ON THE CUSP OF INVISIBILITY: THE LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY, MARGINALIZED STUDENTS, AND INSTITUTIONAL SPACES

This dissertation considers the potential for decolonial possibilities for and democratic participation of students in three rhetorical and institutional spaces: the writing center, the classroom, and the archives. The Lower Río Grande Valley, the site of the study, is located at the Southernmost end of Texas, and is situated between the almost 2,000-mile-long geopolitical border spanning from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California and the internal checkpoints that run parallel to and 70 miles north of the border. The Lower Río Grande Valley has remained a Mexican American cultural province and zone despite six phases of colonization. Little is known of Mexican American uses and practices of literacy, rhetoric, and identity in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. This is even more apparent in regards to Mexican Americans of the Lower Río Grande Valley. On one level, this dissertation focuses on the historical and current state of colonization in the Lower Río Grande Valley. On another level, this dissertation is interested in the presentation and representation of culture through place making, meaning-making practices, and knowledge production. Part historiographical and archival, part ethnographic and decolonial, this rhetorical project brings into focus a region and student demographic that has remained on the cusp of invisibility in society, the academy, and the discipline of rhetoric and composition. The contribution of this research includes developing spatial and temporal awareness, increasing attention to local and regional cultural differences, and articulating decolonial possibilities

Activity orientation in the talk of politicians, news journalists and audiences

The talk of politicians, news-journalists and audiences has been relatively neglected in social psychology and media studies. Within these approaches talk has been ignored altogether, treated as a symptom of cognitive or ideological processes or employed simply as a tool to gain access to `inner' meaning making' or 'outer' behaviour. This thesis explored a corpus of talk data from a discursive perspective in which the talk itself was the focus. It was argued that politicians and news-journalists could in different ways be seen to orientate to the 'truthfulness' of what they say. Thus politicians' were found to cite others to corroborate their claims, and new-journalists through their exchange of utterances attended to the co-construction their 'impartiality' and 'authoritativeness'. Politicians were also found to construct intent in terms of acting in 'the national interest' - this 'repertoire' could blame or exonerate self and others depending crucially on talk-context in which it was produced. Audiences' talk about their identity and contrasts with others was also explored. Their talk was analysed not to uncover their 'meaning-makings' or behaviour but instead to discover the activity orientations of their talk and its sensitivity to the surrounding talk context. In this way the talk of politicians, news-journalists and audiences was not seen as a symptom of some separate, 'underlying' phenomena of interest nor as a mere tool to access their 'inner' or 'outer' world - but rather it was the focus of study itself. Approached in this way talk was understood as orientated to a range of activities such as warranting, exonerating, blaming and so on. It was argued that these activities could be conceptualised as occurring within and across talk context - that is in sequences of talk. The implications of the thesis were considered for aspects of social psychology, media studies and discursive approaches

Transcendental metagenre travelers: a background of the reception of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Spain and France

No abstract available

Volume 30, Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, Fall 1992/Winter 1993/Spring 1993/Summer 1993 Speaker and Gavel

Complete digitized volume (volume 30, numbers 1-4, Fall 1992/Winter 1993/Spring 1993/Summer 1993) of Speaker & Gavel

Equity and Democracy: A Push Towards Social Justice in the ELA Classroom

Despite the fact that schools demand character education, very little in terms of resources is devoted to infusing social justice into the ELA curriculum. Since our ELA instruction has stagnated, our national discourse has become more divided than ever, and many of our core ethical values once thought to be the bedrock of America are now in dispute. It is essential that we re-imagine the ELA curriculum to contain a focus on social justice education in order to instill the values of empathy and equity in our students. If ELA classrooms incorporated the four components of social justice education, schools would begin providing students with many more opportunities to have more meaningful and complex discussions about democracy, culture and fairness, which are fundamental concerns for any person interested in civic responsibility. With this increased focus on social justice, we can actually improve the civic awareness and engagement of our students so that they become more thoughtful participants in society

