1,720,974 research outputs found
How Transracial Adoptees Use Memoirs to Change Adoption Narratives
No full textTransracial adoptees are a salient population in the United States. Social scientific researchers have looked at communicative barriers and social stigma this group may face when navigating their complex intersectional identity. However, rhetorical scholars have not given this group the same attention. Previous rhetorical research indicates that autobiography can be a beneficial tool to advocate for social justice. Transracial adoptee memoirs provide rich experiential narratives that rhetorical scholars should attend to. To consider how transracial adoptees rhetorically construct identity through memoir authorship and how memoirs can shift problematic conversations about transracial adoption in the United States, this study examines two texts: Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption by Susan Devan Harness and All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung. Utilizing Critical Race Theory, and branch theories Tribal Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Race Theory, rhetorical analysis of the texts uncovered themes pertinent to how the authors design their texts as counterstories. These counterstories are a stage in which the authors reclaim and nuance their identities, as well as resist harmful narratives and structures surrounding transracial adoption. The texts function to constrain audience members from promulgating essentializing discourses about transracial adoptees with impunity. The findings amplify the importance for transracial adoptee voices to be centered within social and legal spheres to challenge problematic ideologies on family and race and change policy within the United States
RHETORIC OF THE FEMINIST KILLJOY: AN ANALYSIS OF BAYLOR UNIVERSITY’S TITLE IX DISCOURSE
Full text linkIn October of 2016, Baylor University’s first Title IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, publicly resigned. She alleged that Baylor had failed to provide her with necessary resources to investigate sexual assault on campus and that she was facing retaliation from university administrators for doing her job. In the following months, Crawford and Baylor each participated in national interviews as well as made statements to the press in their attempts to control the public narrative concerning her resignation. This thesis adopts Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy as a rhetorical trope and conducts a feminist rhetorical analysis of the public discourse relating to, first, Crawford’s complaint about her lack of resources, and second, Crawford’s resignation and the rationale behind it. I argue that the figure of the killjoy emerges throughout the rhetoric of Baylor University, Crawford’s lawyer, and Crawford herself, as each actor positions Crawford as somehow impeding the university’s happiness. Crawford’s and her lawyer’s rhetoric situate her complaint and resignation as both driven by her need to speak out against inequality, a narrative which evokes the figure of the killjoy. The killjoy emerges in Baylor’s discourse in other ways though, as they position Crawford’s actions as motivated by her own emotional and professional dissatisfaction, therefore drawing on themes of the killjoy as sensationalist. This analysis not only highlights the potential for the killjoy as a rhetorical trope, but also reveals the complicated nature of Title IX work and discourses surrounding sexual violence
Don't give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses: The Trump administration, public charge, and rhetorical constructions of citizenship
No full textIn August 2019, President Donald Trump and his administration announced a rule that restricted immigrants’ access to visas if they used a variety of social programs, including: Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Supplemental Security Income, among numerous others. Expanding the definition of public charge from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the Trump administration’s change risked the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of immigrants in the United States. This thesis examines the way that Trump administration publicly defended the public charge rule, paying particular attention to the values that were embedded in the Trump administration’s justifications. Using a variety of rhetorical methods, including cluster analysis, God terms and constitutive rhetoric, I argue that the Trump administration’s defenses of the public charge rule reflected, and simultaneously constituted, a market fundamentalist conception of citizenship that necessitated an erosion of inclusive immigration policy and discourse. Furthermore, I argue that in response to objections about the negative consequences of the public charge rule, the Trump administration relied on arguments about administrative and congressional intent to strategically maneuver from difficult rhetorical challenges. This analysis highlights potential rhetorical methods for decoding value-laden discourse and reveals the ways that market fundamentalism and citizenship operate as powerful social and discursive forces
Get in to Get Out: Peele-ian Horror and Consciousness-Raising
Full text linkOne area that has not fully been explored in terms of its ability to engage in Black feminist consciousness-raising (CR) is the horror film genre. This project examines Jordan Peele’s 2017 Black horror film Get Out, arguing that this film engages in Black feminist CR by overtly and covertly addressing systemic racial oppression, white privilege, and the falseness of American post-raciality. I rhetorically analyze Get Out through the lens of Black feminist CR, which places an emphasis on collective experiential knowledge and combating intersectional oppressions while holding white/privileged participants accountable for their own complicity in perpetuating oppressive systemic racism. Ultimately, I argue that Peele’s goal in writing, producing, and directing Get Out was to raise the consciousness of white/privileged audiences by forcing them to take note of systemic racism’s presence in the present day, as well as recognize their complicity in keeping it intact
Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy, 2nd edition
No full textThis book was made possible by a grant provided by the University of Kansas Libraries with a contribution by the University of Kansas Student Senate. The first edition of this work is available in KU ScholarWorks at https://hdl.handle.net/1808/29446 ."Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy" is a contemporary, interdisciplinary public speaking textbook that fuses rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, and performance to offer an up-to-date resource for students. With a focus on advocacy, this textbook invites students to consider public speaking as a political, purposeful form of information-sharing
Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy
Full text linkThis is the first edition of this textbook. The revised and updated second edition is available at https://hdl.handle.net/1808/35488 .
