Communication Dissertations

I am a Revolutionary Black Female Nationalist: A Womanist Analysis of Fulani Sunni Ali's Role as a New African Citizen and Minister of In-formation in the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa

Rondee Gaines — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:06:17 PDT

Historically, black women have always played key roles in the struggle for liberation. A critical determinant of black women’s activism was the influence of both race and gender, as these factors were immutably married to their subjectivities. African American women faced the socio-cultural and structural challenge of sexism prevalent in the United States and also in the black community. My study examines the life of Fulani Sunni Ali, her role in black liberation, her role as the Minister of Information for the Provisional Government for the Republic of New Africa, and her communication strategies. In doing so, I evaluate a black female revolutionary nationalist’s discursive negotiation of her identity during the Black Power and Black Nationalist Movement. I also use womanist criticism to analyze interviews with Sunni Ali and archival data in her possession to reveal the complexity and diversity of black women’s roles and activities in a history of black resistance struggle and to locate black female presence and agency in Black Power. The following study more generally analyzes black female revolutionary nationalists’ roles, activities, and discursive identity negotiation during the Black Power Movement. By examining Sunni Ali’s life and the way she struggled against racism and patriarchy to advocate for Black Power and Black Nationalism, I demonstrate how her activism was a continuation of a tradition of black women’s resistance, and I extrapolate her forms of black women’s activism extant in the movement.

The Ontological Scandal of Corporate Personhood and Speech: A Rhetorical Analysis of Key Supreme Court Decisions

Nneka Logan — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:45:44 PDT

The power of the corporation is pervasive in every aspect of human life. This situation initiates a question: how did the modern corporation become so powerful? To answer this question, as well as to understand the implications of the modern corporate form and its power in contemporary society, this dissertation explores how the corporation’s power stems from three historical developments that have had lasting significance: 1) its legal personification under the Fourteenth Amendment; 2) the development of its “voice” in the form of public relations and; 3) the acquisition of First Amendment political speech rights. Independently and collectively, each of these developments contributed to the corporation’s rise to dominance within society and to its hegemony in the U.S. and around the world. In addition, the growth and expansion of corporate power is also connected to several landmark Supreme Court rulings on corporate rights. Thus, this dissertation provides a rhetorical, ideological analysis of Supreme Court rulings that have contributed to the ongoing protection and expansion of corporate rights and power under the law. These rulings include Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), which endowed the corporation with Constitutional personhood rights; and Buckley v. Valeo (1976), First National Bank v. Boston (1978), Nike v. Kasky (2003) and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010), which all enabled, granted or protected corporate First Amendment rights. The analysis is guided by a close reading of these judicial texts. In sum, this study aims to uncover the ideological underpinnings of these Supreme Court decisions as it shows what interests are served through these rulings. It also describes how these rulings contribute to the expansion of corporate power and shape the relations between human beings and corporations in our society, in ways that are ontologically controversial.

The Last Stone is Just the Beginning: A Rhetorical Biography of Washington National Cathedral

Teresa F. Morales — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:45:42 PDT

Washington National Cathedral sits atop Mt. St. Alban’s hill in Washington, D.C. declaring itself the nation’s cathedral and spiritual home for the nation. The idea of a national church serving national purposes was first envisioned by L’Enfant in the District’s original plan. Left aside in the times of nation building, the idea of a national church slumbered until 1893 when a group of Episcopalians petitioned and received a Congressional charter to begin a church and school in Washington, D.C. The first bishop of Washington, Henry Y. Satterlee, began his bishopric with the understanding that this cathedral being built by the Protestant Episcopal Church Foundation was to be a house of prayer for all people. Using Jasinksi’s constructivist orientation to reveal the one hundred year rhetorical history defining what constitutes a “national cathedral” within the narrative paradigm first established by Walter Fisher, this work utilizes a rhetorical biographical approach to uncover the various discourses of those speaking of and about the Cathedral. This biographical approach claims that Washington National Cathedral possesses an ethos that differentiates the national cathedral from the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul even though the two names refer to the same building. The WNC ethos is one that allows a constant “becoming” of a national cathedral, and this ability to “become” allows for a rhetorical voice of the entity we call Washington National Cathedral. Four loci of rhetorical construction weave through this dissertation in the guiding question of how the Cathedral rhetorically created and how it sustains itself as Washington National Cathedral: rhetoric about the Cathedral, the Cathedral as rhetoric, the Cathedral as context, and Cathedral Dean Francis Sayre, Jr. as synecdoche with the Cathedral. This dissertation is divided into eight rhetorical moments of change that take the idea of a national church from L’Enfant’s 1791 plan of the City through the January 2013 announcement allowing same-sex weddings at the Cathedral and Obama’s second inaugural prayer service. The result of this rhetorical exploration is a more nuanced understanding of the place and how it functions in an otherwise secular society for which there is no precedent for the establishment of a national cathedral completely separated from the national government. The narrative strains that wind through Cathedral discourse create a braid of text, context, and moral imperative that ultimately allows for the unique construction of Washington National Cathedral, a construction of what defines “national” created entirely by the Cathedral.

