Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Dickinson, Greg, committee member"

Browsing by Author "Dickinson, Greg, committee member"

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Open Access
A dangerous message: the material effects of Enough
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2006) Richards, Joseph P., author; Holling, Michelle A., advisor; Bubar, Roe W., committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
Domestic violence is a cultural epidemic in U.S. society. How we define, perceive, and treat domestic violence is a product of the material rhetorics about it. Since film is a prominent mode of rhetorical discourse, I examine how the issue of domestic violence is represented in the 2002 film Enough. I argue that the film presents a view of domestic violence that offers space for empowerment, but serves to potentially place real women in danger. I undertake a dual-methodological approach using a textual analysis of the film and a focus group discussion with female domestic violence professionals/providers to discern the negative material effects of Enough. In my concluding section, drawing from feedback from the focus group participants, I offer suggestions for improving portrayals of domestic violence that may lead to ending this problem.
Open Access
Addressing the religious free-rider problem via religious consumption signaling and religious capital accumulation
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Simpson, Jason J., author; Bernasek, Alexandra, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
The aim of this paper is to investigate and illustrate the religious free-rider problem within church congregations while investigating religious consumption signaling patterns and the ability, or lack thereof, to form religious capital. From an institutional perspective, this paper will address stigma-screening processes via three economic models in an effort to understand and evaluate the overall effectiveness of institutional responses towards free-riding members. In addition, this paper will explore incentives behind perverse consumption signaling as a method of communicating membership, as well as the overall impact of restricting religious capital accumulation for both members and free-riders alike.
Open Access
An urban field of dreams: professional baseball and the fruition of new - old Denver
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Miller, Preston, author; Alexander, Ruth, advisor; Gudmestad, Robert, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Didier, John, committee member
This thesis examines how Coors Field framed the evolution of Denver's cultural geography and common identity between 1980 and 2010. I focus on the ballpark's connection to the process of "placemaking" as it unfolded between two adjacent "Old Denver" neighborhoods: North Larimer - a multicultural enclave that became the "Ballpark Neighborhood" - and the Lower Downtown historic district, whose founders bemoaned Denver's subsequent transformation into "Sports Town USA." As a contested icon, Coors Field affected notions of place, image, and inclusion for these neighborhoods and the city at large. Given this volatile context, I argue that its fruition highlighted what the Retro Ballpark Movement could and could not do for postmodern urban America. Many observers have heralded this ballpark project as an urban panacea, but an analysis of how ordinary Denverites perceived the new kind of city it left in its wake exposed a growing rift between baseball's working class mythos and the upscale nature of contemporary ballpark projects. Despite its instant success as an economic anchor, Coors Field ultimately contributed to the homogenization (or "Disneyfication") of "Old Denver" - a trend that clashed with baseball's democratic promise and previous notions of this downtown area as a diverse and authentic enclave. Utilizing local periodicals and government documents, I look at how this facility sprang from the hopes, dreams, and qualms of myriad individuals; the finished product representing a new dawn for some and a recurring nightmare for others. The narrative follows, as a central protagonist of sorts, Karle Seydel, an influential urban designer and neighborhood activist who should be recognized as the grassroots "Father of Coors Field." Seydel championed the project as a means to save North Larimer, guided its design, and dealt with its consequences. I wanted to offer a people's history of the "Blake Street Ballpark," and thus his experiences and opinions (as well as those of his allies and opponents) will guide my analysis of how an urban field of dreams contributed to Denver's reinvention as a new - old "city of leisure."
