College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Living a Participatory Life: Reformatting Rhetoric for Demanding, Digital Times(2023) Salzano, Matthew; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Living a Participatory Life explores how people navigate demanding, digital times where social movements and digital media meet, in the context of what media scholars refer to as the participatory condition. The participatory condition describes how participation is an inherent, inescapable condition of digitality with its always-on and always-prompting media; it is distinctly different from the participatory cultures theorized of the blogosphere and Web 2.0. In the participatory condition, the digital is demanding, and our demands are digitized. What does it mean to live a participatory life in the participatory condition? How should we practice rhetoric (as a productive and critical art) during demanding, digital times? To aid in answering these questions, this dissertation offers a format theory of participation. I theorize four key concepts—parameters, imperatives, trans-situations, and sensibilities—to define participation as a formatted rhetorical practice that modulates affect and sensibilities within a formatted ecology. In the following three chapters, I locate three participatory sensibilities from advocates for social change across intersectional issues: Disparticipants, offering participatory dissent at the Women’s March; Fictocritics, generating criticism of the YouTube manosphere; and Installectuals, transforming Instagram during the Summer 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism. Each illustrates the ramifications of the participatory condition and how advocates for social change navigate it. The dissertation concludes with a provocation to learn from these sensibilities and begin reformatting our own participatory lives.Item A Feminist Affective Turn for Public Relations: Mothers, Passionate Publics, and the Childhood Vaccine Debate(2016) Kennedy, Amanda Kae; Toth, Elizabeth L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project proposes a feminist intervention in how affect and publics are theorized in public relations research. Drawing from extant literature, I argue that public relations theories of affect and publics have been apolitical and lack depth and context (Leitch & Motion, 2010a). Using the context of the online childhood vaccine debate, I illustrate several theories and concepts of the new feminist affective turn, as well as postmodern theories of affect, relevant to public relations research: (a) Public Feelings, “ugly” feelings, agency, and community (Cvetkovich, 2012; Ngai, 2007); (b) passionate politics (Mouffe, 2014); (c) postmodern assemblages, biopower, and body politics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Foucault, 1984); (d) affective facts and logics of future threats (Massumi, 2010); and (e) affective ethics (Bertleson & Murphie, 2010). Scholarship in the areas of public relations, risk, feminist and postmodern affect theory, and the vaccine debate provided theoretical grounding for this project. My research questions asked: How is feminist affect theory embodied by mothers in the vaccine debate? How do mothers understand risks as affective facts in the vaccine debate (if at all)? What affective logics are used by mothers in the vaccine debate (if any)? And, What are sources of knowledge for mothers in the vaccine debate? Multi-sited online ethnographic methods were used to explore how feminist affect theory contributes to public relations research, including 29 one-on-one in-depth interviews with mothers of young children and participant observation of 15 online discussions about vaccines on parenting websites BabyCenter.com, TheBump.com, and WhatToExpect.com. I used snowball sampling to recruit interview participants and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to analyze interview and online data. Results show that feminist affect theory contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge in public relations by politicizing and contextualizing understandings of publics and elucidating how affective facts and logics inform publics’ knowledge and choices, specifically in the context of risk. I also found evidence of suppression of dissent (Martin, 2015) and academic bias in vaccine debate research, which resulted in cultures of silence. Further areas of study included how specific contexts such as motherhood and issues of privilege and access affect publics’ experiences, knowledges, and choices.Item (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic: Violence, Affect, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Migration Literature(2007-05-29) Shaw, Barbara L.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a project of literary reclamation, canonical revision, cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary remapping. Drawing on American studies, women's studies, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean studies, particularly performance theory and recent theoretical work on affectivity, it analyzes the negotiations of protagonists who move back and forth between and among cultures and nations, exploring complex possibilities for subjectivity, identity, and citizenship within worlds of domestic and neocolonial violence. Collectively, America's Dream, The Line of the Sun, Geographies of Home, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Unbelonging re-map Gilroy's influential theory of the Black Atlantic in three ways: by tracing the legacies of colonization in relation to interpersonal violence; by re-writing national narratives of the metropole from migrant Caribbean women's perspectives; and by including Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Jamaica, within its purview. While arguing for the complex personhood of these migrant protagonists and elucidating their legacies of pain and healing, alongside their victimization and resistance, this dissertation also provides a materialist analysis of cultural production, examining how these books circulate as objects in the global/local economy of book selling and distribution. Through a small-scale ethnographic study of independent publishers, alongside a material and visual cultural analysis of the book covers, it analyzes the politics of publication and canonization of Caribbean women's literature. By centering the Caribbean and its diaspora in an American Studies project, this dissertation pushes the boundaries of the discipline beyond the examination of cultures in the United States or American imperialism in other nations. (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic asks not only that the Caribbean be considered part of the Americas, but also that the relational aspects of migration between the Caribbean on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other, become part of the new cartographies of American Studies.