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My research pivots around questions of making, its importance to all of life, and the challenges it faces in the contemporary world. The research is grounded in simple questions such as: what is making, what are its instruments, and can we do it on purpose? I approach these questions as if through binoculars. With one eye, I want to establish an account of making that is plain and somewhat quotidian. This will ensure the long-term viability of my study. With the other eye, I look for an account of making that is theoretically substantial and thoroughly vigorous. I apply magnification to both of these angles in order to home in on the essential features and operations of making. Though these two focal angles are arranged sequentially in the dissertation, they are conceptually reflexive. One perspective informs the other. I start with the focal chamber that is directed towards the mundane. I take the everyday concerns of “making a living” as my point of departure and treat it as my raw sample. I then examine that sample under the fourfold lens of SYSTEMATIC COMBINING. These lenses spotlight and isolate three structural principles of making. Namely, all making is comprised of agency, surface, and the process of marking. With a more formidable sample in view, I turn to the other binocular barrel and apply more levels of magnification. I look at “making a living” under the lenses of anthropology, phenomenology, and architecture. These rotating magnifications reveal three critical motifs for an account of making. Namely, making is inflected by number, touch, and repetition. Finally, I speculate about the way these binocular angles and their constituent parts are held together by controlling theoretical perspectives. I claim that most making in the modern world has been understood under the rubric of writing and has been guided by a philosophical assumption about exteriority. I assert that drawing—and its correlative assumption about interiority—can rehabilitate making and achieve the goals set out from the beginning of the dissertation. That is, drawing—both as a theory and instrument of making—elides contemporary problems whilst remaining accessible precisely because it is material, habitual, and tectonic.

Inventing Network Composition: Mobilizing Rhetorical Invention and Social Media for Digital Pedagogy investigates how students learn through writing and invention in digital social networks. Pursuing a primary research question of How do student composers invent within networked social media environments?, the dissertation examines how social media and digital writing tools can help students to learn, connect, and share generatively. The core theoretical contribution that this dissertation offers is a theory of network composition, which is a mode of invention that composers engage in social media environments that is intensely social, that is structured by a digital interface, that is interactive and participatory, and that incorporates linguistic, visual, sonic, and other multimodal communication forms. Network composition manifests most notably in network composition pedagogy, which organically locates the work of composing, as well as the disciplinary work of rhetoric and composition, within networked social media environments. This dissertation revisits and updates disciplinary exigencies related to rhetorical invention in digital networks, social media use in the writing classroom, and digital participation as a mode for learning. The dissertation offers an updated approach to invention called network-emergent rhetorical invention that approaches invention as a distributed emergence arising from a network of actants that includes humans, hardware, technologies, interfaces, communities, cultures, software, and infrastructures. It also features an IRB-approved qualitative case study that finds social media to support learning ecology formation, distributed expertise, rhetorical invention, digital and social media literacy development, rhetoric and writing skills formation, and digital citizenship activities. The dissertation additionally examines challenges for social media use in the writing classroom, considering how accessibility, digital aggression, digital discrimination, and data/privacy challenges can and should be navigated. The dissertation closes by speculating about futures for network composition and considering what is at stake for the future of learning, interaction, and participation in digital networks.

Linguistic bias in academic publishing, the idea that a manuscript would be rejected due to its language alone, is a growing area of concern and study. Scholars are particularly concerned that EAL (English as an Additional Language, often referred to as “non-native”) writers face this bias more than first-language English authors. The research on linguistic bias relies on understanding the perceptions about language that belong to reviewers, authors, and other parties involved in publication. This MA thesis project investigates peer reviewer perceptions of English language usage in the manuscripts that they review using the International Journal of Nuclear Security (IJNS) as the site of research. Data sources came from an anonymous online survey and peer reviews from published IJNS manuscripts. Findings show that the participants, reviewers for nuclear security academic research, do notice language usage in manuscripts and consciously decide how to respond to perceived errors. Reviewers also seem to expect authors to use some standard, correct language when writing English-language manuscripts for international, academic publication, but none defined exactly what the standard or correct language was. These results suggest that IJNS and other international, academic, English-language publications should communicate clearly with reviewers about what is expected of them regarding comments about language in reviews and what the publication’s understanding of correct language is. The larger conversation about linguistic bias may be more productively conducted if it is shifted to a conversation about standard and nonstandard language rather than focusing on the native/non-native author divide.

