Browsing by Author "Dunn, Thomas, advisor"
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Item Open Access A vision of ourselves: regional rhetoric's impact upon public policy relating to individuals experiencing homelessness(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Anderson, Garrison Michael, author; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Prasch, Allison, committee member; Scott, Ryan, committee memberPublic policy at all levels, local, state, and national, has a profound, yet seldom, recognized impact upon the lives of citizens unless the policy directly impacts them. In the following thesis, I explore the discourse and debate that a local-level public policy can have upon the construction of space, impact upon already marginalized populations, and the use of regional identity to justify said policy. More specifically, I explore the consideration of a "appropriate-use of public space ordinance" in a mid-sized city, Fort Collins, Colorado. I argue that visions of Fort Collins regional identity are used to justify certain aspects of the ordinance that criminalize individuals experiencing homelessness. In my analysis, I make use of theories of communication and space including critical regionalism, juxtaposition, and spatial trajectories. In application of these theories to understand my text I am performing an analysis of critical rhetoric to reveal potential power struggles at play and the possibility for change.Item 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 memberUtilizing 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.Item 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 memberThis 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.Item Open Access The power of the player: embodied social activism of professional athletes(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Schade, Kennedy J., author; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee member; Cloud, Doug, committee memberDesigned to contribute to conversations about the political nature of sports, this thesis proposes a new type of rhetorical activism that is utilized by professional athletes. The figure of the athlete activist has a long history in United States sports culture of using their platform to speak to their fans and other audiences about social issues that occur in the lives of everyday citizens. By drawing on scholarship surrounding rhetoric, social activism, identity, and embodiment, this thesis directs explicit attention to the way that the human body functions rhetorically for professional athletes when practicing social activism. Extending Kevin Michael DeLuca's claim that the body is not inherently argumentative, I argue that given the inherent political nature of sports, the body of a professional athlete can be read as political even without intent of the athlete themselves and because of that, athletes are given opportunities to practice "embodied social activism." Representing an evolution of the athlete activist, I define embodied social activism as the way an athlete's marked body or lived experiences can be read as consequential contributions to discourses surrounding social issues. Analysis of the careers and activism of National Basketball Association (NBA) player Allen Iverson and National Football League (NFL) player Michael Bennett stands to show the ways that the athletic body can both function as argument itself and can be used as evidence to support more traditional means of social activism.Item 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 memberThe 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.