Scholars within and beyond the field of rhetoric have acknowledged how the advent of social media platforms like Twitter have restructured every aspect of communication theory, from notions of authorial intent to how we understand audience. While the rhetorical situations of social media have been widely studied, scholars of rhetoric have scarcely begun to theorize how Twitter radically changes how we think about affect and the rhetorical situation in the wake of a national tragedy like a mass shooting. The 2017 Las Vegas shooting illustrates how Twitter functions as a site where people come together to express feelings of shock, grief, and outrage, pray for victims, share stories of bravery, eulogize the dead, circulate outlandish conspiracy theories, assign blame, propagate calls for action, and come to terms with the implications of their own mortality. My research examines hundreds of tweets from October 1-7, 2017 (the week after the Las Vegas shooting) in the context of Lloyd F. Bitzer and Richard E. Vatz’s debate about the nature of the rhetorical situation to interrogate how Twitter users invoke affect and the idea of objectivity to identify and respond to exigencies, establish their emotional and political salience, and shape the rhetorical situations they inhabit.

This thesis seeks to understand the how texts are constructed to forward feminist communicative objectives through a case study of Dr. Karen Kelsky’s "A Crowdsourced Survey of Sexual Harassment in the Academy." In this research, sexual harassment is understood as an act of power, sexual in nature, enacted by faculty or staff (employed or contracted in different capacities) in their relations with other faculty or staff, who are often lower ranking. By adopting invitational rhetoric as a theoretical framework, this thesis examines the way Dr. Karen Kelsky's crowdsourced survey creates the space to articulate and elevate often suppressed personal testimony regarding sexual harassment. By welcoming, and then displaying, narratives that have been deliberately silenced over the course of history, Kelsky’s spreadsheet showcases a collective consciousness surrounding sexual harassment in academia. The current scholarship surrounding feminist communicative praxis highlights the importance of the written personal narrative as meaning-making and as a reflective practice, especially through the medium of journaling. However, this research examines how texts can employ personal testimony to co-create meaning as a mode of resistance. In particular, Kelsky’s artifacts create a space that privileges and displays situated knowledge about sexual harassment that has been otherwise obfuscated. By conducting a feminist rhetorical analysis, this thesis argues that Kelsky's artifacts perform invitational rhetoric that mediates situated knowledge surrounding sexual harassment in the academic workplace. Reflection and dialogue shape the nature of storytelling as evoked by the survey, which are approached by this thesis as feminist communicative praxes that are activated throughout engagement with the artifacts.

This analysis demonstrates the complex ways that Native womxn runners mobilize the rhetoric they create around and through their running activity to challenge settler colonial, heteropatriarchal ideologies in favor of Indigenous lifeways; build upon cultural practices that include running and a wider spectrum of gender roles to enact more inclusive, modern Native identities; and lead intersectional advocacy efforts that center Native communities. Utilizing a Cultural Rhetorics, Indigenous Feminist, and Decolonial framework that recognizes Native womxn as experts in their own lived experiences, I have gathered Native womxn runners' counternarratives from virtual spaces/social media to learn from their cultural, rhetorical (oral, written, digital, visual, embodied, and kinesthetic) practices via a process I call story gathering. Because I am non-Native, I sought to center Indigenous womxn's voices by consulting Native womxn runners' Instagram accounts or organizational websites; print and web-based articles that either quote or were written by these runners; and podcasts, televised interviews, or recorded workshops/panels for which they served as guests. As these sources highlight, Native womxn runners create their own coalitional counterpublics that continually enact cultural knowledge in context via discursive strategies that recognize Indigenous culture as diverse, inclusive, modern, living, vibrant, and embodied. As such, the runners' social media presence and on/offline activism serve as rhetorical, cultural, and political acts. That is, they mobilize multiple modalities and rhetorics in culturally specific ways that have the potential to lead the mainstream (white) running industry toward greater inclusion and effect changes on a larger scale. I argue for a similar shift within Rhetoric and Composition, which still regards work by womxn of color as niche scholarship. To remedy this, the field must acknowledge Native womxn as not just knowledge keepers, but knowledge makers who should be better recognized and valued within our discipline regardless of their relation to the academy.

