Theses and Dissertations
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Item Open Access Live-mediated horror entertainment: the culture, history, industry, and experience of haunted attractions(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Slyter, Riana, author; Diffrient, David Scott, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee member; Claycomb, Ryan, committee memberHaunted attractions are as much thrill-based amusements as they are complex, deliberately designed spaces where fear, technology, labor, and performance converge. This dissertation examines the industrial and affective dimensions of live-mediated horror entertainment (LMHE), a term I use to describe immersive horror experiences such as haunted attractions, immersive theater, and interactive horror events. While "liveness" in media theory has often implied mediation, the term LMHE emphasizes how these experiences merge co-presence and embodied performance with mediated aesthetics and narrative structures, highlighting how these experiences extend beyond broadcast liveness or theatrical co-presence by foregrounding embodied participation, mediated storytelling, and labor-intensive infrastructure. Rather than relying solely on "liveness" or "immersion," LMHE highlights how horror depends on visceral immediacy, technological mediation, and intensive affective labor to create its impact. Framed in this way, haunts reveal how fear is produced through industrial practices that require physical, emotional, and economic investments from both workers and audiences. It also underscores how horror's physical and emotional intensities enable negotiations around identity, social tension, and collective anxiety. Through LMHE, I argue that haunted attractions act as ideological texts that expose the contradictions of contemporary life, where fear and spectacle are tightly bound to the labor, aesthetics, and infrastructures that produce them. Haunted attractions remain critically understudied within performance and media scholarship, despite their cultural ubiquity and economic success. Haunts are spaces made legible through their relationship with the horror genre, which heightens and exaggerates the very tensions, paradoxes, and anxieties embedded in contemporary life. By staging fear, horror enables a visceral confrontation with themes often repressed in other entertainment forms: death, trauma, monstrosity, and social breakdown. As a genre defined by its affective charge and bodily address, horror is well suited to illuminate the ideological work of LMHE. These attractions stage real-life ideological struggles in exaggerated form, often with minimal subtlety, making them powerful cultural texts that mirror and manipulate collective fears. Methodologically, this dissertation integrates empirical fieldwork and affective observation with theoretical analysis grounded in performance studies, media theory, and cultural criticism. Site visits, interviews with industry professionals, and immersive encounters provide the empirical foundation. This empirical work is complemented by a historical and theoretical framework that situates haunted attractions within a broader hauntological lineage, allowing for a recursive reading of how the past echoes through affective and industrial forms. The historical emergence of haunted attractions is traced through a genealogical hauntology, a recursive framework that shows how past trauma resurfaces through entertainment, echoing across time in aesthetic, thematic, and economic form. This hauntological lens reveals how haunted attractions recycle and recode societal anxieties, particularly in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the post-World War II era, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyze how haunted attractions restage affective rituals of haunting, through which audiences confront both real and symbolic fears. Throughout, the dissertation foregrounds the role of labor, technological mediation, and performance aesthetics, emphasizing how affect is not only experienced but also produced and regulated through behind-the-scenes infrastructures. Interstitial narratives and site-specific disruptions—such as Althusserian moments of hailing, recursive hauntings, deliberately disorienting dramaturgies, and improvisational play—are shown to call audiences into new subject positions, blurring the line between spectator and participant. The dissertation proceeds in four chapters: (1) a genealogical history of haunted attractions and their relationship to cultural trauma; (2) an analysis of immersive design and genre hybridity; (3) a look at the industrial logics and economic tensions that shape haunt production; and (4) an exploration of labor, performance, and embodiment, focusing on how monstrosity is enacted and internalized. Reinforcing the claim that haunted attractions serve as ideological texts, my project makes legible the affective, ideological, and infrastructural work performed by LMHE. Haunted attractions offer a potent site for examining how contemporary culture processes fear, trauma, and control, and how horror functions as a vehicle to render social paradoxes grotesquely visible. While they may initially be dismissed as mere entertainment, haunted attractions serve as a mirror to the ideological hauntings that permeate everyday life, offering a critical lens through which to understand media, performance, and