English Doctoral Work

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Carl Sagan's Cosmos: The Rhetorical Construction of Popular Science Mythology
(North Dakota State University, 2013) Sorensen, Karen Jane
Using Carl Sagan's Cosmos as a case study, this dissertation explores the intersection of science with popular culture and builds a new framework for rhetorically analyzing popular science programming. The arguments and research focus on the ways in which popularizing scientific information for the masses can create a type of science fiction rather than merely being a transferal of information. This metamorphosis of fact into fiction occurs as a result of the convergence of three rhetorical concepts, kairos, ethos, and aethos. Kairos is the placement of Cosmos in time. Historical and political elements (including education and entertainment) contribute to a science program's kairos. Ethos is the appeal (or credibility) of the narrator. The audience is receptive to the information presented only if the narrator is able to establish this appeal. Personality traits that are popular outside of stereotypically educational or scientific environments are often used in popular science programs to establish ethos. Aethos is the haunt or the environment created for the program; it lays the groundwork for narrative control. The haunt--which is carefully and purposefully constructed through the use of dramatizations and sensory elements--creates the viewpoint from which an audience examines and evaluates the information or arguments presented. A program's kairos, ethos, and aethos intertwine to determine its potential for attracting and retaining a broad audience. However, these elements carry with them an unintentional side effect. In combination, they create a mythos that can assist in the popularity and longevity of the program but they also carry with them a fictionalizing effect.
Writing (Dirty) New Media: Technorhetorical Opacity, Chimeras, and Dirty Ontology
(North Dakota State University, 2014) Hammer, Steven
Video summarizing Ph.D. dissertation for a non-specialist audience.
Writing (Dirty) New Media: Technorhetorical Opacity, Chimeras, and Dirty Ontology
(North Dakota State University, 2014) Hammer, Steven Reginald
There is little doubt that emerging technologies are changing the way we act, interact, create, and consume. Yet despite increased access to these technologies, consumers of technology too seldom interrogate the politics, subjectivities, and limitations of these technologies and their interfaces. Instead, many consumers approach emerging technologies as objective tools to be consumed, and engage in creative processes uncritically. This disquisition, following the work of Hawisher, Selfe, and Selfe, seeks ways to approach the problem of a “rhetoric of technology” that uncritically praises new technologies by drawing on avant-garde art traditions and object-oriented ontology. I argue that, by following the philosophies and practices of glitch, dirty new media, zaum, dada, circuit-bending, and others, we might approach writing technologies with the intention of critically misusing, manipulating, and revealing to ourselves and audiences the materiality of the media and technologies in use. In combination with these avant-garde practices and philosophies, I draw from object-oriented ontology to argue that we, as new media composers, never simply write on or through our technologies, but that we write in collaboration with them, for they are active and agential coauthors even (and especially) despite their status as nonhuman. I argue for an model that not only levels the ontological playing field between humans and nonhumans, but also one that embraces irregularities and “glitches” as essential features of systems and the actors within those systems. Finally, I provide examples of how to perform these models and philosophies, which I call object-oriented art.
Energetic Space: The Affect of Literature in a Composition Classroom
(North Dakota State University, 2015) Steinmann, Heather Marie
Rhetorical and critical theory have both prescribed and proscribed the way scholars view affect. With the exception of Reader Response Theory, literary and rhetorical theory tend to use a more long-term and permanent frame of reference when addressing the emotional relationship between reader and writer. This disquisition explores a framework where the reader and writer find emotional connection in particular and emergent times and spaces. This work extends the import of Kairos, as a rhetorical figure and theory, to contemporary research and theories like Maria Takolander’s “Energetic Space” and Louise Rosenblatt’s “Aesthetic Reading,” theories that link writer to reader. Rather than returning to the stagnating debate regarding the societal import of literature and its inclusion in or exclusion from university course curriculum, this work will use grounded theory to qualitatively examine students’ affective responses to a novel over a period of 4 years to describe how the emotional relationship between an author and audience can be located and marked in the transformative moment.
