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Toxic sites across the United States have been sacrificed for progress and prosperity somewhere else. Far and wide, the communities that inhabit sacrifice zones and experience slow violence–or harm that happens over long periods–have little influence on regulatory structures that determine the remediation of their homes and homelands. This research answers two questions: how do the legal and regulatory structures of remediation perpetuate injustice and how effective is community activism at influencing these systems? Using legal geography and environmental justice frameworks, this research broadly analyzes the history and governance of toxicity in the United States, as well as coupling these findings with analysis of a community archive at the Tar Creek Superfund site in northeastern Oklahoma using reflexive thematic analysis. I argue that the lack of focus, as well as the lack of enforced procedures, on environmental justice within legal and regulatory frameworks reproduces injustice without acknowledging what community perspectives of justice are. Additionally, I assert that community activism is the primary driver of justice at polluted sites and that community involvement in the remediation process is necessary to move toward justice.

Cinematic Loss investigates the late Weimar Republic’s film legacy, which survives today in fragmentary form, and raises questions about how film historiography addresses absence. Taking a closer look at the final democratic years before the rise of Nazi rule, this study explores the works of German-speaking Jewish filmmakers in Germany from 1929 to 1933 and proposes systematic searches for their lost films in archives and private collections. The focus of film studies has traditionally been on narrative structure, cinematography, editing techniques, and mise-en-scene. Between 1980 and 1990, the archival turn in film studies redirected attention to broader historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. As a result of this shift and technological advancements, scholars can access archival resources more easily, making it easier to analyze missing films. By drawing on preservation debates, this project explores the challenges posed by ontological realism and proposes alternative approaches that consider the uncanniness and gaps inherent in historical discourse. Studying the dynamics between lost and found films highlights the extent of material decay and the potential for restoration. Examining ephemera, this project emphasizes their aesthetic value and broader perspectives beyond the films themselves. Cinematic Loss challenges the idea that ephemera should be considered a last resort in film analysis and emphasizes the importance of engaging with the medium of film in all its forms. Through a comprehensive research effort, this project contributed to the rediscovery of numerous lost films. An extensive search of international archives and private collections led to the discovery of a substantial number of missing films. Considering paper collections, sound elements, and images, among other crucial components, greatly facilitated the systematic search. A researcher’s ability to recognize and include cinematic absence as an object of study within their own work is essential to finding and recovering long-lost cinematic artifacts. One can only find something when one understands what one is looking for. Therefore, the inclusion of missing films into cultural histories facilitates their rediscovery, preservation and restoration by breaking the silence surrounding their existence. In addition to recovering films from the period, this work contextualizes them within their cultural milieu. Among the topics explored are the transition from silent to sound films, the notions of nationality and belonging, and the emergence of a transnational form of cinema in the early 1930s. Taking a closer look at these topics sheds light on the broader significance and implications of the recovered films. Moreover, the study discusses the efforts made by film archives, German government funding for preservation, and the importance of collaboration between archives and private collectors. Cinematic Loss discusses the challenges and methodologies involved in restoring lost films. It emphasizes the need to preserve ephemera and contextual information for future use by archivists and researchers alike. As a final component, this work contains a digital companion piece, the Weimar Talkies Project, which provides summaries and reviews of feature-length sound films from the Weimar Republic, which serve as a valuable research and educational resource. Through archival searches and critical research efforts, this work contributes to the revitalization of the Weimar Republic’s film legacy by engaging with the absence of historiography in film. Cinematic Loss sheds light on a crucial period in German cinema history and enriches our understanding of cultural artifacts from the past.

“Stories of Exile: The Construction of Trans Athletes as a Political Category,” asks: What is the relationship between gendered sports policy since 1936 and anti-trans sports laws in 2021? Utilizing a transfeminist sports studies’ methodology, I explore three significant points in Olympic sports where the discourse of the gender binary shifts: the introduction of sex verification in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the 1972 passage of Title IX, which shaped the classification of “female athletes,” and the 2021 Tokyo Olympics which featured the first out transgender and non-binary athletes. Aiming to bring attention to the connection between sports and the construction and continued (de)stabilization of the hierarchical gender binary, this project looks for explicit attempts to regulate gender non-normativity in sports in order to identify specific characteristics about how trans athletes are discussed to formulate a historically grounded conception of today’s attacks on trans athletes.

