The resident assistant (RA) position at higher education institutions is a position of great influence. RAs have the opportunity to impact many students’ lives through the various roles that they engage in as a RA. The most common roles that RAs are expected to perform include developing community, serving as a peer helper, being a friend to residents, and enforcing policy. The very nature of a multi-role position presents challenges for RAs in understanding how to effectively enact all of their roles. This study aimed at developing an understanding of the ways in which RAs engage in identity management strategies with residents. To accomplish this purpose, 143 RAs were surveyed using an identity management strategies scale designed for this study. In addition, a previously designed self-monitoring scale was also administered to test the relationship between identity management strategies and self-monitoring. These scales were applied to situations representing each of the four primary roles of a RA: community developer, peer helper, friend, and policy enforcer. The results indicate that RAs are more likely to engage in avoidance strategies during the policy enforcer role than any other strategy. In addition, first-year RAs generally use more effective identity management strategies when developing community than returner RAs use. First-year RAs’ identity management strategies also appear to be more influenced by the RAs’ desires to be friends with residents than returner RAs’ identity management strategies. The results also indicate that female RAs are more effective in the community development role than male RAs. However, male RAs are more effective than female RAs in the policy enforcement role. A result that was supported throughout the study was the finding that RAs with upperclassmen residents are not as actively engaged in communicating their roles to residents than are RAs with freshmen and upperclassmen residents or only freshmen residents. Finally, the relationship of perceived self-monitoring to RAs’ choice of identity management strategies was not supported. The results of the study, interpretation of the data analysis, study implications, and directions for future research are discussed in detail.

The resident assistant (RA) position at higher education institutions is a position of great influence. RAs have the opportunity to impact many students’ lives through the various roles that they engage in as a RA. The most common roles that RAs are expected to perform include developing community, serving as a peer helper, being a friend to residents, and enforcing policy. The very nature of a multi-role position presents challenges for RAs in understanding how to effectively enact all of their roles. This study aimed at developing an understanding of the ways in which RAs engage in identity management strategies with residents. To accomplish this purpose, 143 RAs were surveyed using an identity management strategies scale designed for this study. In addition, a previously designed self-monitoring scale was also administered to test the relationship between identity management strategies and self-monitoring. These scales were applied to situations representing each of the four primary roles of a RA: community developer, peer helper, friend, and policy enforcer. The results indicate that RAs are more likely to engage in avoidance strategies during the policy enforcer role than any other strategy. In addition, first-year RAs generally use more effective identity management strategies when developing community than returner RAs use. First-year RAs’ identity management strategies also appear to be more influenced by the RAs’ desires to be friends with residents than returner RAs’ identity management strategies. The results also indicate that female RAs are more effective in the community development role than male RAs. However, male RAs are more effective than female RAs in the policy enforcement role. A result that was supported throughout the study was the finding that RAs with upperclassmen residents are not as actively engaged in communicating their roles to residents than are RAs with freshmen and upperclassmen residents or only freshmen residents. Finally, the relationship of perceived self-monitoring to RAs’ choice of identity management strategies was not supported. The results of the study, interpretation of the data analysis, study implications, and directions for future research are discussed in detail.

In this thesis I argue that technical communication as an academic curricular entity has struggled to define itself as either a humanities or scientific discipline. I argue that this crisis of identity is due to a larger, institutional flaw first identified by the science studies scholar Bruno Latour as the problem of the "modern constitution." Latour's argument, often referred to as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), suggests that the epistemological arguments about scientific certainty are built on a contradiction. In viewing the problem of technical communication's disciplinarity through the lens of ANT, I argue that technical communication can never be productive if it seeks to locate itself within any of the institutional camps of the modern university. Rather, I contend that technical communication is a strong example of a nonmodern discipline, and that its identity crisis can be utilized to take one step towards rewriting the institutional debate over scientific certainty.

When a disaster the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill takes place, is it natural for the news media stories, investigative reports, and public deliberation to focus almost exclusively on finding the person or group responsible for such a horrendous scene. Rhetorically speaking, the discourse surrounding the event can be characterized as a reductive form of praise and blame rhetoric (epideixis). However, these efforts, while well-intentioned, are troublesome because searches for the one technical cause and the sole personal culpability are thwarted by the sheer complexity of the ecological, technological, scientific, institutional, and communicative network required for such a disaster to take place. Thus, to demonstrate the insufficiency of extant models of disaster in a variety of fields, which tend to privilege human-centered approaches, Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age explores the ontology, technical documentation, and rhetorical theory of disasters through a posthuman lens. To find a more critical approach to understanding the nature of disasters in the twenty-first century, I ask the following questions: How do rhetoricians and technical communicators account more fully for the human and nonhuman forces at work in the precipitation of disaster? How do rhetoricians and technical communicators find an approach to ecological catastrophe that goes beyond the mere "environmentalist rhetoric" characterizing the public response? Through the application of several posthumanist theories, my project develops an approach to disaster that complicates traditional ways of approaching causality and blame. I use accident reports, news media stories, and popular literature as data for this project. By examining these texts, my project has broad implications for technical communication, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of rhetoric.