This project was made possible by a grant from KU Libraries’ Parent’s Campaign with support from the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright and the Open Educational Resources Working Group in the University of Kansas Libraries, with a contribution by the University of Kansas Student Senate."Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy" is a contemporary, interdisciplinary public speaking textbook that fuses rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, and performance to offer an up-to-date resource for students. With a focus on advocacy, this textbook invites students to consider public speaking as a political, purposeful form of information-sharing
Interrogating the Power of Open: Critical Pedagogy and the ‘Talk’ of Teaching
No full textPanel discussion on Friday
Video description:
by Meggie Mapes, PhD. Introductory Course Director in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. This session explores open pedagogy at the intersection of critical communication pedagogy (CCP). CCP -- a process that centralizes power by engaging the relationship between communication and teaching -- expands open pedagogical conversations by focusing on the talk about foundational educational processes and practices. In other words, what are mundane and everyday rhetorical choices that normalize publishing processes, naturalize privatized resources, and acknowledge that a commitment to open begins in how we teach about teaching, publishing, and scholarship
Navigating Ambiguous Negativity: A Case Study of Twitch.tv Live Chats
Full text linkThe popular gaming-oriented platform Twitch.tv, which offers video game fans an online space to interact by sharing and viewing gameplay and participating in live chats, is faced with the problem of online negativity alongside all of gaming culture. The content of live chat interaction has been explored on a larger scale, using rules from computer-mediated communication to classify behaviors such as spam and capital letters as negative. The current study used a nuanced qualitative look at particular user communities and the intersection between their descriptive and injunctive community norms and the use of ambiguous negativity, or interactions whose valence is not unanimously understood because communities have their own sets of meanings and rules that can be misunderstood by outsiders. Based on a study of systematic recordings of chats and streams of the Dark Souls game series, ambiguous negativity is prevalent and includes behaviors like cursing, game jargon, banter, spam and sarcasm. True negativity and hostility are rare, but they exist and manifest as usage of exclusionary language and banter gone too far. Despite its infrequency, clear negativity can shape the way people experience these communities. The role community members are to assume in responding or not responding to negativity is often not clearly defined by community norms
Transgressing workplace norms: Understanding the conceptualization and communication of trans identity in the workplace
No full textUsing Tracy and Trethewey's (2005) metaphor of the crystallized self, this project explores the influences of identity communication in and outside the workplace on work and life satisfaction. Using survey design, this study examined (1) how trans individuals communicate their trans identity at and outside work, (2) the relationship between identity communication at work and job satisfaction and life satisfaction, and (3) the relationship between identity communication outside work and satisfaction with job satisfaction and life satisfaction.To analyze how trans folks communicate their identity in work and nonwork contexts and its relationship with job and life satisfaction, survey data was collected from 206 trans individuals who were currently employed or employed within the last two years at the time of the survey. The crystallized self was operationalized into measures focusing on communication about trans identity at and outside work, specifically outness and authenticity. The outness measures were explicit outness, implicit outness, and covering. Authenticity was divided into three constructs of authentic living, self-alienation, and accepting external influence. These measures were used to predict both job satisfaction and life satisfaction. This study also examines two covariates: perceptions of workplace supportiveness and work-life segmentation. The study found that job satisfaction was positively related to authenticity and supportiveness and negatively related to covering and work-life segmentation preferences. Life satisfaction was positively related with authenticity, and negatively related to covering, passing, and work-life segmentation preferences. The findings indicate that being able to engage in a more authentic version of self through openness about identity and having workplace support is crucial to job and life satisfaction
Strong Black Woman Archetype in Organizational Life
No full textBlack women face multiple jeopardies—racism, sexism, classism—as they navigate American society (King, 1988). With more Black families economically depending on Black women, and as their presence within the U.S. workforce continues to increase, it is vital that we better understand their experiences and communication. The purpose of this narrative thematic analysis is three-fold: (1) to investigate how the Strong Black Woman archetype manifests in the workplace, (2) to understand how Black women are affected by it through the lens of organizational emotionality, and (3) to interrogate how Black women use communication to resist oppression in the workplace. Using the Strong Black Woman Collective (SBWC) framework (Davis, 2015) and organizational emotionality (Miller et al., 2007), the data revealed that there were both internal and external expectations for Black women to embody the Strong Black Woman archetype in the workplace
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