The Rhetoric of Louis E. Martin, "Godfather of Black Politics"

Kristina E. Curry — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:30:56 PDT

Louis Emanuel Martin, trained as a journalist, worked on behalf of four Democratic presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. As reporter and editor of two African American newspapers, Martin was uniquely qualified to work with these presidents as a “publicity aide” turned rhetorical liaison for African American communities around the nation. His written and spoken works span from the 1930s to the 1990s—sixty plus years of historical interpretation—and include journals, memoirs, newspaper articles, interviews, and over fifty addresses to various audiences. Martin’s public address is key to this rhetorical biography, for his speeches tell stories of race relations in the United States from a largely unexplored perspective. In each epoch, Martin’s voice clearly articulated the concerns of African American communities, including housing, employment, poverty, and lingering discrimination far into the post-civil rights era. Martin believed in the power of the political process, the foundation of which was each person’s obligation to vote. Beyond the voting booth, Martin encouraged his audiences composed of African American government officials, academics, business people, fraternity members, civic groups, and local opinion leaders to become involved in the system to begin to address issues most important to them. Martin’s goal of a genuine “politics of inclusion” was gradually realized with the appointment of Blacks to government and judicial positions they had never before held. Martin chose to remain largely in the background facilitating other people’s rise to power. While there is Poinsett’s superb biography on his history, Martin’s work has otherwise been sporadically recognized in texts about civil rights, African American politics, and the black press. To my knowledge, there is no sustained study of his speeches, which have been safely archived for rediscovery by a twenty-first century audience. This project is an act of rhetorical recovery.

Subterranean Dissent in the Okefenokee Swamp: The Life and Politics of Walt Kelly's 1950s POGO

James E. Black Dr. — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:40:51 PST

The purpose of this study is to analyze how and why Kelly initially began interjecting political satire into his comic strip Pogo and how he was able to avoid being blacklisted during the time of the Red Scare. The scope of this study includes a history of the medium, a biography of the author, and a discussion of humor as a means of dissent and personal artistry. The methodology uses both historical documentation and semiotic analysis of Kelly’s work from high school, the Disney studios, The New York Star and Pogo. Case studies include gender racial, and political analysis. The findings resulted from an analysis of the archive. Conclusions reached were that Kelly’s work created a new form of political dissent that was less satirical than editorial cartoons of the day and more directed toward the enjoyment of the reader rather than at any political affiliation, a form of comedic writing that continues to be used today in such forms as the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live. This new form of political satire is important to journalistic studies since it reveals a theme of parrhesia, a Socratic term for speaking truth to power, that was further developed in the twentieth century by Star columnist I. F. Stone and French philosopher Michel Foucault. The primary limitation of this study was that Pogo was an extremely personal work, one that could not be duplicated by others successfully after the author died.

Black Public Creative Figures in the Neo-Racial Moment: An Analysis of Tyra Banks, Tyler Perry and Shonda Rhimes, 2005-2010

Danielle E. Williams — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:35:50 PST

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines how Tyra Banks, Shonda Rhimes, and Tyler Perry negotiate blackness in terms of racial representation both in their interactions with the press and public as well as in their final product. Banks, Rhimes, and Perry are among the few prominent African American executive producers working in an industry of inequality. Each is the creative figure behind a prominent prime-time television show. This project contributes to the discussion of race and representation in the field of television studies.