Crossing Idiomas: Negotiating Translingual Rhetoric within Global Health Publics

Increasing numbers of U.S. students and practitioners in the health professions travel annually to developing countries with global health programs. In these programs, visiting practitioners and local residents often work side-by-side to serve marginalized communities in need of better access to medical and dental care. This transnational public engagement in global health requires collaborative work among individuals with varied backgrounds of language, culture, class, and status. Health teams must develop communicative strategies to negotiate these differences and connect with their patients. This qualitative study examines these strategies for cross-cultural communication with two groups of volunteers that ran temporary health clinics in the Dominican Republic. Drawing from ethnographic methods (interviews and participant observation) and a methodology of rhetorical engagement, I examine how Dominican volunteers and visiting health practitioners assembled to form "emergent collectives" that collaborated across linguistic and cultural differences. I also analyze how individuals developed translingual rhetorical strategies that negotiated languages, dialects, and non-verbal gestures to support performances in the clinics. Using grounded practical theory, this study analyzes the communicative problems that volunteers encountered with varied proficiencies in English, varieties of Spanish, and medical terminology. It then examines the rhetorical strategies participants developed in response to those problems to interpret across English-Spanish, Spanish-Spanish, and non-verbal tactics. Although U.S. participants noted that the rural, Dominican dialect of Spanish of the local community was stigmatized, globally, I argue that it was considered the most "useful" form of Spanish to connect with patients and support performances in these clinics. By recognizing the integral support of the local volunteers' use of Spanish-Spanish interpretation and how U.S. participants performed language in ways to "sound more Dominican," I assert that vernacular language use was crucial to assembling as a collective and effectively caring for patients. This dissertation demonstrates how a situated health context outside of the U.S. can illuminate the complex "messiness" of translingual rhetoric in practice for transnational publics. Ultimately, this project encourages a collective approach to translingual rhetoric and advocates for more narratives that incorporate the vernacular voices of local volunteers working "on the ground" of global health

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn August of 2013, Roberto Flores and Alfredo Zárate, two Ciudad Juárez bus drivers, were killed while working. The murderer, according to eyewitnesses, was a woman between 30 and 50 years old. She purportedly wore a blonde wig and a baseball cap to conceal her identity. Eyewitnesses also told investigators that the murderer made remarks before killing the bus drivers, such as "you think you're so bad?" Ciudad Juárez was once considered the murder capital of the world, so the news of two more murders was hardly "news." Thus, this dissertation presents a case that demonstrates the normalization of quotidian violence-a process achieved through everyday cultural acts. Days after the murders, local news media received a confession. The author, who called herself Diana la Cazadora de Choferes (Diana, the hunter of bus drivers), claimed that she had vengefully murdered the bus drivers in response to the raped and murdered female maquiladora workers of Ciudad Juárez. This confession brought together a variety of discourses about maquiladora labor in Mexico, feminicidios (the unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juárez), organized crime, and governmental impunity. From a rhetorical perspective, this confession also hinted at discourses of rhetorical agency, social movements, the rhetorical construction of truth and credulity, and the role of mythology within modernity. Throughout this dissertation, I take a variety of critical, cultural, and rhetorical approaches as I construct and contextualize "Diana," following McGee's (1990) fragmentation theory. McGee argues that "rhetors make discourses from scraps and pieces of evidence. Critical rhetoric [as opposed to rhetorical criticism] does not begin with a finished text in need of interpretation; rather, texts are understood to be larger than the apparently finished discourse that presents itself as transparent" (p. 279). Thus, in this dissertation I examine several scraps of discourse that together, point toward one rhetorical construction of Diana la Cazadora de Choferes-not a complete or finished construction, but one that is put forth toward a specific telos: the illustration of what I term retórica moribunda, precarious rhetorics of life and death in contemporary Mexico

Forms of Global Health

My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between both representational modes, where metaphors for space work with microbial notions of contagion to define disease and shape policy. Reading for such complicity, I argue, recasts tropical medicine as a confluence of scientific and literary traditions. It also complicates contemporary notions of medical literature developed after World War II, the birth of the World Health Organization, decolonization and the emergence of global health, and it enables the field of literary studies to enter into debates about the ethics of public health endeavors from a vantage point unique to the study of representations of disease

The Chilean memory debate: mapping the language of polarisation

This research consists of an analysis based on a Discursive Psychology perspective of how Chileans talk about the recent past. The data are focus group discussions produced in 2005 and 2006. The 11 September 1973, the Chilean military overthrew the socialist government of. Salvador Allende, who had been elected president in 1970. The military installed first a junta and then a military government headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The military regime, which became known for tactics of political repression including assassination, torture and exile, remained in power until 1990, when Pinochet, having lost popular support (according to the results of a national plebiscite), returned the country to civilian rule. Since then, Chile has had four democratically elected presidents, none of whom has been able to avoid dealing with "the legacy of the past". Among Chileans, there is no consensus regarding how to name, describe or explain the events leading up to and during the military regime. On the contrary, since the day of the coup, opposing versions of events have been sustained by those who supported the Allende government and those who supported the coup. The controversies about 11 September 1973 itself, as well as the antecedents and the consequences of what happened on that day, are still valid concerns for Chileans. These concerns have been studied under the moniker of "collective or social memory", as attempts to explain the difficulties Chileans have encountered in "coming to terms with the legacy of the past". The most frequent explanations for the lack of consensus about the "truth" of what happened in Chile have been based on an appeal to memory processes, shaping a debate about the past as well as about legitimate sources of knowledge of the past. My research explores in detail the discursive and rhetorical devices (handled by the participants of several focus groups) by which the debate is explainable as the result of a systematic and methodical use of the "language of polarisation"