Open Access
Black Lives Matter as "social movement": theorizing the materiality of movement of the social
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Clark, Jordin, author; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Cespedes, Karina, committee member
Utilizing Michael Calvin McGee's notion of social movement as a set of meanings that move the social, this thesis builds upon and adjusts the discursive focus of McGee's rhetorical theory of social movement to include materiality, particularly material movement as influential in changing the social. To do so, I build upon theories of sociality, space, and movement to present movement and motion as material texts that hold rhetorical power to inflect and produce our cultural and social understandings of our sociality. Analyzing the Black Lives Matter's Black Friday protest at the Magnificent Mile in Chicago in 2015, this thesis argues that protests—in their material movements—remake public spaces and the societal, spatial, and individual social body to carve out an imaginary and thus sociality in which Black lives matter. The aptly named Black Lives Matter movement is a social movement that makes visible systemic racism that disciplines, endangers, and marginalizes Black lives, with the goal to reimagine a world where Black people are free to exist and live—where Black lives matter. Our current social and spatial imaginary constructs the Black body as a subject of exclusion and allows whiteness to ignore and disregard that Black lives matter. However, during the Black Friday protest at the Magnificent Mile in Chicago in 2015, as this thesis argues, the protesters disrupted the embodied and spatial rhythms of the Magnificent Mile to open a fissure within the shopper's social/spatial imaginary wherein the protesters compelled them to recognize Black lives while urging them to accede that they matter.
Open Access
Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade: invocation, spatiality, and ritual transcendence in two tabletop role-playing games
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Brunette, Tyler, author; Diffrient, Scott, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey, committee member
In 1974 the world's first Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) was published, Dungeons and Dragons. Since that time hundreds of TRPGs have been published in multiple genres. In this thesis I explore the rhetoric of two of the most popular horror-themed TRPGs: Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. I focus on explaining how these games came to be, how they serve their players as equipment for living, how they rhetorically (re)construct real-world places and spaces, and finally, how they encourage transcendence and jamming through ritual play and participation. This thesis hopefully helps to show the complex multi-layered rhetoric taking place in a relatively ignored form of media. Additionally, I introduce the concept of textual invocation as a complimentary theoretical construct to that of textual poaching as an explanation for how players and designers engage in a give and take of authorship.
Open Access
Cultural memory and place identity: creating place experience
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Raadik-Cottrell, Jana, author; Donnelly, Maureen P., advisor; Vaske, Jerry J., 1951-, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Taylor, Peter, committee member
Studying landscapes anchored in human life, with natural and cultural components interwoven as one fabric, embracing the political and ideological aspects, helps to understand the role of our everyday landscapes in tourism. Tourism, the travel between places and touring of landscapes, is essential to the identity process of both travelers and places. The notions of "home" and "elsewhere," "us" and "them" are constructed through mobility, motility (potentials of mobility) and migration. The scope and scale of mobility and motility has changed in a postmodern world through the intensity in time-space expansion/ contraction. Contemporary European society is fractured in a struggle between conflicts of identity (former Eastern Europe). Renegotiations of past and present, integration and diversity are especially acute after the collapse of the Soviet empire and ongoing enlargement of the European Union. Identity and culture are elastic concepts, involving conscious and unconscious processes through which places are lived and made while giving meaning to the lives of the people involved. Communication of those meanings is essential to each individual in this process and to others beyond the actual lived place. The meaning attached to landscapes is negotiable due to competing social actors involved in a continuous interpretation and variability offered across cultural, historical, individual and situational aspects. This case study examines the dynamic between real landscapes, their representations and negotiations of identity under the umbrella of a stabilizing past among foreign and domestic visitors to Saare County on Saaremaa Island in Estonia. The disruptive societal changes, which occurred in recent decades with the collapse of the Soviet regime, guide discussion of interactions of place, identity, landscape and memory, as well as the role of tourism. The central aim of this dissertation is to explore the role of past through individual and collective memory in multifaceted negotiations of place identity and place experience. Huff's (2008) model of landscape, place and identity combined with memory and tourism was used to guide this investigation. Data were collected in three phases: content analysis of online news article debate about the potential bridge connecting Saaremaa Island to mainland Estonia (n=123), onsite tourist survey of visitors to the island (n=487), and in-depth interviews with 16 visitors drawn from the survey sample. Narrative and discourse analyses were supplemented by a multiple/logistic regression of survey data in a mixed methods approach. Results imply that pro-anti bridge sentiment exists among Estonians and foreigners based on socio-cultural and political contexts in a post Soviet society. Memory, well-being, and aesthetics of place with nationality, and education are predictors of perceived effects of environmental changes and effects of a bridge to mainland on future holiday experiences to Saaremaa Island. Past memories from ideological images of place and memories of places elsewhere were intertwined into bodily perceptions of place, yet resulted in somewhat contradictory statements. Evaluation of changes in landscapes correlated with perceived identities of place and self, and reflected upon readings of home. Historical aspects of place were deemed an important part of place experience. Respondents without prior knowledge or experience similar to the socio-cultural, economic and political context in Estonia were inclined to identify place based on comparisons of home place from their own residency and past memories from places traveled elsewhere. Outcomes suggest a dialogue for further sense of place research in tourism for the marketing and management of sustainable tourism development in general and for island destinations in particular.