Coercively Compromised Authorships: Risk Factors in Spaces of Writing Practice
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Laughlin, Mary Kateri
This dissertation project explores the potential for coercive interactions to shape collaboratively authored, singularly credited textual productions. Building on the work of Composition Studies, which reflects a sustained history of engagement with issues pertaining to coercion (e.g., authority; hierarchy), and grounded by the argument that all authorship constitutes at least some degree of collaboration, the driving inquires of the project explore multiple sites of writing practice to identify factors that may act as doorways for coercive pressure, including worst-case scenarios of coercive collaboration that find an individual facing punitive consequences for a text substantially authored by unacknowledged collaborators. The dissertation ultimately offers a heuristic tool designed for pedagogical use: a framework identifying five risk factors of coercively compromised authorships. These factors include: external stakes; interactions with authority; loss of control; changed relationship with a text; and the erasure of collaborative influences. The rhetorical continuum created by the framework encourages users to see collaborative interactions embedded within texts, and to then strategically consider the potential for coercion situated within them. Ideally, the heuristic and the continuum-like view of coercive risk it creates will foster more nuanced critical evaluation of textual authorship; additionally, explicit attention to coercive risk factors may function as a safeguard against future acts of coercive collaborations.
First-Generation Pedagogy: A Case Study of First-Generation College Students in First-Year Writing
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Jorgenson, Jessica
The purpose of this research was to examine the motivations and attitudes first-generation college students held toward classroom interventions and written assignments. This classroom research took place during one semester in a single English 120 College Composition II class that included fourteen enrolled students with three students self-identifying as first-generation college students. The study was composed of two separate qualitative surveys: a pre-survey and a post-survey and all surveys. The pre-survey was distributed to all fourteen enrolled students during week three of the semester. The post-survey was distributed to all students during the final week of the semester. Based on the findings of this survey, and previous research conducted on first-generation college students, this study argues for three pedagogical interventions that can best engage the needs of first-generation college students. The pedagogical interventions include creating structured peer review groups, creating an empathetic space, or safe space, within the classroom, and demonstrates the importance of teaching genres that open up pathways for an emotional discourse in the classroom. These three pedagogical interventions best benefit first-generation college students, but may also benefit the learning of all students.
Women and the Environment of the Global South: Toward a Postcolonial Ecofeminism
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Jabeen, Neelam
In this study I claim that mainstream ecofeminism is inadequate to translate the experiences of the women of the Third World and propose postcolonial ecofeminism. The study focuses on the ecofeminist assumption of women’s relationship of care and compassion with nature. Through textual examples, I show the complexity of relationships between South-Asian women, and their natural environment, and claim that these relations are based on their material conditions and social status rather than necessarily being that of care and compassion. The study also highlights the acute nature of women-nature connection in the South-Asian societies where women are treated as land: their bodies are used to reproduce, and at times leased out to earn sustenance through prostitution. I have selected multiple South-Asian texts (fiction). Chemmeen, Village by the Sea, The Folded Earth, and The Hungry Tide are used to shed light on the role of their respective authors in developing postcolonial ecofeminism. Chemmeen, Nectar in a Sieve and Village by the Sea are analyzed to highlight the practices of the characters, male and female, which appear to be disruptive and harmful for their natural environment that sustains them. Then I use alternative analysis that I term as postcolonial ecofeminist perspective, to interpret the practices of the characters, while considering the livelihood strategies of these characters. I provide textual examples from Nectar in a Sieve and Water to support my claim that in the presented societies, women’s bodies are not just symbolically connected to land but are actually treated as land in the form of prostitution. I also analyze Madwoman of Jogare as a counter example that epitomizes mainstream ecofeminism, and also helps to complicate the notion of embodiment. The study also provides pedagogical implications of postcolonial ecofeminism by providing a sample reading of Fire on the Mountain. Besides challenging mainstream ecofeminism, all the discussed texts highlight the need for a revised ecofeminism that encompasses the postcolonial perspective. The study also shows the rhetorical significance of such texts that may enable students in the classroom to become active members of the society who want to bring change.
