Communication
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Item DIGITAL PLACE-MAKING AND PLATFORM POLITICS: HOW USERS TRANSFORMED AND RECODED THEIR LIVES ONLINE IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19(2024) Phipps, Elizabeth Brooke; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Digital Place-making and Platform Politics: How Users Transformed and Recoded their Lives Online in the Wake of COVID-19 examines the political & cultural turmoil at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, where daily life for millions around the world shifted to digital platforms. Digital users turned to the unique affordances of these platforms for civic activism through what I term “digital place-making,” the rhetorical activity involved in cultivating digital places through specific technologies and practices. Drawing from an ecological rhetorical approach and an understanding of digital experiences as transplatform, Digital Place-making and Platform Politics utilizes a methodology that incorporates rhetorical space & place theory, textual analysis, visual analysis, digital ethnographic work, and “in situ” field work to capture the overlapping and simultaneous nature of place-making for digital users. How does digital place-making impact the relations between users, platforms, and political culture? To render digital place-making as a concept, this dissertation navigates through three case studies between 2020-2022. The first chapter looks at the video game platform Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and how users experiencing lockdown conditions in 2020 repurposed the platform as a site for political expression. This first study establishes the foundational relationship between infrastructure, user practices, and their engagement with broader political discourse through place-making. The second chapter builds upon this role of infrastructure and user practice creating place by looking at how the platform Twitch trains streamers on their platform to create places for community, and then how streamers leveraged these places for resistance and activism on the platform itself throughout 2021-2022. This second study illuminates the way rhetorical place is constructed through both discourse and infrastructure, and how digital place possesses vulnerabilities unique to the condition of digitality. The third chapter addresses Epic Games’ fraught commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington, held in 2021 on the popular video game platform Fortnite. This final study serves as a capstone illustration of the unique vulnerabilities that digital place-making poses for public memory and political discourse.Item DISINFORMATION THAT ENTERTAINS: THE ALT-RIGHT’S USE OF POPULAR AND POLITICAL CULTURE STRATEGIES(2024) Montgomery, Fielding Edmund; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project takes seriously the nested relationship of popular culture and political culture, highlighting how that relationship has promulgated alt-right disinformation in the long Trump era. Throughout this study, strategies of conspiracy, horror, and dog whistles are examined, as well as considering audiovisual concepts like realism and mimesis. Such alt-right disinformation establishes reactionary frames of racism, misogyny, and anti-governance. This work looks at both sides of the popular/political culture relationship, examining cinematic films, political campaign advertisements, and social media posts. I conclude by offering satire as one potential counterstrategy against alt-right disinformation that also resides in the nested relationship between popular and political culture.Item A BLACK NATIONALIST WORLD: THE RHETORIC OF LEADERS OF THE UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION FROM 1914 TO 1925(2022) Carroll, Darrian Robert; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black people continue to struggle for freedom. This project examines the way that leaders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fought for the freedom of Black people from 1914 to 1925. UNIA leaders rhetorically fought for Black people’s freedom by building on their belief in Black self-determination to practice world-making and envision a public. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ espousal of evaluations of the present and expectations for the future illustrates how UNIA leaders developed a view of a public capable of including all Black people and left behind a roadmap for how to make a more equitable world now. Chapter One investigates Marcus Garvey’s “Address to the 2nd Universal Negro Improvement Association Convention.” Garvey’s evaluations and expectations, his world-making, and his freedom dream, provided the foundation for UNIA leaders’ view of their public as one that included all Black people. Chapter Two examines the rhetoric of UNIA leaders Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, and Marcus Garvey during the “Africa for the Africans” campaign. The second chapter reveals how leaders’ world-making rhetoric provided them with the opportunity to envision a parallel public—a public inclusive of all Black people and insulated from the negative views of the “dominant” public. The third chapter examines how leaders articulated evaluations of the past and present and expectations for the future to develop a view of their public as one still capable of supporting Black self-determination despite the imprisoning of Marcus Garvey. UNIA leaders like Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, Amy Jacques Garvey, William Sherrill, T. Thomas Fortune, and Marcus Garvey exemplified a rhetoric of champions as they predicted the future success of their public. The fourth chapter investigates how the most indispensable women leaders of the UNIA reflected on the UNIA’s successes from 1914 to 1925 after the UNIA had passed its prime. Chapter Four turns to Amy Ashwood Garvey’s and Amy Jacques Garvey’s reminisces of Marcus Garvey in their interviews for “The Ghost of Garvey” conducted by Lerone Bennett Jr. In their interviews, Ashwood Garvey and Jacques Garvey produced a rhetoric of falling forward by evaluating the UNIA’s past and expecting that the efforts of the UNIA leaders would have purchase for Black people fighting for freedom in the future. Ashwood Garvey’s and Jacques Garvey’s rhetoric pushed a view of leaders’ public as strong and supportive of Black self-determination into perpetuity. This project concludes by reflecting on what UNIA leaders’ world-making and envisioning of a public illuminate about Black Nationalism in the 1960s and world-making now. Leaders did not get to see their Black Nationalist world come to fruition, but UNIA leaders did bring millions of Black people together around the idea that if they believed in self-determination, the future was theirs for the making. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ rhetoric from 1914 to 1925 evinces how by believing in Black self-determination and articulating their own evaluations of the present and expectations for the future, UNIA leaders charted a path to a different world.Item Facilitating Expressed Empathy: Lessons Learned from Public Conversations(2021) Heist, Nora Lee; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Empathy, it seems, is having a moment. However—even as empathy’s conceptual popularity is on the rise—displays of empathy are on the decline, reflecting polarization trends in the United States. This project seeks to cultivate a culture of empathy in a time when we are particularly hopeless about the future of public conversations and democracy. I forward empathy as a practice for elevating deliberative and dialogic discourses by helping participants more fully consider other perspectives, asking: what deliberative and dialogic practices facilitate empathy? To answer this question, I articulate a rhetorical definition of empathy. Individuals practice what I term expressed empathy when they 1) express shared emotions with the other, 2) use language that acknowledges and imagines the other’s experience, and 3) articulate a recognition of difference between self and other. I analyze three distinct public conversations to answer this project’s central question, responding to calls for research on actual examples of deliberation and dialogue. In the first chapter, I analyze audio tapes from four 1968 Citizens Interracial Committee community dialogues on education in San Diego public schools. I identify two distinct types of expressed empathy based on CIC participants’ communication, which I term second- and third-person expressed empathy. In the second chapter, I examine 75 transcripts of community conversations hosted by the Local Voices Network and New York Public Library from February 2019 to March 2020. These conversations illustrate the value of expressed empathy centered around similar experiences, as they also prompt questions about the degree of difference necessary for expressed empathy to meaningfully enhance the epistemic goals of dialogue. In the third chapter, I review videos from a 90-minute virtual dialogue I hosted in collaboration with the Dayton International Peace Museum during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This case explores participant use of narrative kernels as resources for expressing empathy based on similar experiences, along with the kernels’ conforming influence. Taken together these cases represent a range of rhetorical practices along the deliberation-dialogue spectrum. From these cases, I articulate lessons learned about conversation formats, facilitation strategies, and communication practices for cultivating second-person expressed empathy in dialogue and deliberation settings.Item PATHOLOGICAL PREGNANCIES: THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S ASSAULT ON MIGRANT WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND HOW BROWN WOMEN ACTIVISTS SPOKE BACK TO POWER(2022) de Saint Felix, Skye; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Abortion and immigration are two polarizing political issues in the United States. These issues were made more contentious under the Trump administration (2017-2021) that tapped into cultural and historical memories of abortion as a pathological practice. Situated at the intersection of abortion and immigration rights, migrant women’s reproduction was treated as something to be monitored and controlled to preserve white patriarchal interests. The Trump administration capitalized on the racist and sexist tenets inherent to rhetorical pathology to construct an enemy in migrant women that only his administration was qualified to neutralize through deportation, arrest, and extreme legislation. Rhetorical pathology, in the context of anti-abortion and anti-migrant policies, resulted in contradictory commitments. For instance, the Trump administration and his supporters at once humanized the fetus, but dehumanized Brown women and children by blocking them from entering the country and accessing basic needs. Administrative officials also argued that their anti-abortion platform prevented racial genocide by saving Black and Brown babies while they treated them as enemy threats to be purged from the country. I ultimately argue that white supremacy and patriarchy are unifying ideologies in rhetorical pathology that help these contradictions “make sense” for Trump supporters and anti-abortion groups. In Chapter One, I examine the Trump administration’s efforts to force birth and block paths to citizenship for migrant girls by studying the case of Jane Doe and the abuses she faced in the Office of Refugee Resettlement Custody (ORR). In Chapter Two, I investigate how white supremacists and misogynists co-opted progressive rhetoric to undermine its force by analyzing Trump’s policies that heavily regulated migrant women’s reproduction. Such cruel and unconscionable actions included reinstating (and expanding) the Global Gag Rule and passing “conscience” legislation that allows healthcare providers to discriminate against healthcare they deem “immoral” like abortion care or emergency contraceptives. In this chapter, we also see how conservatives inverted progressive frames like “Black Lives Matter” to argue that “Babies Lives Matter” to fulfill an anti-choice agenda and describe themselves as abolitionists and saviors of Brown children. In Chapter Three, I show the ways in which Brown women activists reappropriated the rhetorical power that conservatives mimicked to justify their inhumane policies. Activist women reclaimed their rhetorical power of definition, shared stories of both horror and community uplift, and used rhetorical secrecy to combat rhetorical pathologizations. Legislation in support of migrant women emphasized healing and care to undermine the rhetorics of pathology. This