Humans naturally communicate, but choose to use tools. They use them to make sense of things, even to their own detriment and the detriment of others. These tools often receive the attention, instead of the human interaction. Aristotle's notion of humans as social animals has been carried into media ecology scholarship by Arendt, Burke, Ellul, Mumford, Postman, and Ricoeur. Social media scholarship has often focused on the tool and how it affects humanity. However, a phenomenological approach is necessary, as humans communicate with or without these tools. This approach will follow multiple steps. The first is through an understanding of the historical lens of civic discourse from antiquity to contemporary society. The second step is to examine why Aristotle's concept of ethos still matters in social media. The third step warns how social media could be shaped into a “knack” environment and lead to a synthetic ethos. The fourth step analyzes how interpersonal communication interacts with social media, as well as how a noble friendship can be established in social media. The fifth step exposes how humanity is unfortunately using technology to revise modernism in a postmodern age. The sixth step details how humans can reconcile social media-in-itself with social media-for-itself. This multi-step approach seeks to understand how social media fit in humanity, and also how humans fit in social media. These steps puts a focus on humans having choice and free will, and thus, responsibility. The approach in this document is more concerned with understanding the medium and then understanding how choice affects human action and direction. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Communication and Rhetorical Studies / PhD; / Dissertation;

The June 2016 UK referendum on EU membership is indicative of the challenges facing the EU, in terms of an apparent lack of unity and solidarity among its component member states. The very fact of a potential ‘Brexit’, and the ramifications that it might have, call into question the concept of European identity, indicative of a sense of belonging and attachment to a community beyond the confines of the nation-state. European identity has been conceived by both European elites and academics such as Jürgen Habermas, in his vision of ‘constitutional patriotism’, as something which can be constructed and fostered, in much the same way that national identity has been in the past. Euroscepticism tends to be associated with a lack of European identity, and an emphasis on nationalism.   However, such views downplay the importance still accorded to the nation-state, and the pervasiveness of nationalism. This study argues that European identity is first and foremost a construct of national discourse, and this affects the role that it plays in fostering support for the EU. Therefore, the research examines British national discourse on Europe and the EU, asking: Does the concept of European identity play a role in the Brexit debate? It considers this in relation to affective attachment to the nation-state, examining the kind of assumptions that such attachment enables. Given its emphasis on European identity as a rhetorical construct, this study uses a method of Critical Discourse Analysis, looking at political and public discourse in the UK over a three-month period in the lead up to the ‘Brexit’ referendum.   The findings confirm the pervasiveness of nationalist assumptions used in discourse, demonstrating that they are not associated solely with Euroscepticism. Moreover, the Brexit debate indicates the rhetorical nature of European identity rooted in shared culture or values. As a result, we see strange bedfellows: support for the EU is premised with an emphasis on national allegiance and belonging, while European identity (based on cultural similarity and belonging) is used as an argument against the EU. Both sides of the debate rely to some extent on a separation of ‘Europe’ and ‘EU’. Support for the EU, then, does not necessarily require a ‘thick’ identity, or that the bonds of nationalism be completely broken down. This prompts some reflection on the potential for identification with Europe based on rational, national self-interest.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Swedish civil service underwent some extensive changes, such as the relocations of public sector jobs, initiated by the government in 2005. This thesis follows an ethnological tradition of focusing on employees’ perspectives as a way of exploring power relations and changes in society. In this study, I draw attention to the fears, joys, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of employees in the Swedish civil service at a time when their workplace was being relocated from one city to another. The study especially focuses on the fact that a decision to relocate initiates processes that change employee’s images of their work life and future. They become forced to rethink life and work and re-identify with professional positions. Such processes are described in this thesis as processes of professional identification. The aim of the study is to analyze professional identification among employees during the relocation of a government agency. It is based on four articles that highlight different aspects of the relocation and the conditions under which research was conducted. The overarching question that runs through the thesis is: what did processes of professional identification mean in relocation practice? I argue that such processes should be taken into account as pivotal to civil service practices such as relocation work. Such knowledge could also be used as a tool for thinking about work life change in a wider sense. Because relocations entail moving people’s entire lives, points of interest are formulated that tell stories of how social norms and rules are formed, maintained, and contested. The results in this thesis could also serve as a departure for discussing the localization of knowledge-intensive institutions. The case study builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2009 at a government agency that moved from the capital of Sweden to a smaller town in the north of Sweden. The ethnographic source material was analyzed using discourse analysis. The analysis centres on a discussion of how processes of professional identification became conditioned by social structures in terms of gender, age, and social class in relocation work. I furthermore discuss the ways in which images of geographies and emotions could be regarded as social categories that conditioned professional identities and had implications for how the move of the agency was organized and conducted, for example for the transferring of competency, travelling on business, and setting up new work practices.  The establishment of professional identity positions functioned to stabilize the social environment during the move - a time when many things at work seemed to be in turmoil. At the same time the positions worked to privilege some ways of professional identification and exclude others. Attention should be drawn to the ways in which agency staff became enmeshed in power structures, norms, ideals, images, and plans for the future that limited their actions in various ways. It is therefore important that the features of professional identification in this relocation process should be further discussed, not primarily as individual concerns of particular individuals, or even a particular agency or location, but as a vital issue of the greatest concern to the welfare state. / Decentralization of government agencies, work force mobility and rural development