I argue there is a connection between how Banks, Rhimes, and Perry publicly discuss race and how these perspectives are encoded in America’s Next Top Model (Banks), Grey’s Anatomy (Rhimes), and House of Payne (Perry) from 2005-2010. These three are vital case studies because their shows offer a range of African American representations and extra-textual discourses about representations.

Chapter Two historically contextualizes the industrial shifts in mainstream broadcast networks and basic cable channels as it relates to blackness onscreen and diversity behind the scenes. ABC, The CW, and TBS are the focus of this chapter because they are the outlets for Banks, Rhimes, and Perry’s shows. I also position ABC, The CW, and TBS in relation to the rest of the industry as it has moved from the multi-channel transition to the post- network era. Chapter Three examines how Banks, Perry and Rhimes promote and publicize themselves as the key creative figure of their shows. This analysis places each individual in different sites of the burden of representation, which each handles differently. Chapter Four explores the connection between the role blackness plays in their image as public creative figure and how it is represented in their texts through a representational analysis of America’s Next Top Model, Grey’s Anatomy and House of Payne.

This dissertation advocates a neo-racial framework to examine blackness on television and behind the scenes. A neo-racial framework acknowledges that racial inequities continue to exist and the context surrounding these inequities needs to be examined. I conclude that the Banks, Rhimes, and Perry cases show that we are not in a post-racial society or in the post-network era.

The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television

Karen C. Petruska PhD — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:50:47 PST

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media policy, and technology. This study is grounded in the disciplines of television studies, media industries studies, new media studies, and cultural studies. Yet because the critic’s writing reflects the totality of television as an entertainment and public service medium, the significance of this study expands beyond disciplinary concerns to a reconsideration of the impact of television upon American culture.

This project offers a history of the television critic during the 1970s, a decade in which the field of criticism professionalized and expanded dramatically. Methodologically, I am incorporating three approaches, including historical research of the 1970s television industry, textual analysis of critical writing, and interviews with critics working during that decade. I’ve identified the 1970s for a variety of reasons, including its parallels with today’s significant technological and industrial transformations. My central texts will be the industry trade publications, Variety and Broadcasting, and national daily newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Viewing TV criticism as a profession, a historical source, and a site of scholarly analysis, this project offers a series of interventions, including a consideration of how critical writing may serve as a primary source for historians and how television studies has overlooked the significance of the critic as an object of analysis in his/her own right.

Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture

Michele P. Beverly — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:45:57 PDT

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu.

I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture.

My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential.

"Doing it For The Dudes": A Comparative Ethnographic Study of Performative Masculinity in Heavy Metal and Hardcore Subcultures

John Ike Sewell Jr. — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:14:00 PDT

Abstract: This ethnographic study compares and contrasts performative masculinities of the overwhelmingly male heavy metal (HM) and hardcore (HC) subcultures. Conclusions derived from this research indicate the following: identities associated with HM and HC conflate masculinity with working-classness, HM and HC identities (and thus masculinities) are merging at present; participation in HM and HC enclaves can serve to symbolically marginalize constituents, and this symbolic marginalization can result in repercussions in the lived world outside of subculture; the hegemonic masculinity of HM and HC subcultures is subsidiary hegemonic masculinity, meaning that it supports the male-dominated structure of mainstream culture without empowering HM and HC males in an extra-subcultural sense; and that despite these negative ramifications, HM and HC participants still find the shared identities and community interaction of these enclaves to be empowering.

Keywords: heavy metal, hardcore, subculture, masculinity, performativity, gender, class, ideology, rock music, identity

Exploring Subtext Processing in Narrative Persuasion: The Role of Eudaimonic Entertainment Use Motivation and a Supplemental Conclusion Scene

Elizabeth L. Cohen — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 08:37:01 PDT