The Trial of Alice Clifton: Judicial Catharsis in Institutional Bias
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Zaugg, Gary
This is a critical introduction and rhetorical analysis of a moment of criminal crisis at a time of profound institutional bias: the 1787 infanticide trial of a young Philadelphia slave and rape victim named Alice Clifton. A dramatistic view of the case—in the tradition of Kenneth Burke—reveals the law’s inherent symbolic action in shaping social reality and its cathartic potential when resolving conflict and judging conduct. Judicial catharsis—the official apparatus for channeling the manifold cathartic pathways that converge upon a criminal crisis—is the procedural and ritualistic dramatism of the law. It provides the serial victimage necessary to feed the insatiable appetite of symbolicity’s categorical guilt. Accused persons stand for, or stand in for, generalized fears and tensions on the assumption that labeling and punishing them somehow remediates past events or external conditions. In that sense, the community treats criminals for its own benefit. Whether convicting or acquitting, punishing or pardoning, acting upon a defendant tends to purify the group. But ritual-induced unity is more of a temporary diversion of collective attention than a persistent change in collective attitudes or social conditions. Institutional bias—such as slavery or disparate treatment of unwed mothers—politicizes judicial catharsis by creating underlying circumstantial guilt that cannot be directly discharged through criminal adjudication. Nor is catharsis through judgment the same thing as justice; the ritualistic sacrifice of a scapegoat can bring a false sense of redemption to the community by masking bias and social division. Thus, the rhetoric of the law is compensatory, not curative—a perpetual cleansing of what can never be made clean. In the case of Alice Clifton, the law required a criminal scapegoat and the privileged hierarchy required a political scapegoat. To serve as both, the respective burdens had to be reshaped to match the scapegoat’s back. By condemning and then pardoning—symbolically taking her to the edge of death and then restoring her to life—the process hybridized the resolution, staking claim to the awesome power of justice and mercy to reaffirm the existing social order.
‘Dear Children, Jacob and Amalie’: A Rhetorical Analysis of Letters from Russia to a Volga German Migrant Couple in the American Midwest
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Schell, Tatjana
This dissertation analyzes a collection of personal letters sent to German-speaking migrants from Russia in the American Midwest by their relatives in southern Russia. The letters can be divided into two groups: the first one includes the ones written in 1913-1914, soon after the couple’s immigration to the United States, while the second one consists of the letters from the 1920s and the 1930s. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the letters from a rhetorical perspective, while the grounded theory and my personal and cultural knowledge about the ethnic Germans in Russia provided an additional help with analyzing the letters and filling in contextual “gaps.” After coding the letters, I examine the ways their rhetoric was influenced by the rhetorical situation, and also the ways various dominant “themes” were communicated by the letter-writers. Also, because some of the letters were sent during a famine that affected the region and the community they came from, many letters included pleas for help from America. I am interested in how these requests for help were rhetorically represented and, therefore, focus on analyzing the theme of “crisis” in these texts. My analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the letter-writing genre and cultural rhetorics by offering a detailed discussion about the letters as rhetorical texts, the people, who produced them, and the constraints that influenced the letter-writers. By using grounded theory to guide my coding process, I was able tailor this qualitative research method for the needs of my project. By using rhetorical theory as a vehicle, I analyze the stories told through the letters and explore how these historical artifacts go beyond simply fulfilling the function of maintaining personal communication between the writers and readers and provide a rare ”unofficial” insight into a tumultuous period of Russian history in the early 20th century. Furthermore, my dissertation informs the discussion about the value of archival research and the use of archival artifacts in studying rhetoric and composition.