affect in a fear-driven world.Item Open Access Beyond the individual-systemic binary: organizing belief in the rhetoric of anti-sexual violence activism(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Buisker, Lauren L., author; Gibson, Katie L., advisor; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Bubar, Roe, committee memberThis dissertation is a rhetorical history of anti-sexual violence activism that challenges what I refer to throughout the project as an "individual-systemic binary," a rhetorical tool of containment in sexual violence discourses that promotes cultural disbelief of survivors. The individual-systemic binary either isolates victims as individual anomalies or subsumes their stories into broad systemic critiques that flatten intersectional differences among victims and promote oppressive, carceral logics. In the aftermath of the Me Too movement, which I argue highlights the shortcomings of individual and systemic narratives surrounding sexual violence, this dissertation turns to intersectionally-informed, historical and contemporary anti-sexual violence organizing that offers insight about activist rhetorical strategies beyond the individual-systemic binary. To do so, I examine three case studies of U.S.-based anti-sexual violence advocacy, whose discourses offer prescriptive insight surrounding rhetorical resources for challenging rape culture. The first case study analyzes the 1944 movement on behalf of Recy Taylor, a Black survivor who multiple white perpetrators assaulted in Alabama. This campaign, called the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor (CEJ), participated in what I term a "rhetoric of radical belief," which framed belief as an act of care, rather than an evaluation of a victim's credibility. Such rhetoric merged the individual-systemic binary by framing Taylor as an individual symbol of systemic democratic failure. The CEJ also inverted the binary by both individualizing the state responsible for ignoring Taylor and bestowing activists with systemic power. The second case study in this dissertation investigates the rhetoric of the 1970s movement against sexual harassment, which was comprised of working-class women, women of color, and university feminists who framed sexual harassment as a matter of economic exploitation. Through what I identify as a discourse that "(dis)organizes disbelief," the movement challenged rape culture scripts and shattered the individual-systemic binary by posing the organizational context as a third scale on which violence flourishes. Finally, the third case study of this dissertation centers around a contemporary nonprofit organization, anonymized as the Peer-Led Violence Prevention (PLVP) Program. Drawing upon the data from focus group interviews I conducted with workers in the PLVP, I argue that the PLVP constructs what I call a "belief biography," or a rhetoric that tracks how cultural belief in survivors is cultivated across time. This model of activism absorbs the strengths of both individual and systemic sides of the binary while avoiding their pitfalls, fostering change through localized, relational practice rather than top-down reform or punitive pressure. Ultimately, this dissertation situates belief in survivors not merely as a moral stance but as a cultural infrastructure requiring sustained rhetorical labor. This project contributes to rhetorical and organizational communication studies by mapping how advocacy efforts can cultivate cultural belief in survivors without reinscribing the hierarchies and exclusions that sustain sexual violence in the first place.Item Open Access Welcome to the neighborhood: dismantling xenophobia while building community at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Whittenburg, Cari, author; Dickinson, Greg, advisor; Knobloch, Katherine, committee member; Aoki, Eric, committee member; Aronis, Carolin, committee memberFew issues occupy U.S. political, social, and cultural discourse like immigration. Since the earliest days of the U.S. as a nation, immigration has been a subject of contention and an important point of public discussion. Popular rhetoric about immigration works to exacerbate xenophobia and present immigrants as the antithesis of American values. In this dissertation, I argue that the Tenement Museum works to dismantle xenophobia through a rhetoric of neighborliness. This neighborliness combines ideologies of mutual respect and social responsibility that in turn work to negotiate the tension of difference and create networks of support. As visitors move through the museum's guided tours, both in the recreated tenement homes and the neighborhood, and participate in the engagement practices, they are asked to become neighbors with the families represented and immigrants at large. This embodied neighborliness invites visitors to bring immigrants into their community and assume a level of responsibility for their wellbeing while simultaneously reaffirming heteronormative family structures as the framework of who is deserving of care.Item Embargo Communicating resistance in U.S. memoryscapes: Black memory, temporality, hauntings, and tourism in the Whitney Plantation and The Myrtles(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Crow, Shelby R., author; Aoki, Eric, advisor; Dunn, Thomas, advisor; Khrebtan-Hörhager, Julia, committee member; Aronis, Carolin, committee memberLouisiana remains a popular