Communication

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“THE FIGHT IS YOURS”: ALLY ADVOCACY, IDENTITY RECONFIGURATION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE
(2019) Howell, William; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Since at least 1990, scholars and activists have used the term “ally” to describe and theorize a distinct sociopolitical role: someone from a majority identity group working to end that group’s oppression of another identity group. While the term is recent, “allies” are present throughout America’s constant struggle to actualize equality and justice. The identity-rooted ideologies that empowered allies disempowered the groups for and with whom they sought justice and equality. But those empowering identities were pieces, more or less salient, of complex intersectional people. Given the shared nature of identity, this process also necessarily pitted allies against those with whom they shared an identity. In this project, I ask two questions about past ally advocacy—questions that are often asked about contemporary ally advocacy. First, in moments of major civil rights reform, how did allies engage their own intersecting identities—especially those ideologically-charged identities with accrued power from generations of marginalizing and oppressing? Second, how did allies engage other identities that were not theirs—especially identities on whose oppression their privilege was built? In asking these two questions—about self-identity and others’ identity—I assemble numerous rhetorical fragments into “ally advocacy.” This bricolage is in recognition of rhetoric’s fragmentary nature, and in response to Michael Calvin McGee’s call to assemble texts for criticism. I intend to demonstrate that ally advocacy is such a text, manifesting (among other contexts) around the women’s suffrage amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the marriage equality movement. I argue that allies rarely engaged the ideologies underlying identity-based inequality in any open, direct, or thorough manner, especially at these moments when those ideologies were optimally vulnerable. I conclude that allies must accept that they marginalize others through identity and its adjacent ideology, and allies must help identity-group peers reconstitute their shared identity in recognition of this. Such reconstituting is necessary for a healthy American democracy but especially so in the late-2010s, as Americans persistently grapple with a political system fractured along identity lines.
Gold Star Pilgrimages: Tracing Maternal Citizenship Through the Great War Era, 1914-1933
(2019) Lucas, Melissa Anne; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
From 1930-1933, the U.S. government funded Gold Star Pilgrimages—two-week voyages for Gold Star mothers to military graveyards in Europe where their sons were buried. These Pilgrimages emerged after a decade of public deliberation over the responsibilities of American mothers to motivate sacrifice during war and commemorate death at war’s end. The political rhetoric surrounding the Pilgrimages often valorized white, biological, and patriotic Gold Star mothers as the most authentic ideals of women’s citizenship, condemned women who challenged the patriotism of maternal sacrifice, and marginalized African American mothers through segregationist practices. This project analyzes how Pilgrimage rhetoric constructed American Gold Star mothers as models of citizenship and how this ideal empowered and limited women’s political engagement and identity during an era of war, social protest, and suffrage. The chapters specifically trace how public discourse before and during the Pilgrimages defined, challenged, and reinterpreted maternal citizenship throughout the Great War era. In this study, I analyze three case studies that shaped Gold Star rhetoric and in turn conceptions of maternal citizenship from 1914 to 1933. Prior to American entry into the Great War, women’s peace and preparedness organizations publicly clashed over meanings of maternal responsibility (Chapter 1). After the war and women’s enfranchisement, Pilgrimage advocates and government officials debated Gold Star Pilgrimages through a series of congressional hearings. In the process, they exalted the Gold Star mother over more progressive forms of women’s citizenship (Chapter 2). After the government announced its decision to segregate the Pilgrimages, many prospective African American Gold Star Pilgrims publicly justified their decision to accept or boycott the Pilgrimages as a performance of maternal citizenship (Chapter 3). The Pilgrimages debates ultimately illustrate how war commemoration can function to exalt and discipline performances of maternal citizenship. The contemporary rhetoric of Gold Star mothers continues to spark public debate about what it means to authentically embody the Gold Star ideal. This project challenges the notion that the Great War has been “forgotten” in U.S. public memory by highlighting the enduring rhetorical legacies of Gold Star Pilgrimages in contemporary political discourse.
