Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, Communication Studies (Communication)

During the Colombian armed conflict, the tossing of corpses and limbs into the rivers became a common strategy used by perpetrators of enforced disappearance to erase evidence. However, by the mid-1980s, the inhabitants of Puerto Berrio, a small town located on the Magdalena River banks, began to pull out the cadavers floating down the river. The villagers buried them in the town´s cemetery as NN (which means “no name,” from the Latin nomen nescio), decorated the graves, and began to build religious bonds based on reciprocity and gratitude. This dissertation analyzes the narratives by which people in Puerto Berrio have rhetorically constituted the Magdalena River as a space of disappearance and La Dolorosa Cemetery as a space of re-appearance. I coined the term rhetorics of adoption of unidentified bodies to account for this relationship and the meanings by which corpses were invested. Whereas the river emerged as a space used by perpetrators to carry out the disappearance of unwanted bodies, the cemetery became a space to resist this crime and reinscribe the nameless corpses into the social and religious life of the community as subjects of devotion. Unique to this study is the analysis of two complementary spaces existing and converging within the same ecology.

Committee: Roger Aden Dr. (Committee Member); Black Laura Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2018, Sociology

This thesis argues that Peru's state-led transitional justice processes have obscured the complexities of the conflict in dominant state narratives. It draws upon secondary literature as well as field research conducted in Peru during the summer of 2017, including participant observation, interviews, and site documentation collection. These narratives assert the state as a defender of democracy and all subversive groups as terrorists and the primary aggressors of violence. These narratives extend to create a dichotomy of victims and perpetrators that coalesces around a discourse on innocence. This thesis focuses on human rights workers' subversion of hegemonic narratives of violence through their efforts for truth, memory, and justice in the creation of a collective memory that reflects the experiences of all victims. Human rights workers' mobilization is focused on the search for the disappeared with forensic investigation taking prominence in the production of truth, memory, and justice.

Committee: Haley Duschinski Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Sociology