This study sought to expand current narrative persuasion models by examining the role of subtext processing. The extended elaboration likelihood model suggests that transportation leads to persuasion by reducing counterarguments to stories’ persuasive subtexts. The model implicitly argues that transportation should reduce total subtext processing, including counterarguments and intended elaboration. But this study reasoned that people with stronger eudaimonic motivation to have meaningful entertainment experiences, would put more effort into processing stories’ subtexts while engaging with the narrative. Because less eudaimonically motivated individuals may be at risk for missing the subtext, it was also expected that adding a supplemental conclusion scene that reiterates the intended message would facilitate persuasion.Following a pre-test survey, 201 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to view an episode of the crime drama Numb3rs: one of two versions of “Harvest,” designed to promote organ donation (with or without a conclusion scene), or a control episode. After viewing, participants completed a thought-listing task and second survey. Results show that “Harvest” did not result in persuasive outcomes related to organ donation. Transportation was a marginally significant positive predictor of total subtext processing. Contrary to predictions, eudaimonic motivation negatively predicted amount of total subtext processing.Eudaimonic motivation also negatively (but marginally) predicted doctor mistrust, but this effect was moderated by conclusion condition: eudaimonic motivation was negatively associated with doctor mistrust only in the no conclusion condition. Eudaimonic motivation was also negatively (but marginally) associated with intended elaboration. Further examination showed that, compared to people with low eudaimonic motivation, those with high eudaimonic motivation were less likely to engage in intended elaboration, but only in the no conclusion condition. This pattern of findings provides indirect evidence that intended elaboration was responsible for decreasing doctor mistrust among people with high eudaimonic motivation who saw the conclusion. But surprisingly, intended elaboration was not directly related to any persuasive outcomes.The findings tentatively suggest that transportation and subtext processing can coexist and that eudaimonic motivation can affect the extent to which viewers engage in subtext processing during narrative engagement. The results also indicate that supplemental conclusions may be useful tools for narrative persuasion.

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination

Drew R. Ayers — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 09:29:55 PDT

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21^st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery.

The Playful Audience: Professional Wrestling, Media Fandom, and the Omnipresence of Media Smarks

Shane Matthew Toepfer — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:53:51 PDT

This dissertation posits a new model for understanding media audiences, bringing the scholarship of game studies to the critical analysis of audience practices. The concept of play proves beneficial for understanding the complex processes of media audiences, as they are able to traverse dichotomous categories when engaging media content. The genre of professional wrestling proves a perfect case study for examining these playful audience practices, and this study is an ethnographic account of the practices of wrestling fans. Focusing on the behaviors of fans at live wrestling events, in online contexts, and in the subcultural setting of a card game entitled Champions of the Galaxy, this study demonstrates the necessity of the concept of play for understanding what media audiences do when they engage media content. These practices, however, are always negotiated by the hegemonic power of the rules that structure how audiences are encouraged to engage content, resulting in ideological constraints on the possibilities play offers.

Strategies of Narrative Disclosure in the Rhetoric of Anti-Corporate Campaigns

Richard A. Herder — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:53:50 PDT

In the years following World War II social activists learned to refine rhetorical techniques for gaining the attention of the new global mass media and developed anti-corporate campaigns to convince some of the world’s largest companies to concede to their demands. Despite these developments, rhetorical critics have tended to overlook anti-corporate campaigns as objects of study in their own right. One can account for the remarkable success of anti-corporate campaigns by understanding how activists have practiced prospective narrative disclosure, a calculated rhetorical wager that, through the public circulation of stories and texts disclosing problematic practices and answerable decision makers, activists can influence the policies and practices of prominent corporations. In support of this thesis, I provide case studies of two anti-corporate campaigns: the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union vs. J. P. Stevens (1976 – 1980) and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers vs. Taco Bell (2001—2005). Each campaign represents a typology of practice within prospective narrative disclosure: martial (instrumental emphasis) and confrontation/alliance (popular, constitutive emphasis) respectively. The former is more likely to spark defensive responses and public backlash, and the latter is more likely to sway entire market sectors and produce lasting changes in the de facto corporate social responsibility standards of global markets.

Mass Media and Representation: a Critical Comparison of the CCTV and NBC Presentations of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Games

James R. Schiffman — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:52:20 PDT

A critical comparison of the CCTV and NBC broadcasts of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics demonstrates how two sets of narratives that on the surface glorify China and the long Chinese cultural and historic tradition offer very different ideological projections about China's rise as a power and engagement with the wider capitalist world. For CCTV, China has finally righted a longstanding historical injustice and established itself as a co-equal nation among nations. For NBC, ambivalence about China is the watchword, and further reforms that by implication will help clear China of its non-democratic, totalitarian, and economically mercantilist sheen are needed if the country is to be fully embraced. The ideological construction is more hidden in the NBC broadcast, but both depend on massive erasures of history and blurring of contemporary issues, causing both sets of narratives to fail tests of narrative coherence. Discursive struggles over the authorship of the Opening Ceremony underlie both media texts and expose their ideological positioning.

