotopias and affect more positive discourse.

Committee: Kristine Blair (Advisor); Sue Carter-Wood (Committee Co-Chair); Lee Nickoson (Committee Member); Michael Arrigo (Other) Subjects: Rhetoric; Social Research; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2016, English

From prompts to share, update, and retweet, social media platforms increasingly insist that creating widespread circulation is the operative goal for networked writing. In response, researchers from multiple disciplines have investigated digital circulation through a number of lenses (e.g., affect theory, transnational feminism, political economy, public sphere theory, and more). In rhetoric and writing studies, scholars have argued that writing for circulation—i.e., envisioning how one's writing may gain speed, distance, and momentum—should be a prime concern for teachers and researchers of writing (e.g., Gries, 2015; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012). Such work has suggested that circulation is a consequence of rhetorical delivery and, as such, is distinctly about futurity. While a focus on writing for circulation has been productive, I argue that that writing in circulation can be equally productive. Challenging the tendency to position circulation as an exclusive concern for delivery, this project argues that circulation is not just as an end goal for rhetorical activity but also as a viable inventional resource for writers with diverse rhetorical goals. To make this case, I construct a methodology of assemblage to retell stories of tactical rhetorics. Grounded in the cultural notion of metis (an adaptable, embodied, and wily intelligence), the framework of tactical rhetorics seeks to describe embodied practices that pull materials out of circulation, reconfigure them, and redeploy them for new, often political effects. Blending historical inquiry with case-based methods, I assemble an array of stories that include practices of critical imitation, collage, tactical media, remix, digital hijacks, and protest bots. In retelling these stories, I show how tactical approaches are inventive in their attempts to solve problems, effect change, or call out injustice. In the process, my project pushes toward a critical circul (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Porter (Advisor); Heidi McKee (Committee Member); Jason Palmeri (Committee Member); Michele Simmons (Committee Member); James Coyle (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Intellectual Property; Multimedia Communications; Rhetoric