The objective of this study was to examine Polish and Canadian children’s and adults’ attention to two potential cues to ironic intent: 1) interpretive perspective (addressee versus bystander), and 2) parties present (speaker, addressee, and bystander). Polish participants were 36 9- to 10-year-olds and 36 adults recruited from schools in Poland. Canadian participants were matched from an existing dataset. Participants watched 9 videos containing ironic criticisms, literal criticisms, and literal compliments. Video characters criticized/complimented a present or absent addressee either with or without a bystander in three conditions: private evaluation, public evaluation, and gossip. Participants judged speaker’s intent and humour from the addressee’s perspective, and/or the bystander’s perspective. Interpretative perspective served as a cue to verbal irony only among Canadian adults, who rated ironic criticisms more mean and more serious when interpreting these statements from the addressee’s perspective versus the bystander’s perspective. The number of parties present influenced interpretation of irony’s seriousness for Polish adults, but not their Canadian counterparts. Polish adults rated public ironic criticisms as less serious compared to private ironic criticisms, while Canadian adults rated the conditions similarly. The results show that the relevance of cues in interpreting ironic criticisms is influenced by age and culture. / October 2016

A comparative analysis of 100 Kurdish novels (written in Kurmanji dialect) examines how Kurdistan, the homeland of Kurds and Kurdish identity, is constructed within the territory of Turkish Kurdistan and in its diaspora. Stateless, mostly displaced and constantly in movement, Kurds lack a real territorial homeland, yet base their national identity on the notion of Kurdistan as their mythical homeland. Kurdish novelistic discourse suggests that definitions of Kurdish identity and ‘home-land’ are relative, depending on ideology and personal experiences, and that ‘Home’, ‘homeland’ and ‘landscape’ as social constructs, are not static entities but change constantly over time. A humanistic geographical approach sees literature, particularly the novel, as an instrument of geographical inquiry into a society or a nation. Using that model, and employing textual and contextual approaches, the study shows how and why the nation/society is constructed and clarifies the sense of home-land and identity embedded in the texts. The novelistic discourse in which ‘home-land’ becomes an ideological construct is mainly shaped by the political views of the novelists. However, compared to the novelistic discourse in Turkish Kurdistan, the Kurdish diaspora novelists have gathered around more diverse ideologies and politics that have led to diverse ‘home-land’ images. The novelistic discourse in Turkish Kurdistan also offers more nostalgic elements whereas diaspora theorists and scholars had identified these as exclusive to the literary works in exile. It can be concluded that feelings of nostalgia are invoked as much by the reality of living in fragmented territory and in a situation of statelessness, oppression and domination, as they are when living at a distance, removed from such experiences. In other words, although living in home territories, the literary characters still experience a sense of migration and detachment from home, which is infused with alienation and loneliness as if they are physically away from their homeland.

This study combines autoethnographies of the author‘s school experience with narratives of school experience as related by adult students who were not successful in school. The study evolved into a narrative exploration of notions of success and failure as they are conceptualized in school settings. Evaluative assessment experiences were examined as the seeds of the 'story of the self' that was planted in each of us as we reflected upon, and constructed through language, the social world of our school experiences through story. Various aspects of the power dynamics inherent in assessment processes are also examined in the context of the narratives. The placement of the adult students‘ narratives alongside the autoethnographies of the researcher reveals fascinating similarities and differences among the ways that each participant conceptualized his/her evaluative school experience. / Graduate