CONSTRUCTING A LEGACY: THE ROLE OF ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIONS IN REMEMBERING BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION
(2019) Bruner, Jaclyn Leigh; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the landmark Supreme Court decision that outlawed legal segregation in the United States. This project engages with three commemorative events that mark the anniversary of the decision--the 25th, 50th, and 64th anniversaries--to investigate how public memory of Brown v. Board of Education is constructed and how the legacy of the decision is remembered. Anniversaries, as moments where kairotic and chronotic conceptions of time come together, offer an opportunity to (re)define the past through the work of public memory. Although Brown’s memory at the “monumental” 25th anniversary featured coordinated regional commemorations, Brown’s legacy of race and memory is nationalized and largely sanitized by the 50th anniversary. In contrast to these momentous anniversaries, the non-monumental 64th anniversary articulated a counter-regional identity for Topeka, Kansas. By tracing the public memory of Brown across a 60-year period, this dissertation extends James Boyd White’s theory of justice-as-translation, asserting that the critical, rhetorical attention to the public memory of the Brown decision enacts a form of narrative justice and, consequently, advances a new way of conceptualizing persistent, de facto segregation and racial injustice in our contemporary world.
LEGITIMIZING THE CULTURE OF BIG TIME SPORT: RHETORIC AND THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT-ATHLETE
(2019) Alt, Rebecca A.; Murray Yang, Michelle; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Legitimizing the Culture of Big-Time Sport: Rhetoric and the Myth of the Student Athlete analyzes and evaluates organizational rhetoric in the context of “big-time” sport, or universities with high-profile, revenue generating [men’s] athletics. I analyze the macro organizational rhetoric of the NCAA, rhetoric at the institutional level (in my project, the University of Maryland), and rhetoric of resistance from two college athlete advocacy organizations. I engage organizational discourse ranging from handbooks, strategic plans, and mission statements to promotional materials, press releases and public addresses. My texts were acquired from archival sources, news sources, and online. I also articulate my analysis in terms of the broader cultural and ideological formations at play, such as corporatized higher education, neoliberalism, and hegemonic masculinity. My purpose is to explore discourse that legitimizes the culture of big-time sport. I argue that the myth of the student-athlete, which hinges on three axiological-ideological topoi – purity, welfare, and excellence – is the primary legitimizing discourse of big-time sport culture – both the good and the bad. This project holds both disciplinary and social significance. Whereas important research has been conducted on sports from mass media or public relations perspectives (i.e., crisis communication during scandal), this dissertation expands the scholarly view to consider the networked and interdependent rhetorical culture of sport and higher education as illuminated through competing organizational discourse. Further, this project is interdisciplinary; it aims to join scholarship in critical/cultural studies disciplines with scholarship in communication. As a result, this project contributes to both the academic and public debates surrounding big-time sport and intervenes with practical recommendations for organizations, leaders, fans, and critics of big-time sport. The issues my dissertation explores are urgent in nature given the issues big-time sport fosters, especially as they implicate the health and well-being of college athletes and the quality of higher education. Aside from shedding light on current issues in big-time sport from a rhetorical perspective, this dissertation makes the following contributions to rhetoric and communication scholarship: First, it explains the ideological and axiological topoi of the myth of the student-athlete; second, it provides an extended critical framework to understand and analyze discourse of and about big-time college sport; and third, it bridges disciplinary and interdisciplinary divides in scholarship to contribute practical interventions for the problems in big-time sport.
COMMEMORATIVE ACTIVISM: TRACING BLACK NATIONALISM THROUGH CONTEMPORARY CAMPAIGNS TO MEMORIALIZE U.S. SLAVERY, 1991-2017
(2018) Fitzmaurice, Megan Irene; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
While much of current public discourse focuses on the ways that black activists are working to desecrate or destroy racist memorials, there has been less discussion about the ways that lobbying to produce antiracist memorials can also serve as a form of protest. This study engages three case studies wherein black activist groups fought for the construction of slavery memorials in New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond. These instances of commemorative activism are the focus of this study, wherein activists challenge existing commemorative culture by engaging alternative memorial practices. The underlying premise of this study is that these slavery memorials and the activists’ rhetoric resisted absent and/or distorted memories of slavery in their communities. This study analyzes the debates surrounding these memorials to demonstrate ways that the activists recirculated historical ideologies of black nationalism in their protest rhetoric. Specifically, the activists engaged themes of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism as they sought to challenge a commemorative culture rooted in white supremacy. This study accordingly situates commemorative activism as a contemporary strategy of resistance in the ongoing black freedom struggle. The black activists in this study fought to determine the commemorative landscape, liberate their ancestors’ memories from post-slavery containment, recover memories of black resistance from selective amnesia, and advance global solidarity surrounding memories of the slave trade and ongoing anti-black racism. This study also examines ways that the subsequent commemorations represent enduring repositories of black nationalist ideologies, challenging racist cultural attitudes embedded in the memorials’ environment. Through their form and function, these commemorations visualize the continued relevance of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism within post-slavery communities. These memorials ultimately reflect the beliefs of the activists who fought for their construction, revealing the radical potential of commemorative activism to challenge racist attitudes, structures, and landscapes.