Open Access
Death becomes us: constituting death and imagining wellbeing through global youth environmental activist discourses
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Amedée, Emily, author; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
In this study, I analyzed death as a rhetorical strategy and emphasized the speaking power of youth environmental activists and their unique contributions to public discourses. I argued that the stories we tell about death constitute particular identities, ways of living/life chances, and ways of imagining the world. I explored the persuasive power of death in and of itself—death as rhetoric—and how rhetoric constitutes death, even as death functions to elide and enable the very discourses that call it into being. I narrowed my focus by consciously "placing" death on the edges of environmental issues and highlighting the ways discourse about the natural world constructs ecological realities and gives shape to environmental ideologies and human/environmental interaction. To enlarge the existing rhetorical criticisms of youth voice, I featured the discourses of three individuals: Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Isra Hirsi. Each orator's intercultural and international contexts ensure that the relationships and experiences each girl has with their environmental context are diverse and span a variety of ecological and intersecting social issues. My study suggests that when youths employ the persuasive power of death, they do one or more of the following: (1) Constitute a space of inbetweenness and a process of becoming; (2) Harness the rhetorical significance of the material, spatial, and temporal aspects of everyday life; (3) Highlight the consequences of placelessness, disconnection, and detachment; (4) Call forth a politics of relation centered in an ethic of responsibility, intersectionality, and shared accountability; and (5) Imagine more just, sustainable, and flourishing futures for all our relations. Considering the rhetoric of this diverse set of young women rhetors, I synthesized the significant findings and key implications of my analyses to suggest a rhetorical theory of eudaimortia, which reveals the persuasive power of death to challenge and reconstitute how to live, how to become, and how to make, move, and imagine bodies, worlds, and time.
Open Access
Denver goes to the movies: engaging national-scale identity shifts from movie house to movie palace, 1900-1940
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Frank, Nichelle, author; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Ore, Janet, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
This thesis examines the relationship between film history and movie theater architecture at local and national levels as a window into early twentieth century identity shifts. The argument is that Denver films and movie theaters from 1900 to 1940 manifested national-level identity shifts as well as influenced them. The identity shifts included attitudes of innovation, decadence, and endurance that roughly characterized the 1900s and 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. These identities represented the dominant identities that were part of the broad shift from nineteenth century frontier identity to post-WWII modern identity. This thesis draws from Denver newspapers, architectural and cinema journals, early film histories, Denver Householder and City Directories, Denver Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, other historic maps, memoirs, and photographs. Through close study of these sources and balancing the national history with Denver history, there emerges a story of how Denverites and Americans have selected ideals to maintain and adopted others as they chase their ever-changing dreams.