This thesis is concerned with the relation between the notion of national language and identity, in particular the manner in which a shared sense of national belonging is expressed and reproduced through the display of public attitudes towards foreign loanwords in society. Employing the case study of contemporary Japan, this research seeks to uncover the process by which a national language is conceived of as a symbol of national identity that requires the exclusion of certain loanwords from the perceptual framework of this national language. To this end, contemporary Japanese discourse on language has been scrutinised, drawing on nationwide newspaper entries published between 1991 and 2010 on the subject of foreign loanwords known as 'gairaigo' in Japanese. Through this analysis, the thesis argues that the fierce debate on the use of loanwords can be understood as a particular manifestation of the ongoing (re-)negotiation of Japanese national identity. On the whole, criticism and praise of the use of loanwords are found to be grounded upon a desire to establish specific understandings of Japaneseness in reference to the otherness symbolised by loanwords. Both parties in the debate are, therefore, highly reliant upon notions of national consciousness, challenging the common view that debates over the use of foreignisms are merely that of an opposition between nationalists who argue for the purity of language and internationalists who argue against such normative boundaries in language. In this context, it is argued that loanwords represent a foreignness, or otherness, felt within a society that constructs an 'internal other', or 'outside within', to a Japanese 'self', the identity of which is neither autonomous nor clearly delineated.

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Master of Science / Department of Communications and Agricultural Education / Jason D. Ellis / The general public is more generationally and geographically removed from agricultural production today than ever before, yet as influential as ever with regards to its ability to impact the operating conditions of the animal agriculture industry. To date, the agriculture industry has focused research and extension on how to educate and persuade the public in order to gain support for its practices and policies. Little work has investigated how the language choices of those communicating about agriculture may be functioning to position themselves and other participants with regards to authority and credibility, and how this affects their communication and the industry as a whole. This study sought to develop an understanding as to how three key groups in the animal agriculture conversation (experts, professional communicators, and agricultural advocates) use discourse and language to position themselves and other participants, their explanations of opposition to animal agriculture, and their ideas about how to best present and justify their arguments to the wider public. In addition to this, the study also sought to understand what power structures and dynamics exist within the conversation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data for a critical discourse analysis. The discursive practices of the participants functioned to ultimately undermine and delegitimize the role of the public and individuals and groups opposed to animal agriculture, as well as position the industry and its constituents as the only authoritative and credible voices in the animal agriculture conversation. This is likely to be prohibitive to achieving the goals of agricultural communication activities. Those communicating on behalf of the animal agriculture industry should become more aware of how their beliefs, values, and ideologies impact the discourse from which they are operating, as well as how their communication is functioning. This research was undertaken from a critical inquiry perspective, shedding light on some of the power structures inherent between the animal agriculture industry and the general public. Others undertaking agricultural sociology and related research should consider doing so integrating a similar theoretical perspective to continually challenge the assumptions and conditions under which the industry operates.

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Richard J. Harris / To date, no research has been conducted to establish the discourse goals accomplished through social movie quoting. In this thesis four studies were conducted to learn what discourse goals are accomplished through social movie quoting and if Roberts and Kreuz’ (1994) discourse goal taxonomy for figurative language would be a suitable theoretical framework for the study of the social movie quoting phenomenon. Study 1 examined movie quoting without being tied to any specific movie quotes. Demographic variables were correlated with common movie viewing preferences, behaviors, and attitudinal responses. Study 2 had participants generate a realistic movie quote they would actually use for accomplishing each of several specific discourse goals in conversation. Study 3 had participants generate a plain English interpretation of the movie quotes selected from Study 2. Study 4 participants rated the movie quotes and plain English equivalents generated in studies 2 and 3 for aptness and likelihood for use in conversation with the knowledge (Condition 1) and without the knowledge (Condition 2) of the underlying discourse goal. Quotes were randomized and counterbalanced so that half the participants in each condition received all movie quotes first (Group 1) and half the plain English first (Group 2). Results indicated that movie quotes were used to accomplish a set of discourse goals most similar to the traditional figures of speech of hyperbole, understatement, metaphor, and simile. The most common purposes of social movie quoting were to compare similarities and either downplay or exaggerate these similarities. Knowledge of the underlying discourse goal significantly increased the aptness and likelihood of both quote types for several discourse goals. The order of presentation did not significantly affect participants’ ratings. The aptness of the quote was strongly related to participants’ likelihood of using a particular quote, regardless of quote type. Future research should focus on capturing naturally occurring language to further increase the ecological validity of these results. It appears that the act of quoting movie lines in conversation is heavily dependent on individual preferences and a method should be developed to capture movie quoting in such a way. Suggestions for enhanced selection of movie quotes is discussed.