The discussion of difficulty exists as a prominent topic within the realm of play. In terms of accessibility, the difficulty associated with any form of play becomes rather crucial. In video games, difficulty can both enhance the immersion and interactions between a player and the game; however, difficulty can also act as a barrier to entrance and "gatekeep" experiences from individuals with disabilities. Developers utilize difficulty as a tool to deliver different forms of narratives and rhetoric to their audience. The field of Ludic Rhetoric observes and studies how rhetoric can be implemented and facilitated within contexts of play and a case study of how developers utilize difficulty to communicate with audiences. Understanding the procedural rhetoric involved in fine-tuning difficulty illuminates the relationship between accessibility and authorial intent. Developers fine-tune difficulty through the curation of alternative mechanics, systems, and experiences. Each of these categories represents adjustable vectors game developers utilize to create accessible experiences. Learning how these vectors adjust difficulty can reveal how other forms of rhetoric can accommodate their respective rhetoric to account for audience, while also maintaining authorial intent.

"Naming More of What We Know: Critical Memoirs & the Ecological Metaphor as a Threshold Concept in Writing" contributes to the work begun by Adler-Kassner and Wardle to gather and name Writing Studies' body of disciplinary knowledge as "threshold concepts." This thesis answers their call to engage in the ongoing development of threshold concepts by offering an additional critical construct: Writing as ecological. To explicitly acknowledge that writing is ecological is an essential addition to the content of our knowledge because it (1) meets the threshold-concept criteria adapted from Meyer and Land (2003), (2) establishes a codified, embodied, 3-dimensional system of knowledge management which corrects many flattened metaphors Writing Studies currently employs, and is (3) already ubiquitous in our scholarship. The exigence for this argument is established in two ways: (a) Through an analysis of that ubiquity and the ecological metaphor's origins from 1980 to present; and (b) through an autoethnographic illustration of ecological embodiment through memoir. Though framed through the disciplinary frameworks with which I am best versed, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies, this project's implications address all Writing Studies factions. Written in two major parts, this work first establishes a theoretical foundation for threshold concepts, for the ecological metaphor, and for personal narrative as an embodied means of expression worthy of analysis. The latter half is delivered as a series of memoir vignettes, each exemplifying through storytelling some of the many ways in which writing is ecological. Ultimately, this project hopes to establish a symbiotic relationship between threshold concepts and the ecological metaphor. Through this symbiosis, naming and teaching writing ecologies as a threshold concept negotiates an explicit corrective to linear habits of thought and our often problematic boundary-creating tendencies through a deeper understanding of the ways in which writing is fluid, complex, and networked.

My experiences with healthcare providers, which pervade my earliest childhood memories, motivated me to become autonomous in managing my health and wellness. This autoethnographic research explores the literacy activities embedded in everyday lived experiences that informed the process of lamination in composing health literacy which influenced health practices and outcomes. By tracing textual trajectories and examining the process of chronotopic lamination to compose my health literacy across everyday literacy activities this autoethnographic thesis project highlights how nonmedically trained persons can use official and nonofficial sources to create a social and culturally contextualized health literacy. This research calls for recognition of the agency that instills confidence in the patient-author regarding their own health and wellness and positions them in authority as the expert of their own embodied experiences. The implications of this research point towards suggestions for the systems that influence health literacy in order to recognize the autonomous agency of patients.

In the popular CW superhero series Arrow, vigilante Sara Lance is revealed to be a queer character when she is shown kissing Nyssa al Ghul, her assassin ex-girlfriend. Later in the same episode, Sara is shown kissing Oliver Queen, the show's male protagonist. Throughout her character development in both Arrow and in her later, central role in DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Sara has been portrayed as being a sexually fluid character, with a variety of love interests both male and female. During a crossover episode with The Flash, the character acknowledges her sexuality directly, stating that "… I like men, and I like women." This makes Sara, as a representation of bisexuality in modern media and as a central character in a popular superhero television series, a particularly interesting point of investigation. Overall, this research closely investigates the world-building surrounding Sara's character in both Arrow and DC's Legends of Tomorrow, how Sara emerged as a queer character in these universes, and how surrounding characters and plotlines in the shows have been impacted by her presence. More specifically, this thesis seeks to explore the following questions: How does Sara's bisexuality function in the world of Arrow? How do the worlds of Arrow and Legends characterize her emergence as a queer character? What impact do these worlds of Arrow and Legends have on her sexuality's function? What role does Sara's bisexuality have in larger conversations about representations of sexuality in fan spaces? These questions were investigated by performing a close textual analysis of the two shows and interpreting key scenes, utilizing Michel Foucault's concept of "surfaces of emergence" from Archeology of Knowledge as a theoretical framework, as well as through an analysis of fan activity on the social media website Tumblr relating to the character and her sexuality.

