This thesis presents an investigation into the experience of ESL Higher Education young writers when composing three online genres: academic text, diary texts, and blog texts. Central to this investigation is the authenticity of audience and directing texts to ‘real’ readers. Hence, technological tools are utilised in order to approximate such experience of writing for real readers. A qualitative case study was employed over three months of an academic semester at an Omani Higher Education College. Two cases participated in the study of overall 17 students across both cases: 5 males and 12 females and 10 students in case 1 and 7 students in case 2. To attain an in-depth understanding of the cases; different tools of data collection were deployed, including: interviews, classroom observation, reflective diary for recording student perceptions and experiences, and three forms of written texts were collected from the participating students: academic essay, diary, and blog. Thus the reflective diary was both a genre of writing and a data collection method. The study findings highlight that having only a teacher as an ‘audience’ restricted students’ attempts to focus on content, and most of this focus was given to shaping texts in accordance with student perceptions of teacher approved organisation and representation of text. Whereas blogging provided an opportunity to think of a wider range of readers and therefore a greater tendency to author personally selected texts. Also, diary was mostly associated with teacher-audience; though some writers enjoyed writing diary for personal use, the fact that these diary texts vary in accordance with these different understandings of audience offers further credence to claims about the role of real and assumed readers in shaping texts. The significance of the current study is that it offers practical and pedagogical thinking for teaching writing in ESL exploiting the affordances of technology in teaching process writing. It suggests that varying both audience and genres in relation to classroom writing tasks can have benefits for student writers in terms of their understanding of audience, their shaping of text for an audience and increased investment in the content of what they write. It offers insights into problems and issues felt by young writers that are usually unknown to the teachers. Based on those insights, differing issues such as collaboration, process writing and grading are re-evaluated.

Audience agency, text-reading practices, and the roles mediated cultural texts play in the lives of readers have long been at the center of enduring debates among Critical, Cultural, Performance, and Rhetorical Studies scholars. One salient ongoing dialogue among scholars and critics questions the degree to which audiences actively participate in the process of making sense of mediated texts. How capable are media consumers of comprehending and responding to texts containing oppressive discourses? If pop culture is vital in shaping what it means to belong to a culture, can politically minded consumption of cultural texts be a tool by which we can resist or subvert dominant ideologies? This study enters into this dialogue through critical engagement with the emergent embodied audiencing practice of movie riffing, which is characterized by performers talking back to a film, or any matter of mediated text, as it is screened, through a series of humorous and/or critical speech acts. Embracing performative riffing as both a text-reading ethic for negotiating ideologically loaded pop culture texts and a space-based return of embodied performance in a social setting typically characterized by stillness and silence, this study explores the present state of riffing and looks to riffing's future by theorizing a movie-riffing ethic that constitutes explicitly political performance. This study is divided into eight chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 consider contemporary and historical anecdotes on audiencing practices to situate riffing within a rich legacy of embodied audiencing, text appropriation, meta-commentary, and ritual performance. Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical implications of riffing by situating riffing in scholarly discussions concerning audience agency in making sense of ideologically loaded pop culture texts; I argue riffing explicates the possibilities and constraints of audience agency, all of which should be recognized if riffing is to become a valuable performance tactic by which consumers of U.S. popular culture might enter into struggle over ideologically loaded cultural texts and reclaim a space for embodied audiencing in the cultural marketplace. Chapters 4 through 6 are dedicated to site- and text-specific inquiries into the current state of performative riffing and embodied audiencing. Chapter 4 chronicles my initial foray into ritual embodied audiencing with an ethnographic account of the 24-hour participatory "bad" movie festival B-Fest. Recounting my experiences of a B-Fest spent riffing alongside a group of enthusiastic B-Fest aficionados, I consider both the shortcomings and potential power of B-Fest riffing as a participatory, embodied audiencing ethic. Chapter 5 continues my exploration into site-specific audiencing rituals and weaves elements of text-specific inquiry, as I examine the popular audiencing ritual of the 2003 film The Room through a lens of Victor Turner's social drama model. I argue The Room's audiencing ritual and its related performances constitute part of a discursive struggle between the film's fanbase and the film's director, Tommy Wiseau, to claim the film's enduring success as a midnight movie phenomenon. In describing ways in which audience members interact with the film and each other during screenings of the film, I explore the implications of tactical in-theater performance in reading pop culture texts. Chapter 6 moves out of the realm of physical theaters and into the world of popular media as I explore today's most famous and influential riffing showcase, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and consider the tactical strengths and weaknesses of its model of movie riffing as a vessel for cultural criticism. I undertake a close textual reading of MST3K's characteristic movie riffing and identify themes that politically minded riffers might utilize to aid their efforts to read and potentially challenge ideologically loaded texts. Yet, recognizing that the discourse of the show at times showcases problematic attitudes that can be read as destructive or offensive in ways that suggest ridiculing a text is not necessarily the same as subverting it, I also consider ways in which MST3K's model of riffing falls short or presents challenges--and, therefore, avenues for innovation and growth--to politically minded riffers. Chapters 7 and 8 reflect on the lessons gleaned in previous chapters to articulate theoretical contributions and future directions for riffing and embodied audiencing practices. Chapter 7 reflects upon the observations and ideas gathered in Chapters 4 through 6 and localizes them in three related contexts--amateur riffing and online communities, mediated activist art, and the political use of humor--which I offer as further illuminating possibilities, challenges, and new directions and paradigms for riffing. Finally, Chapter 8 draws from my observations in Chapters 4 through 7 and discusses future directions that performative riffing and embodied audiencing performances provide as text-based discursive tools for interpreting and critiquing mediated cultural texts and the ideologies and interpretations of reality they convey. I glimpse into the future of riffing and in-theater performance and discuss the possibilities of riffing as a method of political performance by which media consumers can talk back to mediated texts and those texts' ideologies and interpretations of reality.

Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members. / Psychology / D. Litt et Phil (Psychology)