This dissertation explores the relationship between Taiwanese indigenous narrative and rhetoric, in textual representations of the Seediq people and the 1930 Musha Incident. It explores how the forced colonization of Taiwanese indigenous people affected their identities and cultural representation, and how multi-voiced forms of narrative, storytelling, and meaning-making have rooted in indigenous oral traditions and rituals that counter colonial representations. Across a range of cultural texts, I identify what I call Taiwanese indigenous rhetoric of resistance (TIRR), drawing on Simon J. Ortiz’s theory of indigenous literature and oral traditions as indigenous-nationalist forms of cultural resistance. In addition, I draw on New Rhetoric scholarship to position TIRR within a broader rhetorical framework, to analyze the relationship between heteroglossia, Taiwanese indigenous narratives and the interplay of various textual, media, filmic, ritual (semiotic), graphic, and documentary forms. For the methodology of this dissertation, I incorporate New Rhetoric scholarship, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, and Chadwick Allen’s trans-Indigenous methodologies to analyze rhetorics of resistance in the literary and cultural representation of Taiwanese indigenous history and culture. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia recognizes how the voices and languages of different (marginalized) ethnic groups represent themselves. Different indigenous nations in Taiwan, such as the Seediq, Tsou, and Atayal, have found various forms to express indigenous rhetorics of resistance against authoritative discourses and master narratives invented by imperial Chinese and Japanese colonial authorities, including the colonial rhetoric of “savages” versus “civilization.” In Chapter Three, I analyze the retellings of the historical Musha Incident—the 1930 uprising of the Seediq people against colonial Japanese forces. From Seediq perspectives, I argue that representations of the Musha Incident which challenge the academic and political authorities of authors, institutions, and governments that created falsehood, propaganda, self-interests, and inhumanity. In Chapter Four, I argue that Seediq oral tradition forms the basis of a range of heteroglossic narratives that represent Seediq rituals and ways of life that constitute a rhetoric of resistance against the Japanese forced colonization. As represented in different texts and films, Seediq signs including symbols, rituals, and artifacts constitute a multi-voiced discourse that expresses the tensions between colonizers and the oppressed. In Chapter Five, I argue that to engage with these representations of Taiwanese indigenous culture articulates a vision for different ethnicities (Aborigine, Hoklo, Hakka, or Chinese) to co-exist in Taiwan, and to protect their respective ways of life, against the danger of a single-voiced political system that dictates Taiwanese society and its constituent communities. Further, it is imperative that the multiple voices that represent Taiwan’s ethnic diversity can grow and be heard to express their cultural identities and representations. I conclude that these continuous rhetorics of resistance against forced colonization may help Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and all readers of these texts to envision “a new society” for the future, at a time of increased democracy in Taiwan.

This dissertation analyzes the use of different scripts in Japanese writing practices to disrupt English-language and Western-centric approaches to multimodal composition. Early chapters establish a brief history of the Japanese writing system (JWS) and explore its functionality. I trace the JWS’s development from borrowed Chinese characters (kanji), which were adapted to the Japanese language through the translation process of kundoku, to the contemporary system which utilizes the supplemental phonetic scripts of hiragana and katakana, in part, to represent Japanese syntax. Building on this historical context, I demonstrate how the use of the Japanese multi-scripts (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) in conventional and creative writing practices trouble linguistic boundaries and beliefs in the uniformity and stability of modal communication. To illustrate, variations in the meaning, pronunciation, and orthography of particular kanji, as well as variations in one’s choice of script, usher in a range of stylistic and semantic possibilities that complicates the linearity that multimodal scholarship ascribes to written text. The final chapter of my dissertation draws on the results of a process diary study, in which Japanese undergraduates track their writing processes when composing academic and non-academic texts, to propose pedagogical practices for the English composition classroom. By placing historical and contemporary uses of Japanese writing in conversation with the scholarly fields of linguistic anthropology, writing systems research, and sociolinguistics, I demonstrate a transmodal orientation to writing and teaching that is strengthened by, and advocates for, greater attention to thinking across languages and modes.