Reclaiming the Place of Translation in English Composition and Technical Communication: Toward Hospitable Writing
(North Dakota State University, 2016) Verzella, Massimo
The defining characteristic of a pedagogy informed by philosophical cosmopolitanism is a focus on the dialogic imagination: the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual experience which incites us to interrogate common sense assumptions on culture, language, and identity, and combine contradictory certainties in an effort to think in terms of inclusive oppositions while rejecting the logic of exclusive oppositions. One of the goals of the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP), an educational network of bilateral writing-translation projects that establishes links between students in different countries, is to invite students to mediate between languages, cultures, and rhetorical traditions with the goal of transcending differences and find common ground. Students who participate to TAPP understand what is at stake when they write for a global audience by cultivating an attitude of openness that invites hospitable communication practices. The goal of the explorative study illustrated in the second part of the dissertation is to identify regularities of translation strategies in the genre of technical instructions. The dataset consists of a corpus of 40 texts compiled by pairing up 20 instructions written in English by students majoring in different areas of engineering in an American university and their translations into Italian (19,046 words), completed by students majoring in English in an Italian university. The research questions are: With reference to the translation strategies explicitation, implicitation, generalization, and particularization, what evidence is there of uniformity of practice in the translation of instructions from English into Italian? What are the most typical causes of zero shifts? Why do translators resort to rhetorical shifts? Results show that nonprofessional translators tend to resort more to implicitation than explicitation, and more to particularization than generalization. Due to the limited size of the corpus, it was impossible to identify typical causes for zero shifts, but further studies should focus on how writers can facilitate translation by using the topic/comment structure. Finally, translators resort to rhetorical shifts for reasons that have to do with cultural appropriateness in the target locale. The most common type of rhetorical shifts are context-related shifts in emphasis.
Natural Flavors: Rhetorical Stories of Food Labels
(North Dakota State University, 2017) West, Rebecca
What is in our food? What can food labels tell us about what is in our food? This dissertation applies rhetoric in the everyday human act of reading food labels and making decisions about what to eat based on those labels. Rhetoric is continually operating from the beginning of the food manufacturing process, to designing and writing food labels and packaging, and finally to the consumer reading the label in the store. “Natural flavors” is an ingredient listing that appears more frequently on food labels, especially in the organic and natural foods industries. I collected food labels and used qualitative methods as I rendered labels textually into Word documents in order to see the discursive elements of food labels away from the sometimes elaborate graphic design. I found that food labels contained three elements: the story, the reality, and the credibility. The story of the food label lures the consumer into an emotional response in either purchasing the food item or putting it back on the shelf. The reality of the label is in the ingredients list, or what is actually in that food item. The credibility is the availability of the manufacture in connecting with the consumer and to what extent they have transparency. By comparing these three elements on a textual page, we can see if there is truth and label equivalence between them, with “natural flavors” as a central component when it appears in the ingredients list. To the extent that there is or is not equivalence is explored through qualitative rhetorical analysis and briefly discussed by engaging Brummett’s rhetorical homologies.
In this Together: Consubstantial Ethos in Writing in the Sciences Classrooms
(North Dakota State University, 2017) Atwell, Justin Michael
“In This Together: Consubstantial Ethos in Writing in the Sciences Classrooms” explores the ethos of instructors tasked with instructing STEM students how to write in the sciences. Building on the importance of ethos in education and Dale Sullivan’s foregrounding of the importance of consubstantial ethos in building effective communicative acts, this study sought to determine how student and instructor perceptions of ethos were similar and dissimilar to determine if there was a sense that we were truly “in this together” as Sullivan claims is necessary. For this mixed-methods study, I distributed surveys to students as they entered and exited the course. Student surveys inquired about attitudes and beliefs about previous English courses, the trajectory of the course, the overall worth of English courses, and their roles within the course. Instructor surveys, in turn, asked mirrored questions to see how instructors perceived students’ attitudes and beliefs towards the course, the practice of writing, and WAC/WID and English courses more broadly. Encouragingly, the majority of students reported seeing a value to English courses, but this worth was primarily seen as emerging from two components: 1) the content of the course and 2) student perceptions of the instructor—both, this project argues, are closely tied to ethos. As such, the final two chapters of the project suggest adjustments to foster optimal ethos for Writing in the Sciences courses by introducing more direct teaching of Writing Studies theory in such courses and implementing assignments such as the Forum Analysis and Popular Discourse Report that encourage students to critically analyze the work of experts writing in their fields.
Crowdfunding for a Cause: Rhetorically Oriented Action Research with Christian Organizations
(North Dakota State University, 2018) Copeland, Adam J.
