Tractors and Genres: Knowledge-Making and Identity Formation in an Agricultural Community

This research examines the history of a small Florida agricultural community over the course of the twentieth century from a rhetorical perspective in order to understand the technological and communicative transitions that governed the development of American agricultural production. By examining archival and oral histories, this research will add to our understandings of how written and oral communications temper the relationships and social situations of an agricultural community, including the knowledge-making and technological adaptation resulting from communications within the community and with outside institutions and entities. Agricultural villages are not isolated entities, but rather sites of multiple rhetorical situations, and farmers do not farm alone, but inside an ecosystem of networked knowledges, practices, and traditions. Thus, the history of a singular farming community may serve as a rhetorical microcosm of modern American agriculture\u27s evolution over the course of the twentieth century, and provide some mindfulness concerning the social, technological, and natural ecologies that act and interact within modern farming communities. This dissertation will use rhetorical genre theory and ideas of local literacies to examine the written and oral discourses that run through these ecologies for the purpose of tracing the relationships between the sponsors of agricultural ideas and technologies and the local farmers who interpreted, employed, and modified them. In addition, this project purports to add to digital history-making research through the construction of an historical archival website to which community members can add their voices. The Samsula Historical Archive creates an online nexus where community members can document, organize, and preserve the history of the community, offering a portal supporting multiple narratives and perspectives. Each family has its own stories and perspectives on historical happenings; by bringing these together in one databased location, the layers and interconnections will become clearer and perhaps stimulate further memories and insights. A discussion of the rhetorical choices faced in constructing such an artifact may also help future researchers embarking on such a project

Sponsors of Agricultural Literacies: Intersections of Institutional and Local Knowledge in a Farming Community

Many of the agricultural literacies engendering twentieth-century farming practices and shaping contemporary concepts of food and nutrition in the United States arose through scientific research at land-grant colleges. This article examines how those literacies reached and interacted with local communities through institutional entities such as the extension service and its youth program, the 4-H

(un)natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood\u27s Oryx And Crake

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood\u27s Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel\u27s scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood\u27s text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of vulnerable species. Oryx and Crake reveals humanity\u27s organic connections with non-human others through interspecies gene-splicing and the ensuing hybridity. In this perspective, Atwood\u27s text provides a dialogue on humankind\u27s alienation from the natural world and synchronic connections to the animal other, and poses timely questions for twenty-first century consumerism, globalism, and humanist approaches to nature. The loss of balance provoked by the apocalyptic situation in Oryx and Crake challenges commonplace attitudes toward beneficial progress. This imbalance signals the need for a new narrative: A consilient reimagining of humanity\u27s role on earth as an integrated organism rather than an intellectual singularity

SSA03 - Exploring the Hegemony of Ag Modernization through Historical Ag News

Digital cultural history can mean different things to different audiences; a community history website, an online museum, or an institutional photo repository all have digital cultural contexts. Our project concerns interpreting data from one such heritage database, Chronicling America, to understand the role newspapers—the social media of the era—played in disseminating hegemonic ideologies within American agricultural communities

Teaching the Repulsive Memorial

This chapter presents a method for teaching students in writing classes to make repulsive memorials, which reveal to us the repulsive origins and abject byproducts of national identity formation

Soapbox Session C

It\u27s All in the Bag: Developing the BookBag Tool to Organize and Analyze Data and Create Narratives Onsite (Connie Lester) Measuring the Impact of History Harvests on UCF and its Community-Based Partner Institutions (Abigail Padfield) The Paper Lens and Dominant Roots: Exploring the Hegemony of Agricultural Modernization through Historical Agricultural News (Marcy Galbreath and Amy Giroux) Mapping property boundaries and Indian trails in the Chesapeake (Jessica Taylor) Surfacing Indigenous Perspectives on the French Conquest of Algeria in a Graduate DH Course (Ashley Sanders) The JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992 and Digital History (Diane Cline) Big Data, Digital Humanities, and a New Understanding of Predictive Analytics (J.D. Applen