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Browsing by Author "Vasby Anderson, Karrin, advisor"

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    Dancing in the desert: electronic dance music festivals, carnivalesque rhetorics of disorientation, and performative participant observation
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Herring, Kristen D., author; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, advisor; Gibson, Katie, committee member; Aoki, Eric, committee member; Pippen, John, committee member
    Electronic dance music (EDM) creates communities whose members negotiate and renegotiate the politics of public performances of identity. In this dissertation, I ask "How do EDM festivals function as temporary communities that rhetorically construct the performance of gender and sexuality?" I argue that EDM uses a rhetorical strategy I call disorientation. I detail the ways disorientation helps EDM festival attendees, known as "ravers" or "festies," inhabit liminal spaces and transgress the patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacist, and capitalist expressions of gender and sexuality that are dominant in the outside world via rhetorics of the carnivalesque. I also develop an approach to rhetorical field methods I call Performative Participant Observation. I demonstrate Performative Participant Observation in this dissertation and argue that similar methods would be useful for scholars interested in studying ephemeral and public performances of gender and sexuality as well as performances of the carnival.
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    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.