When it comes to fundraising, many congregations and faith-related organizations struggle to keep up in the competitive charitable giving landscape. In recent years, online crowdfunding platforms (e.g. Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo) have grown to a multi-billion-dollar industry, supporting fundraisers for diverse causes both charitable and for-profit. Does crowdfunding offer faith-related organizations potentially valuable opportunities for fundraising? If so, how should faith-related non-profit organizations best ask for money online? To engage these questions, I employed a participatory action research framework to accompany, coach, and learn with organizations launching crowdfunding campaigns. This partnership resulted in meaningful engagement with nine would-be crowdfunders. Three of these organizations eventually launched crowdfunding campaigns. Though none reached their goal, crowdfunders secured over $36,000 for their organizations’ aims. Significantly, all campaigners reported positive mission-related benefits in addition to funds raised. I analyzed data using a cross-case replication study design with three individual case write-ups. Additionally, I rhetorically examined the crowdfunding pages themselves seeking to understand how crowdfunders engaged the multimodal possibilities of the genre. Theories engaged include multimodal rhetoric, audience awareness, genre theory, and Christian giving rhetoric. This project found that crowdfunding pages serve as a place for compact, powerful invitations to give. Yet, in their digital design template and scope of projects, crowdfunding methods also limit fundraisers’ rhetorical choices. Existing scholarship from multiple fields has sought to discover factors related to crowdfunding success and failure. What has not been considered sufficiently, however, is the process potential crowdfunders go through as they discern whether to launch a campaign, how they imagine the audience of a possible campaign, and how the rhetoric of the resulting crowdfunding pages may be shaped by the expectations of the genre. My study identified new terminology to describe rhetorical phenomena of the campaigns including hidden friction, the audience paradox, discrepant rhetoric, as well as visual aids such as an explanatory action matrix. The action research methodology of the study brings the work of crowdfunders, previously behind the scenes, to the forefront. Ultimately, it shows that while the aims of the crowdfunders may be multiple, and even in conflict, crowdfunders can reap rewards beyond money alone.
Composing Comments for Online Students : A Study of Faculty Feedback on Writing in Multidisciplinary Contexts
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Neuteboom, Robert Kimball
In this dissertation, I present findings from a qualitative research project designed to articulate practitioner-teachers’ beliefs about writing and their role in providing feedback on student writing in online courses. To analyze the qualities of these beliefs, I interviewed eight full-time and part-time teachers from multiple disciplines teaching at the same private career-based college. Participants primarily defined writing as grammar and described their feedback intervention as dependent on tools, such as rubrics and web-based grammar software, to ensure students write professionally. Professionalism was a significant concern for participants, many of whom considered preserving the integrity of their discipline and preparing students for its effective deployment as their most important role as teachers. With this goal at the forefront of their efforts, participants generally apply writing as a tool for and sign of professionalism. My findings suggest that participants see professionalism relative to writing as work ethic, formality, practicality, and arrival. These categories characterize what participants prioritize in terms of providing feedback. A limitation of this study is that the participant pool was relatively small and participants all taught at the same institution, with specific standardization requirements influencing how participants perceive the writing task. That said, because the study is so intensely focused, its results may be relevant and generalizable to the perceptions of practitioner-teachers at many institutions.
Toward a More Visually Literate Writing Classroom: An Analysis of Visual Communication Pedagogy and Practices
(North Dakota State University, 2019) Zufelt, Darren Allan
“Toward a More Visually Literate Writing Classroom: An Analysis of Visual Communication Pedagogy and Practices” examines the teaching of visual communication in undergraduate professional and technical communication courses. Through an analysis of scholarship, textbooks, I argue that a situated visual communication pedagogy that integrates both analysis and reflection throughout the visual production and design process can better allow students to understand the ways in which the visual participates within larger social and cultural contexts. This understanding helps students develop abilities to potentially transform visual discourses emphasizing that all visual documents and texts, including the ones they produce, participate in shaping the ways in which meaning is made. By integrating visual communication and design into civic engagement pedagogies in the professional and technical communication classroom, instructors and students can begin to interrogate the view that professional and technical communication is a neutral, objective practice concerned only with prescriptive adherence to forms, conventions, workplace efficiency, and corporate success. Thus, in addition to helping students develop as communicators and thinkers, integrating visual communication into service-learning and throughout the duration of a course allows students to explore the civic dimensions of professional and technical communication, situating them as engaged designers and active members of their communities.