Open Access
Digestive dialectics: everyday life, food, and social change in contemporary Japan
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Fenton, Robert Priessman, III, author; Carolan, Michael S., advisor; Taylor, Peter L., committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
In the field of social research, the concept of change has been dissociated from its practical foundations, recast as a function of structural manipulations and conceptual processes. The living, breathing body of people in their everyday lives has been annihilated by the panoptic gaze of "objectivist" science, its somatic knowledge reduced to a residue. But for all of this technocracy, the lived--everyday life--is no mere repository of conceptual knowledge, but the soil which supports the whimsical adventures of these plants--the so-called "higher spheres"--pullulating from its nourishing base. This thesis, therefore, attempts to relocate the living body in the matrix of gastropractical forces, micro and macro, in two specific contexts in contemporary Japan. Its objective, then, is to discover this body and the forces it confronts in everyday acts of food consumption in rotary sushi bars and Korean barbecue restaurants, the perceptual limits that constrain the ability of actors to "see" the potential for change immanent to repetitious gastropraxis. By utilizing theoretical and methodological precepts fashioned by the work of French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, this research project moves to tackle the issue of social change from a phenomenological perspective. That social space and time are a component of the eating process is apparent. By focusing on a confluence of issues, both immediate and mediate, I take the viewpoint of an actor within these contexts and subject it to rigorous examination. From this perspective things like environmental destruction, culture, aesthetics, political economy, and colonization are analyzed dialectically. Only by problemitizing these forces at the level of the body will the potential for change be uncovered, by laying bare the epistemic barriers that have been erected to reduce its visibility. If social change is to be enduring, affective linkages and embodied knowledge must be integrated into the conceptual whole, which can only happen by recognizing the barriers which prevent its incorporation.
Open Access
Mind the gap: the value-action gap, nudges, and an ecosocial vision
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Croteau, Jessica, author; Macdonald, Bradley, advisor; Betsill, Michele, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
This thesis explores the question: Why do even those with environmental awareness and attitudes often fail to act in an environmental manner? This question begs a second: How can environmental behaviors be engendered? To explore these questions, I first worked to understand the current state of the environment to determine if there is an environmental crisis. The evidence suggests there is an environmental problem, and further, that a majority of humans are aware and opposed to environmental degradation. I then study the environmental value-action gap, or the gap between an individual's environmental attitudes and lack of environmental action. To understand this phenomenon, I studied the individual barriers to action presented in the literature. While compelling, I believe a study of the systemic barriers must also be addressed and discussed the ways in which structural factors work to hinder environmental action. I conclude my thesis with a novel discussion of the use of nudge theory to remove the gap between environmental values and action. However, I note there must be the development of a Critical Nudge Theory, within a new world vision—an Ecosocial vision—to work toward a truly socially and ecologically harmonious future.
Open Access
Online spaces: technological, institutional, and social practices that foster connections through Instagram and Twitch
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Weigel, Taylor, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Martey, Rosa, committee member
We are living in an increasingly digital world. In the past, critical scholars have focused on the inequality of access and unequal relationships between the elite, who controlled the media, and the masses, whose limited agency only allowed for alternate meanings of dominant discourse and media. With the rise of social networking services (SNSs) and user-generated content (UGC), critical work has shifted from relationships between the elite and the masses to questions of infrastructure, online governance, technological affordances, and cultural values and practices instilled in computer mediated communication (CMC). This thesis focuses specifically on technological and institutional practices of Instagram and Twitch and the social practices of users in these online spaces, using two case studies to explore the production of connection-oriented spaces through Instagram Stories and Twitch streams, which I argue are phenomenologically live media texts. In the following chapters, I answer two research questions. First, I explore the question, "Are Instagram Stories and Twitch streams fostering connections between users through institutional and technological practices of phenomenologically live texts?" and second, "If they are, how do users support and advance connections across individuals in dispersed geographies on Twitch streams and Instagram Stories?" As my analysis shows, Twitch streams and Instagram Stories are texts that present themselves as phenomenologically live—meaning that even if they are not live, they are meant to feel live to the viewers—due to the complex institutional and technological practices that often remain hidden to the user, as well as social practices of users. By looking specifically at the rhetoric of liveness, the public screen, the third place, embodiment, and platform affordances and governance, this thesis will uncover the modes of production and possibilities for connection in online, ephemeral spaces. Through a visual and textual analysis of phenomenologically live texts on Instagram and Twitch and a critical analysis of the temporal, social, technological, and institutional practices that engender the materialization and maintenance of these communities, this thesis seeks to understand how visual platforms structure particular experiences in online interactions, acting as informal public spaces that have the ability to foster connections between users.