From 1961 to 1971 the United States and the Republic of South Vietnam used chemicals to defoliate the coastal and upload forest areas of Viet Nam. The most notorious of these chemicals was named Agent Orange, a weaponized herbicide made up of two chemicals that, when combined, produced a toxic byproduct called TCDD-dioxin. Studied suggest that TCDD-dioxin causes significant human health problems in exposed American and Vietnamese veterans, and possibly their children (Agency, U.S. Environmental Protection, 2011). In the years since the end of the Vietnam War, volumes of discourse about Agent Orange has been generated, much of which is now digitally archived and machine-readable, providing rich sites of study ideal for “big data” text mining, extraction and computation. This study uses a combination of tools and text mining scripts developed in Python to study the descriptive phrases four discourse communities used across 45 years of discourse to talk about key issues in the debates over Agent Orange. Findings suggests these stakeholders describe and frame in significantly different ways, with Congress focused on taking action, the New York Times article and editorial corpus focused on controversy, and the Vietnamese News Agency focused on victimization. Findings also suggest that while new tools and methods make lighter work of mining large sets of corpora, a mixed-methods approach yields the most reliable insights. Though fully automated text analysis is still a distant reality, this method was designed to study potential effects of rhetoric on public policy and advocacy initiatives across large corpora of texts and spans of time.

Interactivity research lacks consensus regarding the qualities and consequences of interactive experiences. Empirical proof is needed to substantiate the numerous interactivity theories and provide direction for new media technology developers. Specifically, there is a shortage of research on differences between user experiences of interactivity when technology enables communication versus when it does not. In addition, interactivity research is often confounded by the construct of presence. This study’s objectives included: 1) identifying qualities associated with interactive experiences; 2) disambiguating the constructs of interactivity and presence; and 3) developing a measure of perceived interactivity for VW research. The experimental design measured perceived interactivity and presence following completion of a simple task in the online Virtual World (VW) known as Second Life. It was hypothesized that both perceived interactivity and presence would be greater for subjects encountering avatars believed to be controlled by other people than for subjects encountering no other avatars in the VW. A total of 180 subjects from the University of Kentucky participated in a 2 by 4 factorial experiment. Perceived interactivity was measured by modifying McMillan and Hwang’s Measure of Perceived Interactivity for the VW context. Two essential qualities of interactive experiences were identified: Responsiveness and engagement. These qualities are characteristic of unmediated, FTF conversation, which was perceived as the most interactive communication context above technologies routinely described as interactive. Decreased responsiveness of technology at a second study venue caused significant decline in perceived interactivity, demonstrating the importance of a technology’s reaction speed and control provided to the user. Significant main effects for perceived interactivity due to encountering other avatars were confounded by interaction effects due to differences in technology responsiveness. Interactivity and presence appear to be separate psychological constructs which covary in the context of a new media experience. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

This thesis considers claims of discrimination and the interfaces that six platforms use as companies in the sharing economy. In 2015, Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and an Svirsky did an experiment with Airbnb to test the discrimination of names that sounded distinctly African American. Before and after their findings, there were members of the community who claimed that they had been discriminated against, some suing the company for not upholding their anti-discrimination policy. This leads to the question of how is one able to discriminate against someone whom they have never met and lives thousands of miles away? What information do they have to hold against them? As a result, this thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of the interfaces of six companies of the sharing economy.

The purpose of this project is to examine the visual political ad hominem arguments used on Instagram during the 2016 presidential campaign. Using Walton’s (2007) five subtypes of ad hominem arguments, this study analyzes the “attack ads” posted on Instagram from five of the 2016 presidential candidates into each subtype. This project seeks to understand how ad hominem arguments within political rhetoric function when they are visual. This study uses Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of modality and Rose’s (2012) compositional interpretation to analyze compositional structure of the image and parallels this analysis with ad hominem subtypes. Findings reveal the abusive (direct) subtype as the most commonly used which aligns with traditional or popular uses of Instagram as a social networking site aimed at sharing personal events and stories. The abusive (direct) subtype is an ad hominem that attacks a respondent’s moral character, or ethos, rather than their argument or biases or inconsistencies. The visual abusive (direct) arguments used by the candidates largely targeted their opponents personally which parallels the popular uses of the medium Instagram.

Preparing students of technical communication in the twenty-first century means training them to rhetorically utilize a wide variety of online tools. Technical communicators are now required to employ social media applications on a daily basis to communicate with clients, consumers, colleagues, and other organizations. These online modes have also opened the door to global communication wider and continue to present opportunities and challenges to technical communicators worldwide. Using Japan as a model, this dissertation sought to demonstrate a rhetorical exigency for teaching intercultural social media communication strategies to future technical communicators in the United States. The goal of this dissertation was to ultimately answer the research question: How can American technical communication programs prepare students to act as social media experts in Japanese contexts? To do this, I first conducted a thematic analysis of American technical communication syllabi and found that few engage intercultural social media in a meaningful way in the classroom. This was followed by a content analysis of the online social media presence of Japanese businesses, which demonstrated that evidence exists for the rhetorical exigency of intercultural social media communication in Japan. Calling on these analyses, this dissertation contributes a blended online service-learning curriculum for teaching intercultural social media in the technical communication classroom. The program described in this project can provide students with the opportunity to interact with Japanese professionals by building a social media presence for a foreign organization, receiving professional feedback on their performance, and adapting their skills as technical communicators for intercultural situations.

This study explored the relationship between people who play massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) and their avatars, as well as the impact on players’ self-esteem and perceived social capital in the real world. To examine these influences of online video gameplay, this research investigated gamers who play the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW). This study employed an online survey made available on Reddit, a widely-used news, entertainment, and social-networking website, in which all the content is user-generated. The research questionnaire was intended to reveal the bond between MMORPG players and their avatars; the study examined how this relationship could influence MMORPG players’ confidence in themselves and advance their network of relationships in the real world. The strength of the WoW players’ identification with their avatar did have some impact on their self-esteem in the real world; however, there was no significant relationship between avatar self-identification and perceived social capital in the real world. Additionally, this research did reveal a substantial correlation between self-esteem and perceived social capital in the real world.