destination for vacation and sightseeing, leveraging its cultivated narrative of hospitality, timeless landscapes, and preserved antebellum architecture. However, this allure fails to reckon with the deeply rooted history of U.S. enslavement and anti-Black violence. Consequently, the Deep South, and Louisiana specifically, has rearticulated its history of racialized violence through a whitewashed lens, attracting visitors to modern plantation tourism where African and Black memories and experiences of racist brutality are systematically ignored. Therefore, this dissertation analyzes two contemporary plantations in Louisiana: the Whitney Plantation and The Myrtles, arguing that they communicate diverging narratives of resistive rhetoric and Black memory. The Whitney Plantation stands as a powerful rejection of typical plantation narratives, centering African and Black voices and showcasing their resilience. In contrast, The Myrtles erases its history as a plantation, making it more palatable for white audiences and maximizing its profitability. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that rhetorics of racial resistance serve as a crucial strategy employed by both minoritized and hegemonic groups to either foster moments of solidarity in the pursuit of social change or to perpetuate white supremacy by advocating for a return to a (white) American society.Item Open Access "The dirt below the barrel": COVID compliance, media financialization, and post-pandemic precarity(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Robinson, Isaac Burton, author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Martey, Rosa, committee memberThis thesis utilizes qualitative interviews with former COVID Compliance workers in film and television production to draw larger conclusions about the state of labor relations in the film industry. In framing these interviews and larger, I trace the historical development of deregulation and financialized media production, consider the direct effects that these practices have on media labor, and establish how they set the stage for the exploitation of these workers. COVID Compliance departments were brought onto productions in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to enforce safety protocols during day-to-day operations, but were often met with verbal and emotional abuse, with their departments phased out as soon as possible. Due to their temporary status on set, these workers also were not provided any sort of protections for their jobs and were underpaid compared to other production assistants. The example set by these workers, largely viewed as a means to an end in returning to production after the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrates a larger attitude of disposability that the media industry holds toward below-the-line labor. Ultimately this thesis argues for a refocus in on-set organizational culture away from content generation to a person-focused approach, in which artifacts are still completed, but workers—particularly aspirant workers trying to establish themselves—have an easier path in trying to begin their careers in the industry.Item Open Access Balancing acts: navigating disclosure of Meniere's disease during workplace socialization(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Dewey, Andrew C., author; Williams, Elizabeth, advisor; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Conroy, Samantha, committee memberThis study explores how people with Ménière's Disease (MD), an episodic invisible disability, navigate disclosure during initial workplace socialization. Despite its profound impacts on communication, identity, and work-life balance, MD is unexamined within organizational communication literature. Drawing on theories of organizational socialization (Jablin, 2001) and Communication Privacy Management (Petronio, 2002), this qualitative study explored how people with MD constructed and managed privacy boundaries as they engaged with the first stages of the socialization process. Fifteen participants were recruited by an online support group and engaged in semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were analyzed through a phronetic iterative approach (Tracey, 2018; 2020), cyclically comparing participant responses with theoretical constructs. Data analyzed fell under two overarching categories: a) disability-influenced socialization; and b) the disclosure processes of people with MD. Themes under the socialization category included a) the influence of healthcare on the anticipatory socialization process; b) workplace communication about illness and disability; and c) the newfound process of conditional organizational identification. Findings under disclosure highlighted varying responses, including a) the refusal to disclose; b) the concept of involuntary disclosures; c) communication barriers to privacy management; d) reciprocal disclosures about chronic illness; e) opportunities to educate others on MD; and f) the renegotiation of boundaries following a privacy breach. Findings underscored the unique challenges that participants faced in the workplace. Disclosures were often influenced by previous medical experiences and the observed treatment of others with disabilities. This study contributes to scholarship by bridging organizational socialization and CPMT. A Model of Episodic Socialization is employed to understand theoretical intersections