Communication

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    Protect, Preserve, and Restore: Fundamentalist Arguments in American Discourse
    (2022) Attia, Hagar; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Fundamentalism and ideas about fundamentalism are significant obstacles to dialogue and deliberation. Previous scholarly work on fundamentalism may have contributed to a general distaste for fundamentalism and fundamentalists. Some scholars define fundamentalists as people unable, or unwilling, to cope with the conditions of modernity and therefore turn to scriptural literalism, separatism, and traditionalism to maintain their sense of identity. This project seeks to contribute to this scholarly discussion by focusing on the rhetorical dimensions of fundamentalism. This project proposes understanding fundamentalism as a rhetorical concept—a type of argument—with themes and strategies that perform specific types of work in the world. Fundamentalist arguments emerge out of a concern for defending what is believed to be the fundamentals of identity. Those issuing fundamentalist arguments conclude that without the fundamentals of identity, a cherished and universalized identity would be profoundly compromised. In fundamentalist arguments, the universalized identity is threatened when some of its members arguably sully the fundamentals of identity by supporting external contaminants. The ultimate calls to action in fundamentalist argument are to preserve, protect, and restore the integrity of the fundamentals.Chapter One examines fundamentalist argument in the anti-abortion rhetoric of evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer. For Schaeffer, Roe v. Wade symbolized a nation that broke with its foundation—a Christian worldview. Despite its origins in theological debates, Schaeffer’s rhetoric demonstrates the flexibility of fundamentalist argument in addressing partisan issues in American politics. Chapter Two examines fundamentalist argument in white supremacist rhetoric, specifically that of Mississippi judge, Thomas Brady. My analysis reveals how Brady uses several strategies to achieve fundamentalist objectives to preserve, protect, and restore whiteness as a foundation for American culture. In this journey to understand fundamentalist argument, the cases examined so far cohere in that they champion conservative causes. Chapter Three nuances this pattern by exploring fundamentalist argument in environmentalist discourse, specifically that of microbiologist and renowned ecologist Barry Commoner. Commoner’s particular audience—environmentalists—are tasked with defending all of humanity from self-destruction. Commoner’s rhetoric illuminates the ways in which progressives can turn to more reactionary-based arguments. In the Conclusion, I explore what this analysis reveals about fundamentalist argument as a genre of argument. Per contemporary understandings of genre theory, I appraise the cultural, situational, generic contexts that shape and are shaped by fundamentalist argument. I also discuss the strategic nature of fundamentalist argument as a compelling rhetoric to attract adherents to a cause. Lastly, my Conclusion demonstrates the relevance of fundamentalist argument to contemporary public discourse by briefly featuring fundamentalist arguments visible in our current political debates.
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    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.
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    A Dissident Blue Blood: Reverend William Sloane Coffin and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
    (2014) Krueger, Benjamin Charles; Gaines, Robert N.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A long and bloody conflict, United States military action in Vietnam tore the fabric of American political and social life during the 1960s and 1970s. A wide coalition of activists opposed the war on political and religious grounds, arguing the American military campaign and the conscription of soldiers to be immoral. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., an ordained Presbyterian minister and chaplain at Yale University, emerged as a leader of religious antiwar activists. This project explores the evolution of Coffin's antiwar rhetoric between the years 1962 and 1973. I argue that Coffin relied on three modes of rhetoric to justify his opposition to the war. In the prophetic mode, which dominated Coffin's discourse in 1966, Coffin relied on the tradition of Hebraic prophecy to warn that the United States was straying from its values and that undesirable consequences would occur as a result. After seeing little change to the direction of U.S. foreign policy, Coffin shifted to an existential mode of rhetoric in early 1967. The existential mode urged draft-age men to not cooperate with the Federal Selective Service System, and to accept any consequences that occurred as a result. Federal prosecutors indicted Coffin and four other antiwar activists in January 1968 for conspiracy aid and abet draft resister in violation of the Selective Service Act. Chastened by his prosecution and subsequent conviction, Coffin adopted a reconciling mode of discourse that sought to reintegrate antiwar protesters into American society by advocating for amnesty.