This paper uses archival research of American trade magazines to provide a chronicle of the articles concerning the worldwide and United States releases of Jules Dassin’s 1955 French heist film Rififi. It explores the popular critical discourses published by journalists, critics, editors, and readers over the course of three years in light of the fact that the film was made by an American director who was blacklisted as a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In addition, the study highlights Rififi’s relevancy with the evolving distribution business relationship between the United States and the European countries across the Atlantic.

This dissertation examines the experiences of five civil rights-era rabbis (William Silverman, Randall Falk, Alfred Goodman, Irving Bloom, and Burton Padoll) to highlight their contributions, leadership approaches, struggles, and achievements with a particular emphasis on social justice. As each of the rabbis drew from their understanding of the richness of the Jewish textual canon, the study includes a survey of Biblical, Talmudic, and contemporary Jewish sources that laid the groundwork for their rabbinic activism and which compel rabbis today. The study dramatically highlights those texts as providing applicable strategies with regard to leading a congregation with a “prophetic” voice, knowing when to speak out, and how to do so, strategies that inspired—and inspire—rabbis to engage in work intended to make their communities more just and equitable. Each of the five rabbis featured in the dissertation produced vast amounts of correspondence, sermonic materials, and other writings, making archival research a particularly useful methodology to explore the volumes of primary sources and provide insight into the individual and collective experiences of these rabbis. Particular attention is further paid to context as a means of highlighting and distinguishing the choices that these rabbis made as leaders of and within their communities. The dissertation contributes to the leadership legacy of these rabbis by contributing new and relevant materials to scholarship around the civil rights movement, the American Jewish experience, and the intersection of the two. Four contemporary leadership theories are highlighted through their experiences (Transformational Leadership Theory, Servant Leadership Theory, Relational Leadership Theory, and Courageous Leadership Theory), which, in turn, makes current scholarship in the field of leadership and change accessible to clergy. Additional theories of leadership are also explored through these exemplars, as is the introduction of a composite theory of leadership based upon the shared experiences of these rabbis. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, https://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

In this thesis, I examine Chicana English Professor Lora Romero's life and death as a Stanford University haunting. A haunting that, I argue, has both epistemic and deadly consequences. These consequences include epistemic unconfidence and epistemic haunting. What I term epistemic unconfidence leads Chicanas/Latinas to deny not only their own knowledge or lose knowledge but subsequently also deny their own humanity. Epistemic haunting is both a methodology and a theoretical framework for understanding knowledge and ontology. I coin epistemic haunting as knowledge that continues to lurk and highlight a continuous, unsolved social violence.I demonstrate that Stanford's epistemic haunting is a collective construction that impacts Chicana academics' lives. In this thesis, I expand on studies in hauntology, building on sociologist Avery Gordon's interpretation of "haunting." I contend that white heteropatriarchal epistemes continue to haunt Chicana academics. Through a comparative analysis of Lora Romero's life and death, alongside the Mexican and Chicana folkloric icon La Llorona (Weeping Woman), I demonstrate how the negation of queer Chicanas knowledge can lead to gendered, queered, and racialized violence in academia. As I interpret Romero's narrative, I show how she is a Llorona that the academy framed, but who nonetheless resisted these academic boundaries.

