Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationFood encapsulates the entire circuit of production that connects field to fork. The biological necessity of food is always already enmeshed within complex relations of capital. Access to a safe, nutritious, and socially acceptable food supply co-conditions how food is grown, processed, exchanged and transported, and ultimately consumed. Discursively, food security signifies relations of sustenance via flows of comestible capital, subjectivating populations through regimes of governmentality, vulnerability, and visibility that exploit the biopolitical insertion of bodies into the late capitalist economic machine. As an issue of environmental justice, food security reveals the disparate impacts of foodways, regimes, and practices on marginalized groups, and the limitations of late capitalism in accounting for environmental degradation. This dissertation theorizes food security by tracing its articulation in farm/food policy, living wage activism, and anti-hunger advocacy discourses. My first chapter frames, via Marxian political economy, Foucauldian biopolitics, and articulation theory, the relations of sustenance by which this project is driven. In my second chapter, I take up the Marxian concept of social metabolism to consider the ways the farm bill arranges the circuit of comestible exchange. Analysis of Congressional deliberations reveals how, in an entrenched agriculture/nutrition war of position, food security is articulated as risk, valorizing the fertility of agribusiness and re-employing the wasted poor. Chapter III explores the subjectivation of the working poor; tipped restaurant workers living wage activism functionally antagonizes the hegemony of employment-based notions of food security. In Chapter IV, the Food Stamp Challenge is taken up in terms of a bio/politics of visibility, and considers how food operates as an element in class relations. My fifth and final chapter brings themes across all of the chapters into sharper focus. It directly addresses my research questions about food security and (bio)political economy, explicates the rhetorical dimensions of food security across policy, activism, and advocacy contexts, and concludes with implications for critical praxis

From paper to plastic: electronic benefits transfer as technology of neoliberalization

This analysis refocuses attention to the relationship between neoliberal government practice and co-conditioning rhetorical consequence through examination of Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT). Operating by a plastic card similar to consumer debit cards, EBT opens new possibilities of consumption for those receiving Food Stamps. Rather than simply signaling a disciplining governmentality, electronic food assistance functions as a technology of neoliberalization, proffering the potentiality of social equity while (re)instantiating class boundaries. I appropriate the finance term securitization to specify the disposal of liberalist logics that transform the poor from economic risk to state asset while also leaving the conditions of poverty and food insecurity unchallenged

Reform, Justice, and Sovereignty: A Food Systems Agenda for Environmental Communication

Food ecologies and economies are vital to the survival of communities, non-human species, and our planet. While environmental communication scholars have legitimated food as a topic of inquiry, the entangled ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary relations that sustain food systems demand greater attention. In this essay, we review literature within and beyond environmental communication, charting the landscape of critical food work in our field. We then illustrate how environmental justice commitments can invigorate interdisciplinary food systems-focused communication scholarship articulating issues of, and critical responses to, injustice and inequity across the food chain. We stake an agenda for food systems communication by mapping three orientations—food system reform, justice, and sovereignty—that can assist in our critical engagements with and interventions into the food system. Ultimately, we entreat environmental communication scholars to attend to the bends, textures, and confluences of these orientations so that we may deepen our future food-related inquiries

The Impact of Source Credibility on Scientific Skepticism of Climate Change and Genetically Modified Foods: Findings from the General Social Survey

The current study explores the role of source credibility in continued public concern over climate change and GM foods, suggesting that this skepticism is more likely driven by perceptions of scientists as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and unbiased- the three primary constructs of source credibility (McCrosky & Teven, 1999; Teven 2008). We analyze data from the 2006 GSS survey to empirically measure the components of source credibility, comparing their influence and relationship to political ideology in perceptions of CC impacts and willingness to consume GM foods

The Radical Potential of Public Hearings: A Rhetorical Assessment of Resistance and Indecorous Voice in Public Participation Processes

Little scholarship in environmental communication has considered the intersections between public participation and social movement. We fill this gap by discussing how public participation process can become sites of radical politics when publics employ disruptive or improper tactics, known as indecorous voice. Indecorum can be used to sustain protest matters beyond official forums, engage multiple audiences, and forge new identities among publics. We demonstrate the utility of indecorum through two case studies: Love Canal, NY where residents combat exposure to toxic chemicals, and Salt Lake City, UT, where publics challenge industrial expansion in a fight for clean air

Comic Book Villain's Body: Deviant Sexuality and Gender-Transgression

Oftentimes, superheroes are recognized in the fields of visual rhetoric, popular culture, and literature as means for persuading and influencing masculine identity. With the explosive popularity of comic books and the presence of them in varying media, comic books necessitate the exploration and investigation in regards to how they affect a mass consumerist audience and society. Despite this new found attention to comic books as viable scholarly material, supervillains remain largely dismissed from the academic discourse regarding their influence on gender and sexuality under the umbrella of masculine identity and performance. By examining the first explicitly homosexual character in a comic book and his portrayal, along with a supervillain that has amassed considerable popularity and has changed drastically overtime, this paper intends to set the groundwork for future academic scholarship over identity, gender, sexuality, and comic books. Ultimately, it appears that comic books, whether explicitly or unintentionally, reiterate and reinforce a heteronormative agenda and social framework by having the supervillains embody gender-transgressive characteristics and deviant sexuality.Englis