Reckoning with Freedom: Legacies of Exclusion, Dehumanization, and Black Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Freedmen's Bureau
(2017) Lu, Jessica H.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Charged with facilitating the transition of former slaves from bondage to freedom, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played a crucial role in shaping the experiences of black and African Americans in the years following the Civil War. Many historians have explored the agency’s administrative policies and assessed its pragmatic effectiveness within the social, political, and economic milieu of the emancipation era. However, scholars have not adequately grappled with the lasting implications of its arguments and professed efforts to support freedmen. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to analyze and unpack the rhetorical textures of the Bureau’s early discourse and, in particular, its negotiation of freedom as an exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, idea. By closely examining a wealth of archival documents— including letters, memos, circular announcements, receipts, congressional proceedings, and newspaper articles—I interrogate how the Bureau extended antebellum freedom legacies to not merely explain but police the boundaries of American belonging and black inclusion. Ultimately, I contend that arguments by and about the Bureau contributed significantly to the reconstruction of a post-bellum racial order that affirmed the racist underpinnings of the social contract, further contributed to the dehumanization of former slaves, and prompted black people to resist the ongoing assault on their freedom. This project thus provides a compelling case study that underscores how rhetorical analysis can help us better understand the ways in which seemingly progressive ideas can be used to justify exercises of power and domination. Additionally, this interpretation of the Bureau’s primary role as a mechanism of supervision, rather than support, sheds light on the history of unjust practices that persist today in American race relations. Finally, this study affirms how black people have persevered in inventive and innovative ways to disrupt the pervasive discourse that seeks to destroy them.
Freedom from the Market: Antagonistic Disruptions of Neoliberal Capitalism
(2017) Slosarski, Yvonne Wanda; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The 2016 U.S. presidential election showcased prominent rejections of the existing political and economic order, as many voters channeled frustrations over rising inequality and instability into support for candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who acknowledged the widespread economic struggles of the market globalization age. This recent electoral example is one of many global rejections of free market expansion, a phenomenon that my dissertation examines. While rhetorical scholars have addressed the growing prominence of the free market and its logics, my project examines how people have resisted what is often called neoliberalism. Taking an approach to rhetoric derived from theories of articulation, in this project, I define neoliberalism as a hegemonic articulation that strings together four governing principles: freedom as primary, economics as natural, the individual as rational actor, and the free market as pure. The project examines three activist discourses that challenged neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s and that continue to resonate today: the 1986 U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Economic Justice for All pastoral letter, the Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal of 1996, and Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests. With each case, I demonstrate how neoliberal discourses themselves fostered tensions and how people exploited these tensions to challenge neoliberal hegemony; following theories of articulation, I call these challenges “antagonisms.” This project suggests that we should understand activist moments as “antagonistic disruptions” that that interrupt hegemonic discourses and evoke the possibility of their demise. Taken together, these case studies offer three major lessons for scholars and activists. First, the project suggests that powerful discourses—like neoliberalism—are comprised of necessary tensions, and that scholars can identify those tensions and that activists can exploit them. Second, the dissertation teaches scholars and activists that existing discourses and previous antagonisms enable people to challenge powerful discourses. Thus, scholars and activists learn that antagonisms are disruptive when they participate in legible frames of reference. Third, the cases suggest that the more multi-modal and frequent the antagonistic engagement, the more forceful the disruption. This project then, recommends that scholars study multi-modal recurrence and that activists strive for multi-modal consistency.