Open Access
Performativity in comics: representations of gender and sexuality in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Vincent, Aimee E., author; Langstraat, Lisa, advisor; Reid, Louann, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
This thesis examines the role of comics in rhetoric and composition studies. By examining Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, this thesis shows that comics employ specific forms of visual-verbal rhetoric that can be useful to developing visual-verbal literacies in rhetoric and composition instruction. This thesis also suggests that gender and sexuality are underexplored areas in comics studies and examines representations of gender and sexuality through three main lenses: Foucauldian feminism through theorists such as Sandra Bartky, performativity through Judith Butler's framework, and queer theory through theorists such as Ann Cvetkovich. In the conclusion, this thesis proposes that one use for comics, specifically Fun Home, in rhetoric and composition classrooms is as a way to introduce queer theory and queer pedagogy into a first-year composition class.
Open Access
Questioning the carnivalesque: poetry slams, performance, and contemporary forms of resistance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Freitas, Isaac Richard, author; Hempel, Lynn, advisor; Taylor, Pete, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
This thesis explores the form that resistance takes in poetry slams. In this study, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival is applied to the poetry slam as a contemporary form of resistance. Carnival provides a place outside of everyday life where different rules are in effect. Through the carnival, participants see new possibilities for their everyday lives. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate whether poetry slams show carnivalesque resistance. Research was conducted using a hermeneutic perspective. The data was collected through observation and interviews with subjects at two poetry slams: the Open Counter Poetry Slam and the Rue Vermilion Poetry Slam. Observations were conducted at multiple occurrences of each slam. Thirteen individuals were interviewed with eight coming from the Open Counter Poetry Slam and five from the Rue Vermilion Poetry Slam. Thematic analysis was used in interpreting the data. Two approaches were used to examine the results of the analysis. A spatial approach was used to see how the times and spaces that poetry slams occur show carnival resistance. The second approach used the perspectives of the interviewees and observations of poetry slam participants' interactions to explore carnival's role in poetry slam events. By showing how carnival manifests within poetry slams, this research shows how events can provide safe havens from the pressures of power that permeate the social hierarchies of everyday life.
Open Access
Reinforcing hegemonic structures: remediating and stymieing memories of Native Americans at Euro-American historic sites in the American West
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Stocker, Esther, author; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Martinez, Doreen, committee member
This thesis examines the Crazy Horse Memorial and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument to better understand how both places of public memory articulate Native American identities. Drawing on scholarship in public memory, the materiality of rhetoric, and Native American rhetorics, this analysis shows in part how both sites strive to remediate public memories related to Native Americans in the broader U.S. culture. However, the chapters also show that these efforts at Crazy Horse and Little Bighorn are simultaneously stymied from within and without through intentional and unintentional means. As the chapters reveal, the stymying components of each memorial presents a specific articulation of Native identity with the Crazy Horse Memorial presenting Native identities as ownable and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument presenting Native identities as existing in the past, respectively. Putting both presentations into conversations suggests that there is a broader cultural articulation of Native identity as controllable in these U.S.-American memory sites. Such a rhetoric perpetuates prioritizing Euro-American values, stories, and identities within the U.S.
Open Access
Remembering capitalism: A. Philip Randolph, Eugene V. Debs, and the town of Pullman
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) O'Mara, James, author; Dunn, Thomas R., advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Cauvin, Thomas, committee member
Through an analysis of the Pullman National Monument, and President Obama's speech commemorating the town, this thesis demonstrates how the memory of the labor movement within Pullman is framed through a progressive narrative of U.S. history. Throughout the analysis of these artifacts, this thesis examines the material, visual, and textual contours of the public memory surrounding the Pullman town. Building from theories of public address, public memory, public forgetting, and space and place scholarship, my examination of the Pullman National Monument demonstrates the persistence of appeals to liberalism, which actively forgets any alternative to capitalism. This active forgetting serves to stifle the imagination of individuals to develop a working-class politics. Furthermore, in my analysis of President Obama's speech, I offer a theory of the forgetful form to understand how speakers create a desire within the audience to forget problematic elements of the past. Finally, this thesis closes with a discussion of how examining the textuality of a speech, as well as the materiality of a monument together, aid in understanding the public memory of an event.