between invisible episodic disabilities, organizational socialization, and disclosure. Practical implications are offered for improving disability discourse in organizational contexts.Item Open Access Guilty until proven innocent? Richard Whately and presumptive lenses in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Foust, Allison, author; Burgchardt, Carl, advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Knobloch, Katherine, committee memberIn this thesis, I argue that nineteenth-century rhetorician Richard Whately was underrated in his time and is underutilized in rhetorical studies today. Drawing from Michael Sproule's scholarship concerning Whately's psychosocial approach to rhetorical theory, I demonstrate the utility of Whately's theories to evaluate a modern, case study: Justice Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearings to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2018.This thesis examines how Whately's concepts of presumption and burden of proof were pivotal in understanding this notorious rhetorical encounter. In an effort to extend Whately's original theories, I offer the concept of "presumptive lenses" to center the idea of perspective taking and how different argumentative frames can lead to confusion when both sides invoke the same terms but use very different burdens and evidentiary standards. The essence of "presumptive lenses" is to foster a practice in which all parties in a debate try to identify their opponents' understanding of presumption and burden of proof, to discuss it respectfully, and to honestly compare it to their own. The goal for the argumentative process is transparency for the rhetorical opponents, the judge, and the general public.Item Open Access #MeToo media and Hollywood: challenging sexual violence in film and television and the limits of media industries(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Lynn, Emma, author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Diffrient, Scott, committee member; Gibson, Katie, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee memberEver since bombshell news reports exposed media mogul Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator in 2017, there has been an influx of narrative film and television texts that address the #MeToo movement—both implicitly and explicitly—in their narratives. Taken together, these texts make up a distinct cycle of film and television I term "#MeToo Media." This dissertation seeks to uncover how Hollywood comes to terms with the #MeToo movement through its relationship with the #MeToo Media Cycle. #MeToo Media both challenge and reinforce power dynamics in Hollywood. On the one hand, these texts can productively engage in #MeToo discourses and challenge sexual violence through narrative storytelling. On the other hand, #MeToo Media can be a mechanism for Hollywood to pay lip service to the #MeToo movement without confronting the larger structural issues that enabled Harvey Weinstein in the first place. I analyze how these tensions play out across industrial contexts, from mainstream Hollywood to independent cinema to streaming television. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the transgressive potential of #MeToo Media is often limited by the regressive practices of the media industry institutions that produce, exhibit, and award them.Item Open Access Sensing materiality's rhetorical force: building a deeper understanding of the rhetorical entanglements of materiality, embodiment, and power(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) McCreary, Miranda L., author; Dickinson, Greg, advisor; Anderson, Karrin Vasby, committee member; Burgchardt, Carl, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee memberIn this dissertation, I examine the complex relationship among the rhetorical nature of materiality, embodiment, and power. To do this, I undertake embodied rhetorical analyses of two spaces—a Walmart Supercenter and a Regal Nail Salon—and explore the various ways in which these elements intertwine to structures spaces for the emergence of the Agentic Hand, Hand as Feminized Object, and the Subversive Agentic Hand. In order to more fully understand the ways that these spaces (what I refer to as sensory architectures, composed of circulations of matter-energy co-constituting the space of which humans are a part), structure these emergences, I develop two conceptual contributions: an expanded definition of rhetoric's materiality and an understanding of rhetoric as kinaesthetic. My first conceptual contribution, an expanded definition of rhetoric's materiality, describes rhetoric's materiality as the suasory, mercurial movements of matter-energy, with two distinct characteristics: (1) matter-energy moves in dynamic, lively ways, and our embodied experience and understanding of these suasory movements is made possible through affect, and (2) the suasory movements of matter-energy are always influenced by directional lineages of power, but never predetermined by them. My second conceptual contribution, an understanding of rhetoric as kinaesthetic, explains how the rhetorical, suasory force of materiality evokes presence effects that are both relational and kinaesthetic, where kinaesthetic presence effects refer to particular senses of one's own embodiment at any point in time. Ultimately, I argue that these two conceptual contributions offer valuable tools for better