project ultimately exposes how rhetorical pathology operates in order to neutralize its power and center the voices and experiences of migrant women in abortion and immigration debates.Item COMBATTING WHITE SUPREMACY ON CAMPUS: RACIALIZED COUNTER-MEMORY AND STUDENT PROTESTS IN THE 21st CENTURY(2021) Farzad-Phillips, Alyson Beata; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an abundance of student protests at colleges and universities in the United States. Many of these protests cluster around the issues of white supremacy and anti-Black racism as they function in higher education settings—issues that have historically and contemporarily plagued United States colleges and universities. In this project, I analyze the arguments produced by college student protestors during race-based controversies at the University of Missouri, the University of Maryland, and the University of Georgia between 2015 and 2020. In each of these cases, college student activists have addressed racist cultures, actions, and policies upheld by their white peers, faculty, and university leadership. The student protest discourses developed during these controversies illuminate a theory of racialized counter-memory, which I define and elaborate throughout each chapter. Racialized counter-memory, as a rhetorical concept, brings together scholarship concerned with race, memory, and place/space, and it is best understood as public memory that centers race and racialized experiences in a way that counters dominant or institutional memory and promotes an anti-racist perspective. This study shows how racialized counter-memories—and the students that create, negotiate and circulate them—can combat the challenges of hegemonic white supremacy on college campuses by making white supremacy known, by marking racism’s existence on campus, and by envisioning anti-racist solutions. I also illustrate the ways in which students’ use of racialized counter-memory re-constituted the places and spaces of campus towards anti-racist ends, such as redistributing campus resources, constructing memory sites, and altering town-and-gown relations. Overall, this dissertation analyzes specifically how and in what way college students demonstrated the power of racialized counter-memory, in theory and in practice. I posit that rhetorical scholars should further develop and study racialized counter-memory, enacted in anti-racist protests and social change, as a rhetorical lens that can address and combat the assumed white standpoint and white supremacist systems imbedded in U.S. institutions and landscapes, including higher education institutions and their campuses.Item Twin Pillars to the Axis of Evil: Presidential Security Metaphors and the Justification of American Intervention in the Persian Gulf, 1971-2001(2021) Fowler, Randall; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On January 16, 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that his country would withdraw its forces from the Persian Gulf by 1971. U.S. policymakers interpreted this decision through the lens of the Cold War. They feared that the Gulf—a region whose oil was vital to American defense strategy—was at risk of becoming a “vacuum” and falling under the sway of the Soviet Union. Over the next three decades the United States would steadily assert its dominance in the Persian Gulf, as American policy toward the region evolved in tandem with the language used by presidential administrations to conceptualize and address the challenges they saw in the area. This study examines the security metaphors (and the ideas and images they conveyed)employed by U.S. presidents to sell their national security vision for the Persian Gulf to the American people. Four presidential metaphors—Twin Pillars, Strategic Consensus, the New World Order, and Dual Containment—functioned to reconstitute norms of sovereignty and American responsibility for the Gulf. Drawing on the symbolism of the Cold War, these metaphors were used by presidential administrations to progressively articulate a U.S. right of intervention in the region to combat forces perceived to be hostile to U.S. interests. The power of these metaphors derives from the way their logics and symbolism built on each other, collectively constructing interpretive frameworks through which officials, commentators, and reporters made sense of the region and its importance to the United States. This project is divided into four case studies to examine each metaphor, focusing on the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. In each chapter, I outline the development of the metaphor within the administration, analyze the public invocations of the metaphor in presidential discourse, trace expressions of the metaphor and its symbolism in press coverage and foreign policy commentary, and consider criticisms directed at each metaphor. In sketching the constitutive trajectory of each metaphor, I show how the collective picture the presidential administrations painted of the Gulf as a vulnerable and vital region worked to encourage military intervention. These rhetorical developments linked the Cold War to the War on Terror, ultimately setting the stage for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” campaign and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.Item CODE ME A GOOD REASON: JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM AND A RHETORIC OF ETHICAL AI(2021) Yang, Misti Hewatt; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Joseph Weizenbaum was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor often credited with creating the first chatbot, or automated computer conversationalist, in 1966. He named it ELIZA. Ten years later, however, he wrote Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, a book questioning the ethics of natural language processing, AI, and instrumental reason. This dissertation presents Weizenbaum as an early 20th century rhetorical theorist of computation. With an understanding of rhetoric as the material means for generating good reasons for living together, I articulate how Weizenbaum’s rhetorical interventions around the early development of computational culture can inform the ethics of engineering broadly and the development of AI specifically. The first chapter provides an overview of my historical and theoretical framework. The second chapter starts with Weizenbaum’s childhood and ends with the release of ELIZA. The third chapter chronicles his growing disillusionment with computers in society in the context of the Vietnam War. The final two chapters are dedicated to the book and reactions from a prominent figure in the history of AI, John McCarthy. Informed by Weizenbaum, I recuperate rhetoric as a practice of reason composed of technē that requires phronêsis in order to be realized in its full ethical potential. I argue that recognizing the practice of rhetoric inherent in engineering and ethics can better equip engineers and the public to manage scientific and technological uncertainty with the care necessary for a humane future.Item The Black Body in Political Photography, 1990-2020(2021) Sharma, Artesha Chardonnay; Parry-Giles, Dr. Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black political art has been an important element of Black liberation efforts in the 20th and 21st centuries. Black artist-activists of the past and present have demonstrated a concern with systems of oppression that perpetuate multiple forms of racial trauma in the lives of Black people. This project examines the various strategies deployed by artist-activists between 1990-2020 to re-instantiate political trauma in U.S. collective memory. In the process, the project spotlights continued oppression by visually connecting past atrocities with current forms of physical, emotional, and representational violence and examines artists’ depictions of the Black body to remember racial trauma and visualize Black agency. In Chapter One, I examine Carla Williams’s How to Read Character (1990-1991) and the ways she revisits the history of scientific racism to expose strategies used to predetermine character based on race. Williams uses her nude body as a means to critique by positioning her self-portraits next to early scientific documents to evoke Black agency and to subvert the dominant gaze that has contributed to Black subjugation of the past and present. In Chapter Two, I examine how the photo-text installation series by Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened and Then I Cried (1995-1996), intervenes in the circulation of archival images of the Black body to contemplate and challenge past and current notions of Black embodiment across race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the process, Weems re-politicizes historical and contemporary representations of Blackness and collective remembrances of Black trauma to call for retribution and healing. In Chapter Three, I interpret how Julian Plowden’s Project #Shootback (2014-2020), offers a haunting reminder of the continued racial inequalities through political street photography of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from collective memories of earlier Black liberation movements, the collection situates Black Lives Matter within a legacy of Black activism committed to ending inequalities faced by Black people. Plowden ultimately re-politicizes Black emotion and Black embodiment as a means to resist racial oppression, survive racial trauma, and expose ongoing atrocities. In the Conclusion, I analyze LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic exposé on the life and memory of Breonna Taylor featured in Vanity Fair’s, “A Beautiful Life.” I argue that the emotional photography of Taylor’s loved ones pushes back against negative stereotypes about Taylor and Black women to assert Black worth and visualize the suffering that police brutality causes to the Black community. Situated within the context of continued racial tension, the images in this project demonstrate the multiple strategies of resistance and empowerment used by contemporary artist-activists in the U.S. to expose and end racial injustice. Overall, the images highlight the continued importance of photography in the current fight for Black liberation.Item A Rhetorical Criticism of Hillary Clinton in Political Satire and Political Parody(2021) Hannah-Prater, Kimberley Jacqueline; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between the years of 1992 through 2016, Hillary Clinton was framed rhetorically by various forms of political humor, including political satire and political parody. These messages were disseminated across television and the Internet in ways that depicted Clinton as a “threat” to the myth of the cis-gendered, white male presidency. However, Clinton attempted to participate in mediated humor to blunt the negative characterizations of her in entertainment media. This dissertation examines how television humor and online platforms for humor contributed to the humorous, and often sexist, framing of “Hillary Clinton.” More specifically, this project analyzes how Hillary Clinton’s personality, character, political ambition, and gender identity were rhetorically framed in mediated humor and how these frames circulated widely across these texts. I propose the concepts of the political killjoy and comedic grandstanding as humor strategies that comedians used to depict Clinton and that Clinton used in turn to boost her own relatability. In Chapter 1, I explore how late-night shows, including Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, made arguments about Clinton’s political image as first lady, senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate. I focus on television programs that implement political satire and/or political parody for at least part of their humor. In Chapter 2, I trace various forms of online political humor that were created during Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns. These texts include parody articles and humor videos on the Onion, videos created for Funny or Die, humor articles on College Humor, and Internet memes posted to Reddit and KnowYourMeme.com. While sexism was present in many of the television texts in this study, the Internet humor texts often circulated more vulgar and misogynistic frames about Hillary Clinton. And in Chapter 3, I analyze examples of Clinton’s appearances on televised and online humor, beginning in 1992 and continuing through her televised and online humor appearances during her own 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton participated in mediated political humor to portray her marriage as stable, project her knowledge about policy, and frame herself as self-deprecating, especially when selling books and reinforcing her electability as U.S. president.