In this thesis, I examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, and the raced body are written into the Census as a document of technical writing. The United States Census is the key site of inquiry that I examine in analyzing and articulating a rhetoric surrounding race and identity. While the Census does not dictate the ways how ethnicity is made visible or erased or the ways in which race is reified; the ways in which conceptions of race and racism permeate American society are complex and too large for the scope of one conference proposal or project. The Census, however, is an important technical document that tracks identities and demographics in America. And as a governmental document, its use in public discourse impacts minority communities such as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hispanic Americans, as well as other minoritized communities like migrants or refugees. In this thesis, I use this analysis of the Census document to focus on Middle Eastern identity and its relationship to race, ethnicity, and the raced body in technical writing, and seek to use this study to develop a theory of delivering identity through writing.

This study explores how a single visual from an online NASA article gets used as evidence in three different online contexts. The author found these new online contexts using Google Images reverse search function. In locating these visuals in new online contexts, this study analyzes how the visual events contained within a single figure correspond to the linguistic portions of the online contexts. The resulting analysis found that the visual and linguistic connections show that the writers in these online contexts used the same figure as evidence to make different yet similar arguments. Moreover, this reverse search method was applied to junior composition course for the purpose of seeing how effectively the author’s method helped composition students identify visuals as arguments.

How has the worldwide phenomenon of nomadism—present day, recent past, and ancient past—been characterized through metaphor by writers, orators, and auteurs? Using metaphoric criticism, I show how the rhetoric of twenty-first-century "van-lifers" builds on a long global history of displacement that ranges from Central Asia to Malaysia to the Grand Canyon. This project’s three case studies span two decades each, comprising the Kitan people of Central Asia (1207-1227); Bukat people of Borneo in Malaysia (1930-1950), and contemporary "van-lifers" of the US (2001-21). This MA thesis parses a newfound connection between the language of nomadism and Burkean “truth”; the language of nomadism clearly contains metaphors of fluidity and renewal, and nonlinear, non-hierarchical structures, pointing to political friction.

This dissertation critiques the systems theory approach to incarceration policy, practice, and research and proposes a rhetorically informed spatial theory approach as an alternative. Offering a non-hierarchical complexity theory as a bridge between systems and space, I then integrate rhetorical listening as a strategy for navigating and operationalizing our proposed spatial theory approach. I then apply our proposed methodology to archival research, focusing on the South Carolina Penitentiary as a case study, and offer two heuretic experiments to explore the range of this methodology for archival research. I also explore potential applications of this rhetorically informed spatial theory approach in terms of civic engagement among incarcerated populations through deliberative democracy theory. Finally, I conclude that this methodology offers an avenue for elaborating the ambiguity in myriad social organizational practices that are conceived in terms of systems, crucial insights into uses of complexity in contemporary rhetorical studies, and a valuable approach for argument analysis and civic engagement in composition classrooms.

This dissertation examines rhetorical conditions and internet-mediated communication strategies that open and close dialogue between individuals with diverse and conflicting worldviews. The author illustrates this tension through sacred-secular interactions in college composition classrooms and online environments, positing that navigating conflict between these discourses—namely those espoused by religiously committed students and public university instructors—often requires stepping outside of adversarial communication frameworks. This project makes a case for models of civic engagement that use more deliberative rhetorical approaches prioritizing empathy over defensiveness and understanding before persuasion. To develop these non-adversarial communication approaches for the composition classroom, the author looks to participatory media for insights and studies the negotiation strategies of Christian and atheist YouTube users who leverage the affordances of the video medium, internet logics, and invitational rhetorical strategies to engage ideological differences in their respective online communities. Through mixed methods research involving in-depth interviews with five YouTube vloggers, netnographic study of over 3,000 videos, and statistical analysis of 76,000+ user comments, Coding Christianity finds that perspective-taking in conflict-ridden environments can happen between netizens when content creators opt out of “flame wars” and, instead, explicitly model critical openness and charitable listening to perceived “others.” The author ultimately suggests that sacred-secular tension in both academic and digital environments be used, not diffused, to negotiate conflicting values and engage in rigorous, civil dialogues.

Higher education was never made for marginalized people. The academy was created based on the privileged white, able-bodied, males who preoccupied higher education for the longest time. While that has certainly changed over the years, the institution itself is still in the past resulting in BIPOC students and disabled students continuing to struggle within higher education. While instructors have begun to take interest in the need for inclusive pedagogy within the last decade, it still has a far way to come in order to help the marginalized students with intersecting identities and students who may not benefit from a one size fits all inclusive pedagogy. In this thesis I suggest the combination of antiracist pedagogy and disability pedagogy to center some of the most marginalized students within the classroom for the first time. I look at the composition classroom specifically as that is where both BIPOC students and disabled students face similar hardships. I then give examples on what it would look like to implement this combined pedagogy through a syllabus policy example, a grading example, and an assignment example that people can take and modify to then use within their own classroom.