understanding the relationships among rhetoric's materiality, embodiment, and power. I believe that they are uniquely useful for two primary reasons: (1) because my expanded definition of materiality is more attuned to the fundamental role of power in materiality than many other conceptual definitions, and (2) because my understanding of rhetoric as kinaesthetic expands current understandings of rhetoric's presence effects to include both relational and kinaesthetic effects. For these reasons, I believe that the two conceptual contributions I offer in this dissertation can serve as important analytical tools for continuing the collective scholarly journey to more deeply understand the entanglements of rhetoric's material force, embodiment, and power.Item Open Access Leadership in uncertain times: exploring leader-member exchange and leadership adaptations during the COVID-19 transition(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Shahbazian, Parnian, author; Williams, Elizabeth, advisor; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Conroy, Samantha, committee memberThis thesis explores leadership dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how leader-member relationships (LMX) influenced leadership strategies. Using qualitative methods, the study examines the experiences of 12 leaders who managed teams across various industries through the sudden transition to remote or hybrid work. The research highlights how intentional communication, support, safety, and relationship-building shaped leadership practices during this crisis. Leaders employed tailored communication strategies to maintain engagement, reduce uncertainty, and ensure that their team members felt valued as individuals. Findings demonstrate that virtual leadership required heightened intentionality, emphasizing person-first approaches and the importance of consistent support. Leaders had to adapt their communication styles, increase transparency, and show empathy to maintain trust and team cohesion. The study also discusses the theoretical implications of LMX during times of crisis, showing how strong leader-member exchanges positively impacted motivation, retention, and well-being. Practical recommendations highlight the need for clear communication, flexibility, and emotional support in remote leadership settings.Item Open Access Intervening with laughter: using laughter/humor to create positive experiences in dementia relationships(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Matter, Michelle M., author; Faw, Meara H., advisor; Knobloch, Katherine R., committee member; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Lucas-Thompson, Rachel G., committee memberHumor and laughter have various positive outcomes on people's health and relationships both within healthcare settings and in daily life. In particular, humor and laughter can be beneficial for individuals impacted by dementia. This dissertation project was an engaged, mixed methodological intervention in which a program containing humor activities was created for people with dementia and their care partners to determine whether actively engaging with humor and laughter would be associated with positive outcomes for participants' well-being, observed behaviors, and relationships. Data collection methods included real-time observations as well as pre- and post-test surveys. Results indicated that participants were able and willing to participate in the program, that they engaged in various relational maintenance strategies during the program, and that the program was enjoyable and effective at creating positive personal and interpersonal outcomes for participating dyads. This project contributes to the scholarly community by investigating the usefulness of a noninvasive intervention within an understudied dyadic and aging population while demonstrating the powerful outcomes that can result from engaged scholarship and community collaborations. Additionally, this work offers the community partner a "plug-and-play" program that can be repeated in the future and provided participants with valuable and enjoyable experiences.Item Open Access DC unmade: failure, fandom and the Justice League films that could have been(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Greene, Ryan, author; Diffrient, David Scott, advisor; Martey, Rosa, committee member; Burgchardt, Carl, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee memberUnmade films have received little attention as a general category, and this is doubly so for unmade superhero genre projects. The fact that these unfilms are failures in otherwise vibrant action franchises has typically led to their elision from canonical narratives. In studying two of the many defunct superhero films in Warner Brothers's DC catalog, it is possible to compare the failures of each in order to discern the industrial and narrative practices that contributed to their collapse. I apply scholarship on failure and comic book film adaptation to the case of George Miller's Justice League: Mortal. I trace the director's grand vision of a franchise juggernaut that was ultimately cancelled due to a confluence of bureaucratic interference and backlash against the promise of unlimited, speculative success. I then turn attention toward WB's second attempt to create a superhero ensemble film, Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon's Justice League (2017). From the ashes of the film's financial under-performance and critical failure rose a dogged fan movement to release an unknown and totally different director's cut. To understand this fan community and its impact on unproduction, I evaluate the Snyder Cut movement's defense of Zack Snyder's unmade DC Extended Universe, their battle against Warner Brothers and their refusal to accept failure. Taken together, these two unproductions demonstrate two divergent visions of failure. One lacked fan backing and so rests inert, its pieces scattered across the internet. The other rose from the unfinished realm of shadow cinema, lifted up by fans who vilified its producer while demanding that executives pay for its release.