COLD WAR II: UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND IDENTITY
(2017) McCloskey, Thomas Laurence; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity showcases tensions between nationalism and internationalism in a post-Cold War era. Ukraine’s political leaders and ordinary citizens express opposing views about the identity and sovereignty of their nation, as some want closer ties with the European Union, while others seek closer relations with the Russian Federation. The myths and memories of Ukraine’s Cossack past, as well as its time in the former Soviet Union, animate discourses throughout the conflict. These debates result in no clear consensus about Ukrainian identity. The inability of Ukraine to find a unified nationalist identity in the conflict highlights a post-Cold War paradox. Ukraine is unable to articulate a unifying identity because the myths and memories of the Cold War continue to circulate in public discourse. International organizations are largely unable to legitimize either side’s claims of identity in the conflict. This chaos has invited outside intervention, as both the Russia Federation and the United States attempt to influence Ukraine’s decisions about sovereignty and identity in ways benefitting Russian or American interests. These discourses mirror Cold War debates over Soviet satellite countries, as a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people rage on in political speeches, online forums, and in international organizations. Ukraine is thus mired in a cycle of unrest, as corruption and language issues continue to prevent the nation from articulating a unified nationalist identity. Ukraine’s crisis showcases the inherent conflict within notions of sovereignty, as both self-determination and freedom from outside intervention often contradict the expected obligations of nations to protect not only their citizens but also those of other nations whose human rights are threatened. This project challenges the notion that post-Cold War states can easily move beyond the legacies of the Cold War, as their past myths and memories continue to define their sovereignty and identity well after the conflict ends.
The Carnival of the Courtroom: Public Moral Argument, Antiwar Protest, and the Chicago Eight Trial
(2017) Depretis, Abbe Sentina; Gaines, Robert N.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this project, I examined rhetorical activities of the 1969–1970 Chicago Eight Trial, focusing on discourse from the trial itself (e.g., from the eight defendants, the judge, the lawyers, and the court reports) and discourse occurring outside the trial (e.g., newspaper reports) from 1968 to the present. Because the Chicago Eight Trial played an important role in the discussion of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement, I sought to interrogate the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse within the trial, in the media coverage of the trial, and among the participants during the trial. This case was situated within the context of antiwar protests in the United States as well as the transformative context of the 1960s, specifically contestations about the Cold War, civil rights, political assassinations, and the military draft. Overall, this project was intended to deepen understanding of how public moral argument, Baktinian carnival, and guerrilla theater functioned in discourses of the Chicago Eight Trial, whose defendants aimed to challenge the dominant sociopolitical culture over the U.S. war in Vietnam. In addition, the Chicago Eight Trial was a prime example of the ways that public moral arguments can be used to disseminate messages about the political, ethical, and social conditions in the United States. Finally, in this project, I sought to understand how the rhetoric involving the Chicago Eight Trial was framed by the defendants and by the media. The project contributes to literature about framing, protest movements, and social change.
The Rhetoric of Eco-Revolutionary Activism: Constructing the Earth Liberation Front
(2017) Olson, Jade; Klumpp, James F; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the mid-1990s, a new voice of environmental protest emerged in the United States. Frustrated by the failures of both mainstream and radical environmental activism to protect the Earth from the catastrophic effects of industrial capitalism, a small group of clandestine activists identifying as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) utilized vandalism, arson, and other means of property destruction to articulate a rhetoric of revolutionary environmental resistance. An unlikely coalition of voices from industry, government, and the established environmental movement emerged to oppose ELF, painting the activists as dangerous eco-terrorists. This study examines the dialectical contest to provide the dominant public account of ELF’s enigmatic protest rhetoric. This rhetoric is referred to in the study as eco-revolutionary activism, for it rejected even the radical discourses of its ideological predecessors such as Earth First!, embracing instead a holistic critique of capitalism, the state, and contemporary civilization. The study traces the dialectic that unfolded through a series of key moments in the rise and fall of ELF in the public imaginary. ELF made national headlines in 1998 when affiliated activists set fire to seven buildings at a Colorado ski resort as a protest against the resort’s planned expansion into ecologically fragile habitat. In the years that followed, ELF activists went on to commit more than 100 protest actions, causing millions of dollars in economic damage and prompting foundational questions about the meaning of violence, the limits of protest, and the responsibility of individuals to combat harmful systems. Anti-ELF rhetors publicly condemned ELF activists as eco-terrorists, taking advantage of cultural anxieties about terrorism that emerged in the wake of events such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. By early 2006, the rhetoric of terror had successfully trumped ELF’s eco-revolutionary rhetoric, functionally ending the public dialectic on ELF. The study finds that, while ELF’s eco-revolutionary voice was compelling and innovative, its flaws made it susceptible to the more powerful rhetoric of terror.

Communication

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