In 2015, Baltimore city erupted after the death of Freddie Carlos Gray. He was a 25-year-old who was forcibly placed into the back of a police van and after riding in the van, sustained several injuries that resulted in his death. After the video footage was shown to the public, a tension bubbled in the air that cause what seemed like weeklong protests and riots. The event is now referred to as the “Baltimore Uprising.” When he died, it was like a portion of each of us died. It was another narrative added to the cultural collective of Black faces killed by police violence. I was a year from graduating undergrad when Freddie Gray was killed. I remember distinctly, the feeling in the air There was a thickness. A sense of doom lurked in the air. This feeling has stayed with me for years after his death. The thickness, the heaviness of his death and the causes behind it are what interest me. The relationship between Black people in America and police has been tumultuous, gruesome, and counterproductive to progress of communities. Black identity and the Black body have been controversial since the creation of this identity. Blackness, identity, and policing and their connectedness is the reason behind this thesis. The relationship between Black identity and the continued attack on the presence of Blackness in America is a catalyst for this thesis, in which I explore the complexities and beauty of identity through an examination of the life and death of Freddie Gray. I explore how identity is linked throughout communities and the influence it has on both people and history. This thesis is important for me because of my identity. I am a Black woman from West Baltimore who grow up witnessing and experiencing Black Baltimore. To fully analyze my identity, the uprising, and its relation to the city, I collected sources from scholarly texts and conducted interviews from organizers and protestors who were present during the uprising, alongside my own perspective, and I use these varied sources to show how Freddie Gray’s life and death are emblematic of Black American identity.

Instructors of First-Year Composition courses are pursuing new ways to help integrate students into collegiate writing. One approach that has been gaining more widespread use is teaching composition through a popular medium. Inspired by these pedagogical movements, I designed a first-year composition course that approached writing through looking at different rhetorical elements of video games. During the course I encouraged students to enter into an I.R.B. approved study in which I recorded certain elements of their progression, discourse, and understanding regarding composition taught through gaming in an effort to document what was pedagogically successful, and what aspects of the course I could go on to change in further renditions. This approach is not a new one, but I wanted to help validate the argument for teaching composition through something students not only had prior knowledge of, but deeply wanted to discuss. My hope is that this study will help future students of first-year composition courses by encouraging their instructors to think critically about their own pedagogy, and help meet students where they begin their collegiate writing journey.

The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand the rhetorical influences that shape Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers’ lives and professional careers. To that end, this dissertation reimagines Deborah Brandt’s analytical framework of literacy sponsorship in conversation with feminist ecological thinking and rhetorical theory to forward a feminist ecological framework of rhetorical sponsorship, which uses ecological thinking to examine sponsoring influences within rhetorical ecologies. Drawing upon archival, quantitative, and qualitative data, this framework is used to explore three significant sites of rhetorical sponsorship—institutions, place, and memory—for Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers. First, to explore how institutions function as sponsors for women preachers, this dissertation theorizes institutional sponsorship. A specific application of rhetorical sponsorship, institutional sponsorship offers a methodological intervention that advances efforts to recover lost and marginalized figures by analyzing the relationship between a figure and an institution. This model is illustrated with archival data surrounding Rev. Mary Will, a 19th-century Wesleyan-Methodist clergywoman. Second, by blending quantitative data with a case study of Pastor Liz—a senior pastor in Boston—this dissertation examines how physical spaces associated with preaching serve as sponsors for Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers, focusing on how women derive power from preaching spaces. The data show that some women preachers draw upon the power of preaching spaces by committing ritual transgressions, movements that are outside the proper. The results are inconclusive, but it is possible that women preachers may be more likely than their male counterparts to commit ritual transgressions because they have a stronger sense of rootedness or place attachment in their preaching spaces. Lastly, this dissertation explores the sponsorship relationship between memory and Wesleyan-Methodist women preachers. A deep sense of historical memory emerged as a common feature among successful women preachers in the qualitative data, and further analysis revealed that these women actualize memory through the hopeful jeremiad—a modified version of the jeremiad that is infused with activist hope. To demonstrate how memory serves as a sponsor and is actualized via the hopeful jeremiad, this dissertation focuses on the exemplar case of Rev. Dr. Jo Anne Lyon, the first woman elected to lead the Wesleyan denomination.

