Systemic Noise: Investigating the Posthuman Rhetorical Movement of You Didn\u27t Build That

While campaigning for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he uttered the sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” In the aftermath of the speech, the phrase “you didn’t build that” circulated widely in political discourse, generating a variety of responses from campaigns and commentators as to what the phrase means. This thesis uses a posthuman rhetorical framework to investigate how “you didn’t build that” influenced and was transformed by political discourse systems. Specifically, I synthesize scholarship on complex systems, enthymeme, and new materialism to argue that the ambiguity of the phrase enables individuals to draw inferences capable of destabilizing discourse systems, and that from such disruptions emerge responses that work to (re)stabilize those systems. In particular, I analyze a response from the Obama campaign, articles written by political commentators, and the “You didn’t build that” Wikipedia page in order to consider the rhetorical activity generated by the phrase. Ultimately, this thesis argues that treating sites of analysis as momentarily stable can provide a productive means of investigating the complexity of rhetorical movement. I also maintain that seemingly divisive arguments can indicate subtle yet significant changes in political discourse

Manufacturing crisis : rhetorical new materialism, political discourse, and the ‘crisis’ at the U.S.-Mexico border

“Manufacturing Crisis: Rhetorical New Materialism, Political Discourse, and the ‘Crisis’ at the U.S.-Mexico Border” examines the rhetorical life of crisis as a concept and term, particularly in its fraught application to the U.S.-Mexico border. Grounded in rhetorical new materialism and informed by border rhetorics scholarship, this project examines how dominant, representationalist discourses and digital practices circulate and sediment “crisis” as a normalized designation for the border. Using Karen Barad’s posthumanist critique of representationalism, I analyze how public declarations of the so-called 2019 border crisis became rhetorically weighted and advantageous for the Trump administration, as “crisis” resonated with the belief that the safety and (white) hegemony of the U.S. was being threatened by migrants of color. While much new materialist scholarship has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with discourse, I show that Barad’s critique of representationalism coupled with her understanding of representations as material-discursive phenomena offer a useful framework for analyzing political discourse. In doing so, I also argue that rhetorical new materialist scholars are well-served to consider how our critiques of representationalism nonetheless rely on and reinforce the very Cartesian orientation we seek to complicate. While this complicity is perhaps inevitable, it’s not a contradiction nor unproductive, and instead offers scholars an opportunity to recognize our entanglements with our objects of study.Englis

“The City Residents Do Not Get Involved”: Understanding Barriers to Community Participation in a Small Texas Boomtown

Background: Professional communication researchers have engaged communities through community research and interventions, such as town halls, charettes, and participatory design work. Such interventions rely on community members who are willing to get involved, voicing their perspectives, and engaging in productive dialogue. Yet, some communities do not have these precursor conditions for intervention: they face significant social barriers that make such interventions unlikely to succeed. In an interview- and document-based study, we examine the social barriers described by interviewees in “Permia,” a small town in the Texas Permian Basin region. In contrast to the five other communities we studied, Permia participants demonstrate little readiness to engage in community dialogue. We explore how Permia interviewees made sense of unwillingness to participate in its public life, how their understandings contrasted with the other communities we investigated, and how this research might guide professional communicators as they plan future community-based interventions. Literature review: We review the professional communication research on community interventions as well as relevant sociological literature on boomtowns. Research questions: 1. How do community leaders understand their community heritage as constraining or enabling development? 2. Where do community leaders and members see potential for change and growth in community development? Where do they see barriers, threats, and hard choices? 3. How do community leaders describe the relations among community development stakeholders? How do they describe expectations and trust among them on interpersonal, intergroup, and interorganizational levels? Research methodology: We collected documents and statistics about six small Texas towns, then interviewed community leaders about the towns’ advantages and challenges. Based on those interviews, we collected further documents. We analyzed the data using deductive and inductive coding, as well as narrative analysis. Results/discussion: Through coding, we determined that interviewees saw Permia’s residents as unwilling to engage in deliberations in traditional forums such as city council meetings, and that their explanations for this unwillingness fell into three categories of barriers: distrust of institutions, dwindling personal ties, and lack of moral expectations for residents to engage in community dialogue. These three categories contrast with the other communities we studied. Through narrative analysis, we identify stories that were told by the interviewees to explain how these barriers developed in Permia. Conclusion: We conclude by discussing how professional communicators might survey barriers to community dialogue. Such surveys can help professional communicators choose a pathway for intervention in their community projects.IC2 Institut