Advancing Gender Equity in STEM: Antenarratives and Feminist Leadership Practices in Policy Work
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Petts, Ashleigh Ryann
While the field technical and professional communication (TPC) has long been concerned with workplace writing and policy writing, few studies have addressed the process of policy writing within an academic context. Using antenarrative and apparent feminism methodologies, this dissertation explores the policy writing process and feminist leadership practices of the DESIGN Committee, a group of women academics who worked to propose new policy to address gender inequity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields for faculty working in their statewide educational system (SES). Employing methods of observation, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection over a period of three years, the researcher sought to answer two research questions: What does the process of policy writing look like for the DESIGN Committee? In what ways do feminist leadership practices, as performed by the committee leader and other committee members, influence the work of the DESIGN Committee? Through the creation of an antenarrative of the DESIGN Committee’s policy work, three important threads stand out: proximity, transparency, and accountability. These threads provide an alternative to the dominant narrative of the committee’s work. In addition, the committee leader’s use of feminist leadership practices, such as creating community, encouraging self-empowerment, and fostering collaboration, impacted the efficiency of the policy writing process. These results point to important factors for future policy writers to consider when composing policy to address diversity, equity, and inclusion or when employing feminist leadership practices.
Because Comics: Comics Literacy and Multimodal Pedagogy
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Gomes, Shane Anthony
How and what we teach in the post-secondary English classroom has tremendous power, both regarding individual students and larger contexts in which they function. As post-secondary instructors, our pedagogical approach to our subjects can impact our student’s abilities and experiences directly through interactions with texts, and also impact our specific institutions, our academic disciplines, and larger social structures. This project will propose what is best termed a disruptive pedagogy, founded in comics literacy, and a primary goal is to effect change in the classroom and therefore in our students’ later social and professional contexts. Increasingly, what we teach in English classrooms is moving towards a pedagogy of multimodality that reflects the contexts of our students outside of the classroom. Multimodal researchers Jennifer Rowsell and Eryn Decoste state that “To expand notions of composition, there is a need to not only introduce other modes such as visuals, sounds and interactive modes, but also develop frameworks, activities and lesson ideas to actually teach other modes of representation and expression” (246-247). Yet, as they mention, this isn’t always easy or even possible. But an additional issue is that multimodality can elide the discussion of narrative, one of the key affordances of the English classroom. Further, much emphasis in multimodal pedagogies is on technology, which access to the needed technology is not universal. Focusing education tactics in the context of internet enabled classrooms will necessarily leave some populations behind. To address these two issues, this project works to propose a multimodal pedagogy that uses comics as an ideal narrative multimodal medium. By fitting comics into the framework of multimodal education in post-secondary classrooms, this dissertation demonstrates the potential of the medium. Therefore, the focus of this project is on building a multimodal pedagogy for comics. By focusing on the methods by which comics create, this dissertation proposes a formalized way to use them as a foundation of a pedagogy that builds student’s multimodal literacy. A standard for deploying these texts has yet to calcify, meaning that current research can impact multimodal teaching substantially in the future.
Social Dialect Features of Military Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of Fargo Veterans
(North Dakota State University, 2020) Albright, Anthony J.
This mixed-methods study examines the potential existence of a military dialect separate from regional or social dialects experienced by civilians. In particular, how similar is the military-related storytelling lexicon of veterans in the Fargo-Moorhead area to the lexicon set forth in training bases and training manuals used by the U.S. military? The lexicon used by veterans in storytelling can sometimes seem opaque to an audience. It is typically dense with meaning borne by a few coded words. These words carry a contextual burden that can be better understood by an appeal to the dialect from which they were borne. In order to disentangle the veteran way of speaking from other overlapping and intersecting social and regional dialects that make up a subject’s typical speech, guided conversation and word-matching exercises were used to isolate lexicon that was typical to the military experience. The resulting interview transcripts were analyzed in comparison to military training manuals to arrive at a percentage of military-specific terms used in the guided conversation and a percentage of general knowledge military terms retained in the word-matching measure. The resulting 1.85% of military-specific terms and phrases used by participants in guided conversations and 61% retention of military-specific term knowledge was used to show that the military dialect not only exists but persists in the repertoire of veteran participants. As the majority of those who work with veterans are not veterans themselves, these percentages represent a significant barrier to understanding veteran storytelling. This barrier hinders the successful reintegration and mental health of veterans who return to their communities without knowing how to meaningfully express their stories in their existing support networks.