For decades, writing assessment theorists have subscribed to the principle of localism––the belief that assessments should be designed with local contexts in mind and administered by local actors. Although this belief has ensured the validity of assessments in writing programs, it has also led to a tendency to treat assessment as a stable practice that is bound to a particular location, thus ignoring what happens when assessment knowledge and methods developed in one location travel to another distant location (as they do for campus assessment initiatives). To that end, this project traces how assessment knowledge is transformed as it travels to different locations via texts and people's interactions with them: from writing assessment position statements to publications authored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), from AAC&U to one university, and then to faculty assessors using AAC&U rubrics to score student artifacts for General Education assessment purposes at that university. Through document analysis, I find that, while AAC&U's approach to assessment appears to be aligned with writing studies' assessment principles, the organization is drifting away from recommending local adaptations and toward encouraging a more standardized uptake of its approach. Focus group interviews with five faculty assessors reveal the embodied practices assessors developed to manage their work and make a variety of scoring decisions as well as the textual ideologies participants brought to the work of interpreting and applying the rubrics. My analysis of participants' utterances and gestures shows that they critiqued the rubrics for appearing to uphold a singular, normative standard (standard language ideology). At the same time, they negotiated standard language ideology themselves, sometimes making comments that perpetuated this ideology. My analysis illustrates the instability of standard language ideology, which itself is often treated as a stable phenomenon. This study has implications for large-scale assessments and writing assessment research: I argue that a knowledge mobilization framework for writing assessment makes it possible to attend to how people transform seemingly fixed assessment knowledge in practice.

This mixed methods action research study aimed to understand the use of LMS assessment tools by faculty teaching English Composition (Eng 101) at a New Jersey Community College in order to increase that use for assessment of outcomes. In spite of administrative push for faculty to use the LMS for data based decision-making, there is still limited use of LMS tools. In writing-intensive fields like Eng 101 grading and feedback could be accelerated along with monitoring student performance on outcomes using LMS assessment tools. Forming a virtual faculty learning committee that collaborated in the study's data collection and analysis, volunteers studied faculty experience with their college LMS platform, Canvas, and its assessment tools. The purpose was to increase use of these tools through faculty-led professional development that could benefit faculty in assessment of outcomes and lead to student success. The results of the study based on models of blended learning and 21st century learning skills could prove useful to the college administration and educational leaders in determining policy surrounding assessment culture and technology use that impacts classroom practice.

This thesis explores the act of composing as a transformational, ongoing event and offers digital reflection as a tool for first-year writing students to evaluate their own writing practices. I analyze student vlogs produced in response to an assignment that asked students to produce digital reflections on their work as writers across the process of completing a final course project. My findings suggest that adapting experiential learning principles, digital and non-digital, into composition classroom design creates and facilitates writing experiences that are immersive and transformational. Crucial to designing learning occasions is the process of active reflection upon what the writer experiences, a quality that is explored in some depth in this thesis. I outline the habits of mind to cultivate within the writing classroom through the practice of reflection-in-action, and I propose that digital reflection allows writers to fully immerse themselves in the experience of multimodal composition, enacting the senses and engaging the whole person. Advisor: Debbie Minter

The world has become integrated with technology at a rapid rate. The rhetoric of online platforms, due to technology integration, allows people to connect, converse, and meet others who have common character traits. Eyman (2015) defines rhetoric as an action that intends to persuade and form meaning. These platforms are referred to as "social media," which are online networks made by people who use rhetoric to form, confirm, and reinforce the connections of platform users with common character traits: Hobbies, thoughts, race, gender, or religion. These common character traits make up one's social identity. This study details the findings of an extensive literature review with data used from journals, articles, dissertations, and abstracts from the University of Mary Washington library database; to identify how social media's rhetoric shapes social identity through the formation of online groups and reveal how algorithms aid in the confirmation and reinforcement of social identity. This study also uses critical discourse analysis to compare different social groups with similar social identities, illustrating how social media's rhetoric forms, confirms, and reinforces social identity and provides insight into algorithm’s role throughout it all.