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    Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse
    (2012) Samek, Alyssa A.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines how lesbian-feminists navigated the competing pressures of identity politics and coalition politics and confronted compounding frustrations, divisions, and exclusionary practices throughout the 1970s. Specifically, the study attends to the ways lesbian-feminists rhetorically recalibrated their identities in and through coalitional relationships with such social movement communities as women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war activism. In the process, they were able to build coalitional relationships with activists from other movements while retaining a space for articulating and bolstering their lesbian-feminist identities. This study accordingly examines lesbian-feminist published writings and speeches given during conferences, marches, demonstrations, and political rallies between 1970 and 1980 to reveal how they crafted a space for lesbian-feminist politics, identity, and liberation from within coalitional relationships that also marginalized them. The project intersects the theories of public address, social movement rhetoric, intersectionality, identity politics, and coalition politics to examine the strategic interaction between coalition politics and identity politics in lesbian-feminist activism. In particular, recalibration allowed lesbian-feminists to strategically capitalize on intersectionality in order to negotiate the tension between identity creation and coalition formation. Using the rhetorical strategy of pivoting to feature certain aspects of their identities with the various coalitions in mind, lesbian-feminists increased their visibility. They did so not only for the sake of promoting shared political goals and legitimizing lesbian-feminism, but also to confront social movement members on issues of exclusion, homophobia, and sexism. As a result, lesbian-feminism came to hold a variety of meanings for women working in the second-wave women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. At times, lesbian feminists upheld a separatist, vanguard ethic, which was defined in opposition to other identities and movements. Though empowering and celebrated by some as more ideologically pure, separatist identity formations remained highly contested at the margins of lesbian-feminist identity politics. With those margins clearly defined, lesbian-feminists strategically pivoted to enact political ideologies and preserve identity from within coalitional relationships. In the process, their discourse revealed a great deal about the relationship between identity politics and coalition politics in the context of U.S. social protest in the post-1960s era.
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    (Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space
    (2011) Barney, Timothy; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display.
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    The Rhetorical Origins of the African Colonization Movement in the United States
    (2009) Stillion Southard, Bjorn Frederick; Klumpp, James F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    From the introduction of slavery to British North America, the concurrent presence of freedom and slavery fostered much tension. Still, in the early 1800s, slavery was not yet the intransigent issue that would lead to civil war. Amidst mounting tensions and declining, yet still viable, possibility for resolution, a nationwide effort to colonize free blacks to Africa began. Positioned as neither immediate emancipation, nor the continuation of the status quo, colonizationists framed their scheme as a solution to the problem of slavery. With the discourse generated at a germinal meeting on December 21, 1816, the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States (later called the American Colonization Society) was created and motivations for African colonization were set forth. This project explores the rhetorical development of the national African colonization movement in The United States. To begin, this project traces the discursive tensions between discourses of security and morality to which colonizationists would need to attend to advance their scheme. Driving this tension was an emerging antagonism between instrumental and pathetic dimensions of rhetoric. The project then illuminates the potential to overcome such tensions that had been cultivated in political economic (i.e., legislative) discourse about slavery. This potential resolution was defined by the development of moderate rhetorical strategies to address the problem of slavery. Turning to the initial meeting of the Colonization Society, this project attends to how colonizationists negotiated the discursive tensions and used the rhetorical resources of the moment to motivate colonization. Ultimately, this project argues that the motivations offered by colonizationists in support of African colonization failed in their attempt to use moderate rhetorical strategies and thus, failed to overcome the discursive tensions of slavery.
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    The National Woman's Party's Militant Campaign for Woman Suffrage: Asserting Citizenship Rights through Political Mimesis
    (2008-09-05) Stillion Southard, Belinda Ane; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project attends to ways in which the National Woman's Party's (NWP) militant woman suffrage campaign empowered U.S. women to assert their political agency and help earn women's fully-enfranchised citizenship rights through rhetorical acts of political mimesis. Specifically, this study examines how the NWP mimicked political rituals and rhetorics to simultaneously earn political legitimacy and expand women's citizenship roles in the nation-state. To this end, this project examines the NWP's suffrage discourse between 1913 and 1920 to demonstrate the ways in which the group's mimetic strategies both reified and challenged progressive and wartime notions of U.S. nationalism promoted by President Woodrow Wilson and members of Congress. These chapters trace the trajectory of the NWP's campaign as it mimicked inaugural parades, third-party strategies, and congressional and presidential politicking to empower NWP members with the political authority that rivaled the nation's political leaders. The NWP's mimetic strategies allowed NWP members to constitute their national citizenship identities as they accessed reserved political spaces, demanded the attention of President Wilson and members of Congress, engaged the U.S. citizenry as political actors, and suffered severe backlash against their militant acts. In so doing, the NWP helped normalize women's presence in the political sphere, nationalize the suffrage movement, attract national media attention, and ultimately, earn widespread recognition and political legitimacy. Finally, this study looks at the empowering and disempowering potential of political mimesis as a strategy for social and political change, particularly as the NWP formed alliances and divisions among women in national and international communities. In the process, the project looks at how the NWP's rhetoric of political mimesis shaped and was shaped by the democratizing exigencies of President Wilson's nationalist vision; in turn, the NWP's militant campaign helped re-envision the gendered nation.