Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship to include rhetoric and composition, applied linguistics, and heritage languages, my dissertation, Negotiated Identities of Second-Generation Vietnamese Heritage Speakers: Implications for the Multilingual Composition Classroom, is a qualitative study that explores how Vietnamese heritage speakers negotiate multiple identities in different social contexts. I define heritage speakers as asymmetrical bilinguals who were raised in a non-English speaking household but whose dominant language is now English. While findings from this study reveal that heritage speakers struggle to claim a linguistic identity because of discrimination from members of different Vietnamese communities, they nonetheless—through reflexive and interactive positioning—resist these communities' discriminatory practices by constructing and negotiating multiple identities that enable them to reimagine themselves as legitimate members of an imagined Vietnamese community. By focusing on speakers' negotiated identities, this dissertation departs from the traditional emphasis in heritage language and composition studies that equate language proficiency with cultural identity. Instead, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of identity formation that not only engages speakers' multiple spheres of belonging but also informs current pedagogical practices that seek to incorporate speakers' heritage languages as linguistic resources in the composition classroom.

This dissertation examines the rhetorical function and social implications of the "dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy"--that is, the popular depiction of young motherhood as the tragic downfall of a woman's life. I employ feminist poststructuralist and visual rhetorical critique to analyze historical and contemporary teenage pregnancy prevention materials as well as journalistic representations of young mothers. Building from this analysis, I argue that the dominant narrative pathologizes teenage mothers, prevents a focus on structures of inequality and poverty, sustains racialized gender ideologies, and encourages practices that perpetuate disparities for pregnant/mothering young women. In addition, this project explores strategies for resisting this discourse. Specifically, I review scholarship that has contested the dominant narrative and identify counter-rhetorical practices that some young mothers use in their published first-person narratives. Finally, drawing on focus groups I conducted with 27 young mothers, I illustrate that visibly young pregnant and parenting women are often publically confronted by strangers because they embody an urgent and much-debated social issue. I offer the concept of "embodied exigence" as a way to understand how discursive and material realities of the body may construct rhetorical situations and how the body may function as a site of constrained agency. Building from rhetorical theories of agency, exigence, and feminist work on the visibility of motherhood, I assert that in moments of embodied exigence, marginalized young mothers may seize the opportunity to resist dominant rhetoric and act as rhetors in their own right.

This project offers an extended inquiry into the ways that multimodality and digitality influence contemporary practices of public memorialization. My project has two primary ambitions. First, I revisit methodologies for analyzing multimodal public memorials. Second, I advocate for public memorials that advance social justice by inviting and protecting a multiplicity of diverse, even competing memory discourses. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the development of public memory studies, spatial rhetorical studies, and multimodal studies. I argue that space, modality, time, lived practices, and marginalized practices must all be addressed to adequately understand how public memorials form discursive networks of power and meaning. This argument is heavily informed by the work of Chicana feminist and decolonial scholars, who contend that socially just history-making uncovers and recovers narratives that have been suppressed or ignored. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze two case studies of multimodal public memorials commemorating September 11, 2001: The Garden of Reflection Memorial in Pennsylvania and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. Chapter 5 offers a methodology for analyzing multimodal public memorials as memory ecologies. I end the project by suggesting several options for deploying multimodality and digitality in public memorials in order to encourage socially just and multivocal memory practices.

This dissertation addresses the rhetoric of deficiency that frames Latina/o students as lacking with regard to education. This dissertation begins by examining the cultural deficit model entrenched in colonial narratives of history that justify unequal access to resources in the US. I argue that the reimagining of the pejorative trope of 'pocho' by reconnecting it with its etymological root pochteca provides a trope of resistance to deficiency rhetoric, and a trope that embodies rhetorical strategies for Latina/o students navigating academic institutions. Additionally, this dissertation furthers the advocacy of culturally relevant reading and writing assignments and practices, while at the same time arguing that the discursive productions responding to culturally relevant writing demonstrate rhetorical strategies. The analysis of a student publication that responds to and integrates dichos provides a site of analysis where students identify rhetorical strategies that help them navigate obstacles related to education. The use of Twitter by a predominantly Latina/o summer bridge program provides an additional site of analysis where the writing of students in digital spaces allows them to perform latinidad, and create support networks that help them succeed in school. The pedagogical chapter of this dissertation analyzes the Arizona House Bill 2281 and the rhetoric that frames the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies program as racist and anti-American; following this analysis come suggestions for incorporating culturally relevant aspects of the TUSD MAS curriculum into rhetoric and composition curriculum.

In this project, I argue for the importance of public engagement as a method of scholarship for the discipline of creative writing, in writing studies, and the broader humanities. I do so by using historical study, ethnography and survey data, in order to trace the history of creative writing's disciplinarity, define its contemporary practices as socially collaborative and inventive, and show how those practices align with the goals and methods of public engagement projects. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of work in composition studies calling for collaboration between composition and creative writing, and I argue that though creative writers in the academy often participate in what is variously called "community outreach" or "public engagement" activities, that work can and should be more clearly articulated as part of the work of the discipline. Higher education's recent turn toward public engagement--as evidenced by monographs on the subject but also by real-world changes like the addition of language about public engagement to the tenure and promotion guidelines and ten-year plans of many universities--presents a compelling opportunity to re-articulate what it means to be a writer in the university. Work in public engagement provides new access to institutional prestige and funding, and opens connections between the various areas of writing studies in order to better serve university communities, teachers, and students.