Over the past two decades, the term “autism” has become ubiquitous in American culture, with an even bigger effort by activists, advocacy groups, and non-profit/for-profit organizations to “spread awareness” about this supposed epidemic. To better understand the phenomenon of autism awareness, I utilize archival research methods to trace the exchange of autism-related information to its foundation during the 1960s and 1970s. These include the papers of Margie Pitts Hames, the late Atlanta-based Civil Rights attorney, the late radio and film writer Allan Sloane, and a parent-based advocacy organization called the Autism Society of Northwest Ohio. Couched within scholarship of Disability Studies and Literacy Studies, I refer to the exchange and acquisition of such information as Autism Literacy. The project at hand is not a commendation of the increase in autistic rhetorics that tend to stem from a eugenics approach to find “cures,” but is rather a response to the influx in rhetorical strategies that continue to place people with autism at a cultural disadvantage. Due to a nationalist-leaning culture that further isolates people with disabilities though, I argue that the need to understand Autism Literacy is more important than ever. I trace the emergence of Autism Literacy’s more widespread cultural beginnings, which appeared during the 1960s across the U.S. My discussion of these archival findings focus on the rhetorical contexts in which people wrote about autism at the time, as well as their intentions. Such a project also lends itself to the growing need for archival research within Disability Studies conversations in the field of Rhetoric and Composition more broadly.

A structured process to capture, sort, digitize, and curate a researchable history of a writing center has the potential to improve writing center administration with greater recall at both the local and global level. Maintaining a standard of practice from year to year with effective training, stable institutional partnerships, and evidence-based practice is already challenging. This is compounded by the continual erosion of accumulated memory and context for numerous administrative choices through the regular departure of tutors and administrators, posing further challenge to consistent practice, pedagogy, and policy. To preserve the programmatic memory informing countless decisions, relationships, and administrative expediencies, writing center administrators must establish a regular process to curate a researchable archive of the history produced by a center’s operation. Failure to do so risks the atrophy of critical memory every time a staff member leaves the writing center. Adoption of the proposed Reifying Center Archive Process, or ReCAP, provides a robust archive for programmatic recall. Creating an archive will enable writing center administrators to delve into the history of how a center has operated in the past; as a result, the center is better insulated against operational missteps or retreading in the future. Beyond the clear benefit to individual centers, the eventual standardization of such an archive process has long-term potential to improve historically challenging efforts to collect and synthesize the work done in centers across multiple institutions at the regional, national, and global levels. To promote the necessity of the ReCAP, this dissertation: reviews the scholarship that establishes the necessity of an archive-supported writing center; presents a case study of a large public university writing center; prescribes the literature-based archivist practices that will best sustain a writing center’s materials for future research; outlines the ReCAP as a tool to digitally present the physical holdings of the writing center’s archive; establishes a new standard for the organization of writing center materials within the ReCAP; and finally, tests these proposed practices by creating a prototype ReCAP archive for the case study center, the Georgia State University Writing Studio.

Drawing on the Harry Ransom Center’s recently acquired Mad Men production archives, this thesis uses the lens of casting to consider authorial agency in the critically acclaimed AMC series. By following the role of recurring, limited guest, and background actors in the first season’s writing, casting, and marketing, this thesis challenges the popular narrative of showrunner Matthew Weiner’s centrality as a creative authorial figurehead. In addition, this project considers Weiner and his production team’s investment in making the show an “accurate” representation of the 1960s. Though crucial to maintaining the show’s “quality” status, the labor of recurring, guest, and background actors as bodies that appear “period accurate” is often obscured by the contribution of more famous players, like Weiner and the show’s principal cast. Drawing from work in TV studies, industry studies, and cultural studies, this thesis examines the production cultures and ideologies surrounding the claims to “authenticity” and “legitimacy” of the show — both as a faithful visual analogue of 1960s New York and as part of the cohort of post-network era “quality television.”

In response to speculations about the impending obsolescence of higher education's most emblematic sites, I explore how campuses thrive by fostering civically vibrant and not-strictly-curricular forms of writing and rhetoric. I draw from the spatial turn in rhetoric/composition, as well as from scholarship on the field's civic aims, to reframe rhetorical education and college writing as location-based activities tied less exclusively to formal instructional spaces and more dynamically to the campuses within which they emerge. Taking UC Irvine as a case study, I combine ethnographic research with analysis of archival materials to elucidate how three features of campus life—campus planning, campus organizations, and campus publications—encourage students and other inhabitants to participate as writers and rhetors in the ongoing development of the civic geography. After focusing on cocurricular manifestations of rhetorical education and college writing in the first three chapters, I move in the final chapter to consider formal instruction through the lens of this rejuvenated conceptualization of the institutional terrain. Ultimately, by concluding with an analysis of how and why writing and rhetoric instructors draw pedagogical inspiration from their campuses, I hope to position "Campus Life" as a timely and practical intervention into debates about the future of these multifaceted sites.