Reconsidering Testimonial Forms and Social Justice: A Study of Official and Unofficial Testimony in Chile

T. Randahl C. Morris — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:52:19 PDT

Testimony flows from a story that originates long before the opportunity to be a witness about human atrocities occurs. And, ironically, testimony – the voice that is suppressed during times of state sanctioned terror – continues to flow long after the perpetrators fade from power. It is this ethereal and enduring paradox that raises the questions of what testimonial forms are, how they communicate, and whether they positively impact social justice as evidenced by enhanced communicative freedoms.

The testimonial forms of this study are narratives about human rights atrocities which emerged from the 17-year military junta in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet. This project examines the development and uses of official and unofficial testimony surrounding times of transitional justice using a multi-modal analysis incorporating narrative and historical analysis, communication ethics, and critical theory which yields a meta-analysis of testimony and the context in which it functions. This research concludes that a life cycle of testimony exists that is organic and evolving. Furthermore, due to the unique circumstances of transitional justice periods, a theory of testimony ethics is called for to increase individual communicative freedoms that lead to enhanced social justice as well as to increase the success of truth commission communication processes.

Competing Image Vernaculars in the Anti-lynching Movement of the 1930's

Samuel P. Perry — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:21:40 PDT

Lynching photographs and images of spectacle lynching were originally produced to commemorate and celebrate lynching. Through processes of rhetorical re-circulation and repurposing of lynching photographs by those in the anti-lynching movement, lynching and visual representations of it became socially unacceptable. The rhetorical strategies concerning the display of images of violence toward African Americans developed in the anti-lynching movement became one of the most important means of protesting civil rights violations in the United States. This study examines three cases of repurposing lynching photographs during the peak of the anti-lynching movement in the 1930’s. The first is the NAACP sponsored Art Commentary on Lynching. I examine four pieces of art in this exhibition that violate the conventions of lynching photography by representing the lynching in other visual mediums that allow the artists to manipulate the lynching scene. The second chapter examines the generation and circulation of an anti-lynching pamphlet featuring a photograph of the lynching of Rubin Stacy. The photograph is repurposed through the interaction of text and image in the pamphlet in a series of rhetorical questions, details of the case, and general information about lynching. The third case is the song, “Strange Fruit.” The song conjures an image through its use of ekphrasis, and suggests a particular reading of that image throughout the performance of the song. I focus on Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song, but draw conclusions about the song and its various performances and recordings. I argue that the use and manipulation of lynching photographs raised social consciousness and public awareness in opposition to spectacle lynching, and re-articulated the meaning of violence, and representations of violence, toward African Americans in the public sphere.

Rhetorical Failures, Psychoanalytic Heroes: A Psychorhetoric of Social Change

Kimberly D. Huff — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:20:33 PDT

This dissertation confronts the rhetorical discipline with the Real of an antagonism illuminated through its encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather than eliding the desire of subjects in favor of traditional discursive rhetorical solutions, the pschorhetorical response I will propose locates desire and the subject in the moments where communication fails and seeks to make public the realization of desire. Through the psychoanalytic analysis of three acts of agency that comprise rhetorical failure, I will argue that rhetorical analyses of social change are actually not persuasive enough in their acceptance that social reality is entirely mediated. The cases will show that rhetorical failure is tantamount to psychoanalytic heroism. Utilizing what I call psychorhetoric, I will argue that rhetoric’s investment in social change can be much enhanced by opening to the concept of a nonsymbolizable ethics of the Real.

Webs of Resistance: The Citizen Online Journalism of the Nigerian Digital Diaspora

Farooq A. Kperogi — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:33:21 PDT

The enhanced discursive opportunity structures that the Internet enables has inspired a momentous revolution in the Nigerian media landscape. This dissertation chronicles the emergence and flowering of the citizen and alternative online journalism of the Nigerian diasporic public sphere located primarily in the United States. Using case-study research, it profiles the major diasporan online citizen media outlets and highlights instances where these geographically distant citizen media sites shaped and influenced both the national politics and policies of the homeland and the media practices of the domestic media formation.