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 Communicating the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study of a K-12 school district website and Twitter account(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Jones, Olivia E., author; Knobloch, Katie, advisor; Williams, Elizabeth, committee member; Bradbury, Kelly, committee memberThe COVID-19 pandemic was not a linear crisis, and this thesis seeks to explore the potential for liminal spaces throughout crisis cycles by analyzing a public K-12 school district's communication of the COVID-19 pandemic across their website and Twitter account. Using thematic iterative analysis, this research specifically explores the moments when the school district was still in crisis but also attempting to return to a state of normalcy. The analysis and findings yield practical recommendations for organizations that must balance stakeholder tensions, especially during repetitive crises.Item 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 memberIn 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.Item Open Access Managing occupational stigma in abortion care work(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Lee-Simpson, Becca, author; Faw, Meara, advisor; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Kelp, Nicole, committee memberThis study explores how United States health professionals who work in abortion care experience occupational stigma and enact stigma management communication (SMC; Meisenbach, 2010) in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Through interviews with 24 current and former abortion workers, the results indicate that health providers experience stigma through stigmatizing messages, stress compounded by stigma, and socioemotional impacts. Workers manage stigma using a blend of SMC strategies including accepting, avoiding, transcending, and challenging. Further, the study uses intersectional analysis to identify seven factors that influence how workers manage stigma as it intersects with their social identities and context: state laws, service delivery, organizational culture, community attitudes, regional identity, privileged/marginalized identities, and reproductive experiences. The study concludes with discussion of theoretical contributions to the SMC model and practical recommendations for healthcare organizations providing abortion.Item Open Access "There is no normal": how Ms. Marvel constitutes U.S. American citizenship between comics and screen(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bowar, Kyra, author; Anderson, Karrin, advisor; Marx, Nick, committee member; Martey, Rosa, committee memberIn 2014, a new superhero crashed into the Marvel Comics universe; Kamala Khan, a Muslim Pakistani American superheroine, took on the heroic mantle of "Ms. Marvel." Then, in 2022, Kamala's story was adapted to the screen as a part of Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ms. Marvel's story is one of intersections, tensions, and navigating identity in a contemporary, multicultural America. To understand how Marvel and Disney constitute U.S. American citizenship and identity, this thesis compares two versions of Kamala Khan's superhero origin story: the Marvel comic, Ms. Marvel: No Normal (2014), and its streaming television show adaptation on Disney+, Ms. Marvel (2022), produced by Disney's Marvel Studios. Pairing rhetorical criticism with media industry analysis, I argue that, through their adaptation of Ms. Marvel to the screen, Disney widens the borders around U.S. American sociocultural belonging enough to incorporate intersectionally marginalized identities without fully displacing hegemonic understandings of U.S. American citizenship. This thesis demonstrates the utility of multi-methodological critical analysis and expands the theory of constitutive rhetoric by demonstrating how one text can interpellate audience members differently. My analysis also illustrates the continued relevance of superhero media as exemplars of identity formation in contemporary culture.Item Open Access Beautiful transgressions: subversion and visibility in YouTube's beauty community(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Marshall-McKelvey, Kira, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee memberYouTube influencers must navigate the platform's capricious algorithm in order to achieve and maintain visibility online. The attention economy necessitates visibility labor for YouTubers to succeed in digital content creation. In particular, YouTubers must consider advertiser guidelines so that their content gets monetized (and subsequently rendered more visible). Content on YouTube that achieves high visibility tends to reinforce