This dissertation examines the public comments citizens submit to local government agencies and how those agencies, in turn, interpret these texts to make policy decisions. The central case study traces the processes a statewide government agency—the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT)—undertook to solicit citizen feedback about a major public works project and analyzes the thousands of comments that GDOT received in response. Based upon this case study, the author argues that rhetoric and composition scholars have a responsibility to encourage transparency in public engagement processes by working directly with government agencies.

Finding Anna: The Archival Search for Anna Botsford Comstock Karen Penders St. Clair, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 Anna Botsford Comstock contributed significantly to fostering imagination in nature study education at the turn of the 20th century. Through the process of restoring the 'Comstocks of Cornell'-manuscript for historical accuracy and completeness, Anna Comstock’s voice is revealed thereby emphasizing her written legacy in both scientific and Cornell University history.

This project is situated in scholarship surrounding the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of historical women rhetors, particularly those within religious spaces. It places a lens on the rhetorical practices of two religious women: Jessie Penn-Lewis and Margaret E. Barber. I argue that it is important to investigate these women, for doing so reveals not only an area that has not received extensive critical attention, but also informs how scholars look at pedagogy, particularly in religious spaces. The project and methods are grounded in feminist research practices. This project is historical in nature and will thus draw upon feminist historical and archival research methods as my primary methods of investigation. Further, this project is framed as two case studies, which examine closely through textual analysis surviving work produced by these women to begin to extend our knowledge of pedagogical and rhetorical practices in religious spaces. The heuristic used to investigate these texts and women bring forward key themes for study and application such as: how space is used, whether rhetorical or physical; what kind of tools can be used or appropriated for teaching practices; how texts and women circulate and under what conditions and intentions. Finally, I argue for their inclusion within the rhetorical canon as well as rewriting histories of women’s rhetoric; for their work is not only worthy of recognition from the past but more importantly for future scholarship that acknowledges the ways in which institutions of power are still over girls and women. This dissertation points further to the need to research literate practices of “ordinary” people and the barriers of public and private still existing today.

An individual’s years in college are a time of trial and transformation. This dissertation examined college students’ self-created accounts of their time in college in order to identify students’ significant meaning-making activities during those years. Four primary areas of student life were investigated: the rules that students were expected to adhere to, the ways in which students and their class cohorts antagonized one another, hazing, and class competitions. A comparative historical approach was used to analyze student-created accounts of college life in the years 1871-1941. Archival research at a geographically diverse sample of fourteen colleges and universities provided primary source materials created by students, including correspondence, diaries, photographs, and scrapbooks. Collectively, these sources affirm that students derived their significant meaning-making experiences from their extracurricular activities. An additional dimension of the study proposed an extension of the work of sociologist Burton Clark on organizational sagas. An analysis of students’ self-reported experiences suggest that Clark’s notion of organizational sagas extends beyond the bounds of discrete institutions, reaching down to the level of individuals and upward to college students as a collective entity.

Exposure to traumatic and stressful events has become increasingly commonplace and the impact of such experiences has been well documented. Trauma events in childhood have been associated with a number of factors, including maladaptive emotional and behavioral responses, increased vulnerability for exposure to additional traumatic events, and adverse experiences later in life. Juvenile justice youth have been found to have higher rates of trauma exposure, when compared to community samples of same-aged peers. The population of youth residing at Echo Glen Children’s Center, in Snoqualmie, Washington, exhibit unique characteristics for a juvenile justice population, including age (the youngest juvenile offenders in the state of Washington), gender (the only facility for adjudicated girls in the state of Washington), and mental health (a Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA) mental-health designated treatment facility). This archival study explored the relationships among demographic variables (age, gender, ethnicity, committing offense, and co-morbid mental health diagnoses) and trauma symptomology endorsed by new intake residents at Echo Glen Children’s Center. The overall aim included describing, in demographic terms, the youth entering treatment at Echo Glen, in order to gain a better sense of whether their unique characteristics relate to trauma exposure and symptomology. Four hundred and sixty-six youth, ages 10–18, completed a self-report computerized assessment, the Voice-Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (V-DISC), upon intake at Echo Glen Children’s Center from February 11, 2011, to June 30, 2014. Youth endorsement on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder items provided information on trauma exposure and symptomology and demographic information was obtained through JRA official records. Results indicated that the majority of youth entering Echo Glen have been exposed to trauma (81.3%). For trauma-exposed youth, relationships between demographic variables and trauma were evident for gender, age, committing offense, and mental health diagnoses. There was no relationship found between trauma symptoms and ethnicity. This study identified the associations among demographic characteristics, trauma exposure, and symptomology in youth entering treatment at Echo Glen Children’s Center. The electronic version of this dissertation is at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu

Abstract: This thesis explores the emergence of a punk music scene in Edmonton, utilizing archival research, participant interviews and analysis of mainstream and independent media to determine how a genre that was arguably considered a British phenomenon came to have local characteristics and associations. I suggest that regardless of the size of Edmonton’s punk scene, its consideration raises important questions about ‘the local,’ and in doing so provides some sense of what Edmonton values as culture and community, how these values change over time, and the role of the media in determining all this. After theorizing music scenes in the context of the local, I explore the development of the punk music scene during the years 1979-1985 as articulated through participants and the mainstream media. Aspects of the local include the history of the settler colonization of Edmonton, where economic booms and busts were part of the natural cycle; Edmonton’s inclination to paradoxically draw upon the “frontier ethos” that emphasizes individualism, yet maintain a cultural dependency on external metropolitan centers such as London and New York; and class hierarchies and distinctions that were often communicated through discussion about music and cultural life. Strategies of scene building are explored including embodied notions of culture through global media messages, and fanzines as sites of youth initiated media. Finally, I examine local media discourses that conceal notions of civility, social responsibility, and social differences, in the process raising questions about the implicit moral authority of the media, moral panics and media stereotypes capable of shaping public perceptions about youth, and how all this impacted local musical activity.

The dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, 1929-2015, examines the kinds of archives produced by Asian American women in single-gender social organizations or Asian Greek-letter sororities, reconceiving them as transformative acts of affects: embodied memory-keeping practices that transmit knowledge, traditions, cultural practices, and social customs as collective identities and communal histories across time and space, among different, diverse groups of ethnic-Asian women from one generation to the next. The archives reconceived as the transformative acts of affects and participatory memory-keeping practices in Asian American women sororities demonstrate collective and individual identities in complex, crafted social communities. The affective archives of the Asian American sisterhoods of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi complicate the conventional understandings of the archives and memory-keeping projects in minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities of color in the United States. These sororities’ archives of affects and affections not only revise remembering as recuperative practices motivated by the anxieties of personal and collective community forgetting and loss, but also serve as the embodied performances of communal memories that celebrate identities, social cultures, and shared histories and experiences. The dissertation is a multi-method study that includes thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013, as well as ethnographic observations of and archival research on Active members and alumnae of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi, the two historically Asian American sororities established at the University of California, Los Angeles: Chi Alpha Delta, founded in 1929 and Theta Kappa Phi, founded in 1959.