Open Access
Remembering the 1936-37 UAW-GM sit-down strike: stratification of a UAW member's identity in Sitdowners Memorial Park
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Keel, Aaron, author; Anderson, Karrin Vasby, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Kirkland, Kenneth J., committee member
In 1937, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) won recognition from General Motors (GM) through the historic sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. This strike marked the beginning of the labor movement and the battle for worker's rights that is continuing into the present day. Sitdowners Memorial Park (SMP), located in Flint, remembers and commemorates the striker's great achievements in 1937. It is also a place where citizens encounter compelling narratives of the past, pay tribute to those who have come before them, build community, negotiate identity, and receive instruction for the present and future. In this thesis, I explore SMP as an experiential landscape. In exploring the park, I answer two questions. First, how does SMP construct a UAW member's identity? Second, how does SMP represent female gender roles and, more specifically, what kind of agency is attributed to women as members of the UAW in this counterpublic space? I argue that SMP enlists memories of the sit-down strike and its impacts on society to reinvigorate a dying community and offer visitors rhetorical resources justifying pro-union perspectives. In doing so, a counterpublic identity is created. In establishing a UAW member's identity as counterpublic, still fighting for recognition from the larger public, SMP also reinforces the worker/homemaker double bind that is prevalent as part of many women workers' historical and contemporary lived experience. This double bind can inhibit female workers' agency within the counterpublic space of the UAW where they can occupy a "counterprivate" space. Today, however, through the corrections and additions to the park over time, female workers are granted agency, but they are reminded that their participation in the public comes at a cost; the double bind continues to discipline them. Ultimately, SMP works to educate its visitors on the progress that the UAW has attained and the social significance of the sit-down strike. Through this education and remembering, SMP advocates that a visitor to the park must work to maintain what was won in 1937 and participate in a pro-union fight by carrying on the strikers' tradition of progressive politics.
Open Access
The challenges of populism: an analysis of Tea Party structuring narratives
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Coughlin, Alex T., author; Sprain, Leah, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Saunders, Kyle, committee member
The lead up to the 2010 midterm elections saw the rise of a new face in American domestic politics: the Tea Party. Riding a wave of conservative dissent following 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Tea Party exploded onto the political scene and helped to Republicans to score 680 legislative seats. This study compared the structuring narratives of the Tea Party to uncover the way the movement identifies its political aims, goals and actors. More specifically, this essay analyzed the narratives of the Tea Party on teaparty.org and teapartypatriots.org as well as in editorials and op-ed pieces in the New York Times and Washington Times from April 15 through November 15, 2010. Furthermore, because of frequent claims of the Tea Party's populist nature, this project further examined the movement's use of populist rhetoric. The goal of this project was to further understand the competing understandings of the Tea Party and the mode in which the movement used themes of populist rhetoric. This study incorporated theories of narrative analysis to determine common methods of the Tea Party's structuring of protagonists, antagonists, plot, climax, and other important identifying factors. These characteristics were then compared to the rhetorical tactics and themes of past American populist movements. The findings indicated that the Tea Party was identified with a concise structuring narrative in the Washington Times and on teaparty.org and teapartypatriots.org , but this identity was questioned and problematized by the New York Times. The author further suggests the Tea Party's use of populist rhetoric was effective, but will pose problems in the future as questions of authenticity will surround populist rhetorical themes and their campaign fundraising. The author's hope is that studying the rhetorical tactics of the Tea Party will add to the discussion of American sociopolitical movements and the way they communicate.