hegemonic logics of self-branding and gender. The beauty community, which produces feminized cultural outputs, is a highly commercial space on YouTube that rewards capitalist-affirming logics of gender and women's empowerment. Working in conversation with scholarship that explores the resistive possibilities of "LeftTube" (leftist YouTube), I highlight subversive tactics that women beauty gurus use without sacrificing their visibility online. Threading in discourse of play and fun, I argue that women beauty gurus can subvert postfeminist, neoliberal norms that discipline and confine gender performance. I first identify the normative genre conventions of the contemporary YouTube beauty community. Then I argue that RawBeautyKristi challenges norms of new momism and the "always on" digital entrepreneur by performing negative affect as a symptom of alienation, decentering western and masculine temporal structures, and complicating aesthetic labor in relation to neoliberal motherhood. Next, I argue that Nappyheadedjojoba performs platform-specific-intimacy to activate an ostensibly apolitical audience. Specifically, on YouTube, her incongruous references to makeup relieve tension, she utilizes beauty-specific terminology to familiarize her politics, she engages respectability politics, and she incorporates self-promotion as relational labor. On Patreon, she positions audience support as promoting creative liberty, she employs self-disclosure in relation to her politics, and she engages ratchetry as resistance. These strategies cultivate a sort of political authenticity. Lastly, Jenna Marbles's playful performance of failure to be part of YouTube's beauty community lluminates the inaccessibility of a seemingly open, democratizing space. By positioning herself as a YouTube viewer who unsuccessfully attempts tutorials, framing excess in contrast to the quest for natural beauty, exaggerating her status as an aging 32-33 year old lady, and flouting YouTube's self-branding conventions, Mourey reveals an attention economy in the beauty community that privileges postfeminist norms of age, beauty, and femininity. Ultimately, my dissertation aims to provide those in precarious positions with tactics to challenge dominant structures in ways that are invisible to those in power.Item Open Access Black like it never left: Black women and representation in contemporary broadcast television(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Taylor, Kirstin, author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Chung, Hye Seung, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee memberIt is imperative that we recognize that broadcast television is not dead, despite echoing declarations to the contrary, and that it can be a viable platform for presenting Black-led programs telling complex stories. In this project, I argue that current broadcast television shows are harnessing their industrial position and staple generic conventions to reorient depictions of Blackness on broadcast to more complexly and resonantly reflect lived Black experiences. It seems that these stories are being told not just on niche or fringe platforms catering to Black audiences, but also on long established and popular broadcast channels. This project is a limited survey of Black female representation on broadcast television comprised of three case studies: Fox's emergency procedural 9-1-1, The CW's HBCU set drama All American: Homecoming, and ABC's sitcom Abbott Elementary. Guiding this survey is a set of critical questions: First, how do these cases represent Black womanhood? Second, what are the industrial and creative contexts of these cases and how do they influence the texts? How do their creators, showrunners, writers, and actors work within the broadcast parameters and appropriate traditional conventions to display different iterations of Blackness? Finally, what new cultural meanings, if any, are the resulting representations generating?Item Open Access When work is worship: studying identification and faith in church workers(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Neal, Autumn (Buzzetta), author; Williams, Elizabeth, advisor; Faw, Meara, committee member; Dik, Bryan, committee memberThis thesis assesses the relationship between faith, organizational identification (OI), spiritual labor, and burnout in ex-church workers. The impetus for my study came from media (Cosper, 2021; Barr, 2021; Du Mez, 2021) and research (Chappell et al., 2022; Garner & Peterson, 2018; McNamee, 2011) that critically addresses destructive practices in church work. Using a qualitative, phenomenological methodology, I conducted thirteen semi-structured interviews of those who have left their positions in the church. I analyzed the data using Tracy's (2020) phronetic-iterative coding approach and Saldaña's (2021) coding recommendations. My findings revealed five key themes: identities in tension, faith as expectation, forced separation, balancing authenticity, and learned solutions. Ultimately, I contribute to research on organizational identification by problematizing enmeshment and over-identification. I conceptualize the faithful face as a balance of authenticity and boundaries in church work. Additionally, I offer contributions to discourses of spiritual labor and implications for studying faith-based organizations. Finally, I address practical implications, limitations, and future directions.