William Stetson Kennedy (1916-2011), an activist and muckraking journalist, focused on social and economic conditions in the South. In seven decades of activism, he fought for peace, workers’ rights, civil rights, and environmental protections. Kennedy collected oral histories as a folklorist with the Federal Writer’s Project, and he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and worked to get their state charters revoked. This project breaks new ground by bringing to light a neglected aspect of Stetson Kennedy’s work: his years (1943-1947) as the editorial director for the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO-PAC). In this role, Kennedy fought against voting restrictions and informed workers about candidates and voting issues. This dissertation explores several research questions: How are alphabetic, civic, and critical literacies activated and enhanced through labor rhetoric? In what ways are these three literacies connected? What are the implications of interconnected literate praxis in academic spaces and beyond? The writer employs archival research, primary field research, and critical theory. Using critical theory enables the writer to stake new claims about key concepts: the subject, agency, ideology, discourse, rhetoric, and literacy. This project enriches existing scholarship in rhetoric and composition through focusing on literacy programs in labor movements. Although labor unions have long provided instruction in reading, writing, history, and political economy, little work outside of history and sociology has been done on worker education. Literacy building outside the classroom has received some attention in rhetoric and composition, but the role that unions play in this process has been neglected. In addition, this rhetorical biography provides an historical account of a writer who helped educate workers largely through the use of dialect, folklore, and other forms of vernacular/working-class discourse. Vernacular discourse must be recovered in order to rectify the privileging of academic/elite discourse and to end the longstanding silence about socioeconomic class in US society. Furthermore, this project connects rhetorical theory to rhetorical practice, what Paulo Freire called praxis. Ultimately, this project provides a new view of literacy by theorizing how three different literacies interact, as well as the implications of these interactions in classrooms and communities.

Abstract: Abstract This work reveals the relationship between Indigenous people and land, and then speaks to the place for ancestors and Indigenous knowledge in this relationship. It engages with Indigenous Research Methodology that honours Indigenous ways of knowing and being, drawing on the lived experiences of Indigenous people from the Lesser Slave Lake area and giving meaning and voice to the lives of the people. This study addresses the marginalization of the people, their dispossession of land, and the disconnection to Indigenous language and culture that occurred as a result of oppression, colonization, and subjugation of their traditional territories, knowledge, history and identities. The work examines the relationship that connects Indigenous Cree identity with the sense of belonging that is essential to Indigenous ways of knowing. This work draws on ancestral relationships of the past, reclaiming and validating Indigenous history and descendant identities in significant ways that will impact future generations. This qualitative study draws on mixed methods of Indigenous autoethnography utilizing knowledge of the researcher’s family as the foundation of the work, somewhat like a ‘case’ study, and weaving in narrative, expository and analytical writing. The work addresses the near invisibility of Indigenous presence in historical literature pertaining to the Lesser Slave Lake area, and seeks to create another, deeper, level of understanding of community knowledge and local experiences. Ancestry is explored in a way that brings edification in a community, contextualizing the lived experiences of Indigenous ancestors into contemporary times, and addressing the legacy of state-imposed political identities that continues to impact Indigenous people in Canada today. The significant engagement with genealogical and archival data in the study is supplemented with narratives of Indigenous voices from the community. The effect of this twinning of data brings the ancestors out of the shadows, and creates a bridge of reconnection for them with the ‘re searcher’ and the contemporary ‘re searched’. This work speaks to the legacy of pain that Indigenous people carry as a result of colonization, oppression, marginalization, and silencing. Further, it speaks to the challenges of accessing archival and genealogical data, of the unreliability of genealogical evidence, and of the need for validation and mobilization of Indigenous knowledge systems in support of the efforts to make visible that essential Indigenous vitality that has been hidden.