The topic for this project concerns a critical rhetorical analysis of the correlation between texts of first-person narratives and multi-voiced narratives of the Vietnam War (1965-1975) and the American invasion of Iraq (2003-2011). Moreover, this project establishes a correlation between the textual design in these novels and concepts of epistemology that reside in the Western cannon of rhetorical theory. The theoretical framework that is incorporated within this study extracts concepts of (t)ruth from philosophical works such as Michel Foucault's Birth of the Clinic and Friedrich Nietzsche's On Truth and In a Nonmoral Sense. In comparison, I examine the concepts and theories that comprise (T)ruth by incorporating the ideas of philosophers such as Carl Marx, especially his Communist Manifesto. The methodological underpinnings that help support the theoretical and conceptual framework of this project are derived from the application and analysis of distinct forms of narrative theory such as Jerome Bruner's Life as Narrative. Lastly, in the conclusion of this thesis, I provide recommendations for how scholars of rhetoric can add their voice to ongoing debates within in the field of war literature.

Recent writing center scholarship has discussed the roles of valued practices in writing centers and the implications Universal Design (UD) for writing center work. This thesis extends such lines of inquiry by bringing these two conversations together to explore the potential of UD principles as a catalyst for writing center tutor reflection on valued tutoring practices. In a semester long study, data were collected in the form of individual and dialogic tutor reflection through surveys, individual interviews, reflective writing prompts, and a focus group. The data were analyzed to examine how tutors formed their tutoring practices and how they understood the relationship between UD principles and the values that undergird their work in the writing center. This thesis outlines the ways two tutors' experiences both within and beyond the writing center shaped their interpretation and application of their center's valued practices. Further, this thesis discusses insight from the tutors' creative and dynamic applications of the principles of UD to their work in the writing center. Tutors' experiences from outside the center are laminated with experiences from tutor training and writing center sessions in intricate ways that highlight the significance of both tutors' lives outside the center and a writing center's infrastructure in tutors' interpretation and implementation of tutoring practices. Ultimately, the thesis argues for the importance of structured reflection that prompts tutors to examine the formation of their own practices and the values and beliefs embedded in both their individual practices and a center's shared valued practices, suggesting strategies for facilitating this reflection through tutor writing and tutor-to-tutor dialogue.

Language difference and socially-just writing center praxis have long been points of discussion within writing center scholarship. Writing center administrators and tutors recognize that the praxis within their writing centers does not always correspond to their beliefs about working with student writers or the role of the writing center within the academy—particularly in the areas of language equality and social and racial justice—and they acknowledge the impact that course readings have in tutor education. While tutor education readings may not specifically state a particular ideological viewpoint regarding language difference, their discussions of language and rhetorical practices, multilingual writers, and tutoring across difference can indicate certain ideological beliefs. Therefore, I argue the importance of identifying and considering the implicit ideological tenets within these readings, a practice that both reveals possible conflicts between our values and our praxis and recognizes the significant role these readings play in shaping tutors' ideas about language difference. Using the theoretical lens of language ideologies, I analyze tutor education readings from ENC 4275/5276: Theory and Practice of Tutoring Writing, the UCF University Writing Center's tutor education course for new tutors. Drawing on Horner et al.'s chart of ideological tenets and a writing center-focused chart of ideological tenets I derived from writing center scholarship, I identify tenets of monolingualism, traditional multilingualism, and translingualism in these readings and illustrate how others can do the same. Through this analysis, I hope to encourage writing center administrators and tutors to implement this practice, enabling them to determine if their tutor education readings reflect and advance the ideologies they seek to promote inside and outside of their writing centers.