The study makes the case that while it is customary in the scholarship on sovereignty, state-civil society relations, and diaspora studies to emphasize domination and one-dimensionality in cultural flows, the participation of members of the Nigerian digital diaspora in the politics and discourses of their homeland, from their exilic locations in the West through the instrumentality of online citizen media, illustrates that citizens, especially in the age of the Internet, are not mere powerless subjects and receivers of informational flows from the institutions of the state and corporate mass media but can be active consumers and producers of informational resources and even purveyors of political power in ways that amply exemplify trans-local reciprocality.

It also argues that the Nigerian diaspora media might very well be a prototype of an evolving, Internet-enabled, trans-local, and mutual informational and cultural exchange between the educated deterritorialized ethnoscapes of peripheral nations whose exile in the West endues them with symbolic and cultural capital and the private institutions and governments of their homelands. The study recommends a comparative study of the online citizen journalism of Third World virtual diasporas in the West.

Facebook Friendships between College/University Instructors and Students: Deciding Whether or Not to Allow Students as Friends, Communicating with Students, and the Individual Differences that Influence Instructors' Impression Management on Facebook

Melissa S. Plew — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:17:10 PST

This research examined Facebook friendships between college/university instructors and students. Based on the development of instructor-student dual relationships, this study described instructors’ Facebook use with students. This included explanations for allowing/not allowing students, communication with students, and ethical concerns. Rooted in the theories of impression management, self-monitoring and role conflict, plus the concept of ambient awareness, hypotheses predicted relationships between instructors’ individual differences and Facebook use: (1) self-monitoring would be positively related to role conflict; and (2) self-monitoring, (3) role conflict, and (4) ambient awareness would be positively related to instructors’ self-presentation, impression management behaviors, and privacy management. Emails were sent to faculty at 270 colleges/universities throughout the U.S. and 331 instructors completed the online survey. Of these, 56.2% allowed students as friends. Open-ended answers revealed that instructors allowed students as friends to communicate, to facilitate learning about each other, and because it was difficult to decline requests. Some instructors did not allow certain students (e.g., problematic students, undergraduates). They communicated by commenting on and liking posts on students’ pages, and had ethical concerns about negative consequences. Open-ended answers revealed that instructors did not allow students as friends to maintain the professional divide and avoid favoritism, which explained their ethical concerns. Hierarchical regression analyses tested the predicted relationships. Results revealed that self-monitoring approached significance as having a positive relationship with role conflict and a negative relationship with privacy management, but was not related to self-presentation or impression management behaviors. Role conflict was not related to impression management. Awareness of students was positively related to self-presentation and impression management behaviors, but unexpectedly, perception of students’ awareness of instructors was negatively related to privacy management. A partial correlation analysis tested high/low self-monitors separately and not only replicated the results, but also revealed that high self-monitors’ perception of students’ awareness was positively correlated with self-presentation and impression management behaviors. These findings indicate that ambient awareness is related to online communication and should be studied further. This is especially intriguing since the two types of ambient awareness related differently to the three types of impression management studied in this research.

The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America

Chara Kay Van Horn — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:54:53 PST

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are two events that scarred America and its people. In the aftermath of the assassination and the terrorist attacks, the American public was forced to sift through competing messages existing in the public sphere in order to make meaning out of the events. Although the American government, within a few days of both events, released who was ultimately responsible (Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for 9/11), the people were still left with coming to terms for why such violence occurred.

In order to provide a frame from which the American people could view and understand the assassination and the terrorist attacks, two blue ribbon commissions were formed: the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the terrorist attacks. Despite the reports’ purposes, significant segments of the population questioned both Commissions’ conclusions. In both instances, conspiratorial understandings of the events grew after the publication of the reports so that, in the case of the Warren Commission, most of the American public believe Oswald did not act alone and, in the case of the 9/11 Commission, there is growing belief that the government’s failure to predict and prevent the terrorist attacks was the result of a governmental conspiracy.

This dissertation seeks to understand why, in our current times, official discourses are unable to prevail over conspiracy theories. This study proposes to illustrate the power of conspiracy discourse by examining it through the lens of official discourses that were designed, in part, to head-off conspiracy beliefs before they gained momentum within the American public. Such an inquiry will provide three main benefits: it will contribute to a more exacting understanding of the rhetorical power of conspiracy arguments in our times; it will provide insight into the relationship between official and conspiracy discourses (especially as they now exist); and, such a study has implications for determining the current direction of political life.