Environmental attitudes are an important and frequently used concept in social and environmental research and in the practise of environmental management. Numerous studies have been done in connection with environmental attitudes, but many of these have been criticised by several scholars and researchers from various disciplines for being atheoretical and non-cumulative, and for failing to contribute sufficiently to a cohesive understanding of the construct. This study explored community environmental attitude change around the Lake Ellesmere - Te Waihora area of Canterbury, New Zealand, over the course of the twentieth century. A qualitative and quantitative mixed-method approach to a retrospective longitudinal research design was adopted. The research involved the indexical use of the Environmental Attitudes Inventory (EAI), a recently developed, theoretically based, standardised measure of environmental attitudes, in conjunction with the application of a discursive analytic framework. The use of both a standardised instrument and a discursive framework for the analysis of the contents and features of a stratified random sample of 1000 archive issues of community newspapers from the years 1900 to 2000 involved the integration of quantitative analysis with qualitative research which aimed to address the need for cumulative and theory-based studies of environmental attitudes, without forgoing the benefit of insights that may be derived from qualitative exploration. The findings of this research show that community environmental attitudes around the Lake Ellesmere - Te Waihora area are multi-faceted and are reflective of micro- and macro-level environmental discourses and practices, and the social history of the lake. These are manifest in two particular aspects. First, the environmental attitudes expressed have been predominantly utilitarian over the course of the twentieth century, although a gradual rise in preservationist attitudes, over time, is evident. Community environmental attitude change involves the mutually independent factors of 'utilisation' and 'preservation'. Significantly, utilitarian and preservationist community environmental attitudes were not found to sit at opposite ends of a single continuum; that is to say, a linear change, over time, from utilitarian to preservationist attitudes was not clearly shown in the data. Second, community environmental attitudes occur within existing micro-level social constructions and environmental contexts that tend to interact with, and draw from, larger and more extensive or pervasive discourses at the macro-level. Macro-level discourses, such as that of global trade and capitalism, are inflected into the local, becoming relevant to a variety of micro-level social structural and environmental situations, such as those involving practices of lake management and agricultural land use. From these two main findings, this study argues that community environmental attitudes can be re-conceptualised as a non-bipolar, multi-dimensional construct with a structure consisting of the two distinct factors of 'utilisation' and 'preservation'. Community environmental attitude typologies can be drawn based on the nature of the combination between these two distinct factors. Furthermore, changes in wider meaning systems produce changes in community environmental attitudes and changes in environmental practices. In sum, this research has conceptual and theoretical implications for how community environmental attitudes and environmental discourses may be understood in the various disciplines and fields of environmental studies and the social sciences, and how alternative research approaches on the environmental attitude construct may be conducted. From a practical perspective, this study suggests that an understanding of community environmental attitudes and the dynamics of community environmental attitude change should inform strategic decisions and management interventions in wetland environments.

This dissertation project, which recovers the feminist invention of 19th-century actress and author Adah Menken, proves the efficacy of conducting historigraphic recoveries of heretofore forgotten and elided female rhetors. I situate Adah’s visual and written performances within the materiality of Victorian social codes, positioning her as a feminist commentator worthy of inclusion in our remembrances of feminist discourses. I use archival sources including carte de visites (CDVs) and Adah’s letters and poetry as heuristics for gendered critique, to analyze how she resisted the master narrative of Victorian society and its accompanying codes governing public and private feminine behavior. My objectives are three-fold: to use archival recovery as a method to unearth and evaluate what feminist inquiry can accomplish; to argue for the feminist intentions of a previously unknown female writer; and to offer an opportunity to discover cross-disciplinary connections for rhetorical recoveries. Feminist inquiry is itself an exemplar of rhetorical invention, the idea of making a path. In my dissertation project, I illustrate how Adah Menken blazed a path in her personal and public rhetorics. For my principal goal of asserting Adah’s importance as a feminist rhetor, I use primary sources to demonstrate that her invention and resistance provide fertile ground for vital feminist inquiry. As a secondary means of asserting the significance of archival feminist research, I also offer my Adah Menken recovery as a case study for examining ideas of resistance and subversion to dominant master narratives. For this application, I use Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Michel Foucault’s ideas surrounding the topic of resistance. Ultimately, the convergence of theoretical and practical applications for rhetorical recoveries, both of which I describe in-depth in my dissertation, serve to re-connect fields of inquiry and make them relevant to scholars across the Academe.

Established in 1873, Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, provided a unique experience for their undergraduate students. A limited amount of research has been conducted on the institution but no work has been done to specifically look at the undergraduate student experience. Using archival research methods and information from literature on image based research; the researcher has created a pictorial history of Drury College utilizing photographs, images, and archival documents. The specific research questions asked were: How do archival images and documents of Drury University's first 50 years describe the undergraduate student's experience, specifically in the area of their involvement and overall campus life? What according to archival images and documents, was the collegiate experience like at Drury University from 1873-1923? How were undergraduate students represented in archival images, documents, and additional resources? The findings tell the story of the student experience during the first 50 years of Drury College. The dissertation is divided into five chapters and the findings are organized to highlight each of the three research questions. This research project seeks help stakeholders of Drury University better understand the history of the institutions and their past students and will provide future researchers a guide to conducting similar research.