This project, Toward a Pedagogy of Visual Communication as Critical Practice in Professional and Technical Communication, examines the teaching of visual communication in undergraduate professional and technical communication courses. Through an analysis of scholarship, textbooks, and a service-learning project as a case study, I argue that a situated visual communication pedagogy that integrates both analysis and reflection throughout the visual production and design process can better allow students to understand the ways in which the visual participates within larger social and cultural contexts. This understanding helps students develop abilities to potentially transform visual discourses emphasizing that all visual documents and texts, including the ones they produce, participate in shaping the ways in which meaning is made. By integrating visual communication and design into service-learning and other civic engagement pedagogies in the professional and technical communication classroom, instructors and students can begin to interrogate the view that professional and technical communication is a neutral, objective practice concerned only with prescriptive adherence to forms, conventions, workplace efficiency, and corporate success. Thus, in addition to helping students develop as communicators and thinkers, integrating visual communication into service-learning and throughout the duration of a course allows students to explore the civic dimensions of professional and technical communication, situating them as engaged designers and active members of their communities.

Ridicule is a means of affecting change. Issuing an interpretation of a subject's relation to an ideological formation or social norm as an argument to change behavior, language-use, belief, or the like, ridicule can be used both to affirm and to contest prevailing hierarchies. As a discursive function, this dissertation theorizes, ridicule can be either monological or dialogical. Monological ridicule often takes the form of a demand or directive and usually commands its subject to comply with some ideological formation or social norm. Used in this way, it is a norming tool. In contrast, dialogical ridicule generally invites or encourages negotiation or mediation. As such, it is often used to contest or challenge prevailing hierarchies, with the ultimate aim of creating conditions that can allow for transformation. In six chapters, this dissertation offers a theory of ridicule, traces conceptions of it through western history, examines both monological and dialogical applications of it, and, lastly, explores its use on the Internet, where it has flourished. If the aim of rhetoric is to please, to instruct, or to entertain, then ridicule may be the master rhetorical trope as it can achieve all three simultaneously.

This dissertation addresses the development of Nuevomexicano/a student identity at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) during three periods: (1) New Mexico's Territorial period and early statehood, (2) the 1940s, and (3) the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nuevomexicano/a student identity was shaped through a process of accommodating to and resisting institutional powers. Since 1898, Nuevomexicano/a students have been active members of the university community, despite periods when they constituted a small portion of the student body and the institution's frequent disregard for Nuevomexicano/a culture and language. As they participated in campus activities, Nuevomexicano/as reconstructed their individual and collective identities, appropriating terms such as Spanish or Chicano/a, as a rhetorical strategy to revise their relationships with the university. Extralocal institutions, including government institutions, national protest movements, and international organizations shaped public conversations about cultural identity. During the first two periods, students employed subtle strategies of resistance that included presenting speeches and reorganizing student government. Often labeled as accommodationist, these strategies represent viable rhetorical strategies that provided students access to dominant literacies, which were used to promote social change. In the 1970s, Chicano/a students utilized more aggressive practices, such as a weeklong sit-in, to radically alter the institutional culture at NMHU. In the forty years since the sit-in, NMHU has developed into a university that supports its Nuevomexicano/a students and incorporates elements of their culture into the university's social fabric.

This project presents the results of a case study of creative nonfiction (CNF) pedagogical practices in undergraduate composition studies and creative writing courses at The University of Arizona, exploring how those who teach CNF at this top-ranked school for the study of the genre are shaping knowledge about it. This project analyzes within a rhetorical framework the various subject positions CNF teachers assume in relation to their writing and teaching as well as the teaching methodologies they utilize. I do this to articulate a theory of CNF pedagogy for the twenty-first century, one that represents the merging of individualist and public intellectual ideologies that I have observed in teacher interviews, course documents, and pedagogical publications about the genre. For students new to the genre, so much depends on how CNF is first introduced through class discussion, representative assigned prose models, and invention activities when it comes to creating knowledge about exactly what contemporary CNF is/can be and how writers might best generate prose that fits the genre's wide-ranging conventions in form, content, and rhetorical situation. Understanding how and why instructors promote certain ideologies in relation to CNF becomes increasingly important as this mode of personally situated, fact-based, narrative-privileging, literarily stylized discourse continues to gain popularity within and beyond the academy.

Healing in the mental health system of the 21st century is difficult as the credibility of mental health users is constantly called into question, their experiences and perceptions of their "illness" undervalued or even completely ignored. This attitude towards mental health users must be changed in order to work towards truly alleviating mental illness and suffering. Careful analysis of the rhetoric of published personal narratives written by women describing their experiences with mental healthcare reveals the ways in which medical knowledge is created, owned, and disseminated only by the “authoritative expert,” defined as healthcare professionals who categorize, taxonomize, and pathologize in order to treat both physical and mental illness. I argue the authoritative expert marginalizes the "everyday expert," exemplified through the perceptions of women who, in their narratives, record realities that do not always match the diagnoses and prognoses assigned to them by their healthcare providers. My project's central question asks: In what ways do personal narratives of mental illness and suffering illuminate the ways in which language constructs reality? My research illuminates the ways in which narratives of mental illness and suffering are healing, and thus serves as an advocate for patient rights, both by empowering patients and by furthering discussion among medical professionals regarding problematizing "standard" treatment. My work advances the connection between politics and language as it takes a commonly undervalued form of language and lived experience--narrative--and researches the ways in which it has been and can continue to be used as a powerful political agent to empower mental health users by giving them a voice. Specifically, I demonstrate how patients' personal experiences should and can be valued as a way to illuminate their own understanding of their disease as well as to inform their treatment. This project lays the foundation for future research examining ways treatment for mental illness should be differentiated from treatment for physical illness. I am interested in ways to further combat the stigma of mental illness by looking at ways providers can honor and respect the opinions and values of mental health patients in non-pejorative ways.