Open Access
The implications of the "new" majority of non-tenurable faculty for first year composition curricula and critical pedagogy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Austin, Sarah E., author; Doe, Sue, advisor; Langstraat, Lisa, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
Of late, much discussion has arisen around university employers' treatment of the "new" majority of contingent faculty. However, little is being said regarding two important points: first, that in the field of rhetoric and composition and in first-year writing classrooms, especially, this majority of contingent faculty is not at all new. Secondly, that some attention should be paid to what effects this writ-large university labor shift may be having on the pedagogical and curricular decisions within composition programs, particularly as they pertain to faculty's academic freedoms and the teaching of critical thinking skills. As such, this thesis sought to attend to both of the above issues by documenting the history of rhetoric and composition's labor force, aligning that history to activism and critical pedagogies and, through a local example, discussing the implications of the "new" majority of untenurable faculty on the pedagogies and curricula utilized in first-year composition. My findings indicate, as suspected, that the majority of contingent faculty is not a new phenomenon to the field of composition. Nevertheless, this contingent majority does impact the ways in which critical thinking and pedagogies may be used within the first-year composition classroom. Results seem to show that such a shift in university faculty profiles will indeed affect professors' abilities to wield traditionally understood ideas of academic freedom but that, drawing on Foucault's notions of power and his term "specific intellectual," individuals within composition departments, and perhaps university-wide, are able, through conscious action to uphold the democratic ideals of a postsecondary education: to create civic-minded, critical thinkers.
Open Access
Who is Columbine? Forgetting the public in contemporary memorial sites
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Schwake, Jena R., author; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Fish Kashay, Jennifer, committee member
The Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado honors and remembers the thirteen victims of the Columbine High School shooting. The memorial presents itself as an open, public space in which all are welcomed to visit, mourn, or reflect as they wish upon the events of April 20, 1999; however, the memorial’s rhetorical tactics seem intended exclusively for a particular and privatized public—namely, the survivors, family members, and intimates of those killed in the shooting. Through critique of the Columbine Memorial as a public memory place, this occurrence presents a rhetorically oriented instance of “forgetting the public.” Forgetting the public, as conceived here, results from the privileging of individualized memories within public commemorative sites, ultimately leaving those visitors outside of a narrowly circumscribed public unacknowledged by the memorial site. I contend that forgetting publics prevents public identification with memorial sites, which disrupts the epideictic processes necessary for a memorial to achieve its intended civic purposes. This study critically examines the memorial’s employment of specific rhetorical tactics, as viewed through the relationship between private and public memory. This lens reveals three trends occurring within the memorial that inform our understanding of contemporary memorial sites, including Presence/Absence, Intimacy/Publicity, and Discursivity/Materiality. Specific examples within each trend demonstrate an apparent forgetting of the public, ultimately leading to the conclusion that the Columbine Memorial perpetuates the privileging of private interests over those of the general public.
Open Access
Wunderkammers, photographs, and growing up Southern: a visual semiotic analysis of self-identity through autoethnography
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Ownby, Terry D., author; Quick, Don, advisor; Geiger, Wendy, committee member; Banning, James H., committee member; Anderson, Sharon K., committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member
By using the civil rights era within a segregated South as a cultural backdrop for this dissertation, I explored the construction of self-identity through narrative text and photographs in the form of a visual autoethnography. Specifically, this study had a two-fold mission: First to explore my self-identity in relation to my Southern culture through narrative text and photographs as primary data; and second, to apply a combined-methods approach in order to paint a complete and holistic portrait of my self-identity construction. Using an overarching notion of Barthesian visual semiotics, I have taken a combined-methods approach by using traditional ethnographic research techniques to produce an autoethnographic narrative with a critical visual methodology in order to draw meaning from a university gallery showing of my photographic exhibition titled: Wunderkammer: Specimen views of my postmodern life . The resultant analyses of narrative text and photographs revealed an underlying sub-text of significant racial encounters as well as several social and institutional ideological issues that contributed to my self-identity construction and acculturational journey. Implications from this particular methodological design indicate usefulness not only in photography programs, but also in allied disciplines such as communication, cultural and media studies, education, sociology, or anthropology. This study contributes its voice to the conversations about autoethnography and self-identity construction through researcher-participant generated photographs.