A Rhetorical Approach to Human Remains Display in Museum Collections: An Ecotriangle of Publics, Objects, and Place
(North Dakota State University, 2021) Watts, Amanda Christian
This research approaches archaeological human remains in museum collections from a rhetorical perspective. Instead of joining the body of scholarship in museum studies that focuses on the process of curatorial interpretation, this project applies public memory studies to explore what happens to curatorial interpretation when it goes out into the world and is taken up in public circulated discourse. With a focus on publics, the moment of knowledge construction when visitors approach a display of human remains in a museum is captured and analyzed through the lenses of new materialism, rhetoric in situ, and public memory studies. Each lens represents the chosen approach to each of the three elements that converge at the moment of knowledge construction – publics, objects, and place – which are grouped together as a triangle of interrelated dynamics all working in a situationally-contingent rhetorical ecology of other factors and influences. Thus, the dynamic inseparable trio of publics, objects, and place are coined the “ecotriangle.” For museum studies, rhetoric’s foundational work can provide critical perspective into the nature of communication and meaning-making that happens when publics meet human remains in a museum space. In order to explore the ecotriangular relationship of publics, objects, and place with an interdisciplinary approach, this project begins by interrogating the implicit assumptions within the defitions of terms like “public” and “object” then develops collaborative definitions from the scholarship in rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies. The particular case of human remains challenges most scholarships’ definitions of object. Yet as this research reveals, human remains as case study help develop and refine the approach to objects, materiality, interpretation, and museum display when challenged to inclusively frame such a case instead of treat human remains as an exception or outlier to scholarship on objects. Exploring the ecotriangle as a heuristic model for conceptualization of interrelational dynamics in knowledge construction extends current scholarship in rhetoric, especially rhetoric in situ and rhetorical ecology, and also reinforces existing interdisciplinary bridges between the fields of rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies.
Rhetorical Agency in Digital Storytelling: New Americans' Voices in the Chthulucene
(North Dakota State University, 2021) Belmihoub, Ibtissem
This study explores New American (refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers) storytelling and agency through Donna Haraway’s concepts of the Chthulucene (pronounced thulusene), making kin, and staying with the trouble. Haraway’s framework positions this study in the Chthulucene era, where humans recognize that solving global issues requires making connections and taking collaborative action. This study demonstrates how New Americans can create counter-narratives through Digital Storytelling (DST) in the Chthulucene. An analysis of ten New American participants’ DST processes and story choices is provided. This research responds to three main questions: How do New Americans shape their digital stories through specific choices and how do these choices display agency? What do their storytelling processes reveal about agency through their rhetorical and linguistic choices? Finally, how do New Americans display their agency in multimodal storytelling? Participatory Action Research (PAR) is used to frame the research questions. Alongside the collaborative, flexible, and adaptable nature of PAR, the Story Center’s Digital Storytelling (DST) model was selected as the appropriate approach to facilitate DST workshops for New American participants. Three separate workshops included ten New American participants from different backgrounds. Approaches such as focus groups, story workshop reflections, and individual interviews were used to respond to the research questions. After transcribing focus groups and individual interviews, all data was coded using Grounded Theory. The findings suggest that participants make storytelling process, rhetorical, linguistic, and multimodal story choices by being intentional in using their original voice and agency as counter-narrators. Participants’ storytelling process choices indicate that past storytelling constricted their agency while DST provided an opportunity for their agency to be visible. Furthermore, participants’ rhetorical choices demonstrate their audience and situational awareness. In addition, linguistic choices illustrate that participants’ understanding and use of English demonstrates translingual practices. Moreover, multimodal story choices display their innovation and commitment to personal intentional storytelling. Additionally, participants' experiences in storytelling and how they implement their agency varies by individual. This study demonstrates what doing research and practicing pedagogy that operates in the Chthulucene might look like for Rhetoric and Writing Studies to remain relevant.

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