The concept of EU citizenship holds promise as a revolutionary model of citizenship where residency and political participation substitute for national identity as membership criteria. However, EU citizenship's revolutionary potential is limited by the fact that today, citizenship remains tied to traditional definitions codified by EU member states, excluding millions of permanent residents who are living in Europe as long-term Third Country Nationals (TCNs). A host of individuals, nongovernmental organizations and institutions have pressed for expansion of EU citizenship to include TCNs. Following Vico's theories of imagination and ingenium and Olson and Goodnight's approach to rhetorical criticism of oppositional arguments, this dissertation analyzes the controversy over TCNs and EU citizenship, highlighting the implications of the controversy for the EU, its institutions, its citizens, and particularly its non-citizens.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organizations constituted by section 501c3 of the U.S. Tax Code (think tanks, TTs or tanks) monitor and adjust governance norms and networks by using research, analysis, and advocacy to structure discourse about social problems and solutions among multiple elites and in the popular imagination. Through conversation, public communication, participation in government commissions and committees, and other methods, tanks strive to keep certain ideas alive (or at bay) until a particular policy idea becomes politically feasible and persuasive. Thirty-four case studies illustrate TT roles in constructing two basic policy regimes in 20th century America, corporate liberalism and neoliberalism. The two policy regimes are contingent discursive achievements, reflected in the adaptations in the modalities and rhetoric of think tanks in relation to dynamic processes of capitalist development, crisis, realignment, and consolidation. The cases show that while TTs generally function to contain and co-opt radical political economic ideas and social impulses, they are are not able to stitch interests seamlessly into state policy. Rather, social and economic crises, the changing demands and forms of the economy and the state, the actions of other actors, and other forces function to constrain the appeal of a given discourse or institution, so much so that individual tanks can drift from one ideological pole to another over time in reaction to these forces. These forces can also enable think tanks to exert discourse as an autonomous power that transcends the material constraints of the organizations themselves.

This dissertation performs a historical analysis of MTVs Real World programming and an ethnographic study of two of its most prominent participants. In it I examine reality TVs role in televisions ongoing transformation as a technology and cultural form from the perspective of those who work in the industry as reality-talent. By adopting this perspective, I indicate some of the ways reality TVs construction of celebrity has altered the economic and performative regimes that have traditionally structured television stardom. One of the central issues this dissertation works to address is the way in which many participants are limited by the singular nature of their fame. To do this, I explore how the participants status as on-camera talent is rooted in an ability to perform as if always off-camera. The participants amateur image is argued to serve two critical functions. Because the participants image appears more real than the show itself, it exists as an element within the text that lets the viewer know that what they are watching is staged. This in turn requires that the participants performance always be restricted to the reality that his or her image represents. Recently, this has meant that participants who transition into reality-talent often rely on their status within the media industry as the basis for their performances. In the case of MTVs stable of Real World participants, continued participation in one of the longest running reality franchises indicates the repurposing potential offered by a form of talent that is typically understood to be disposable. Ultimately, this project calls attention to the new manner in which reality TVs representational logic and industrial deployment uniquely situates viewer and participant in a shared space of labor.

This dissertation documents and theorizes cases of 'heavy' music production in terms of their unique technological dispositions. The project puts media and cultural studies into conversation with constructivist approaches to technology by looking at the material practices behind such styles as Punk, Hardcore, Metal, and Industrial. These genres have traditionally been studied as reception subcultures but have yet to be systematically treated as subcultures of production. I believe that this is a key area of study in the digital era as the lines between producers and consumers, artists and audiences, become hazier. In effect, above and beyond exploring these genres and subcultures, the aim is to conceive a mode of thinking appropriate to understanding aesthetic judgment vis-à-vis the evolving life of sound in a technologized, mass-mediated culture.

Using an interdisciplinary approach and the guiding principles of new historicism, this study explores the discursive and visual representational history of lynching to understand how the practice has persisted as part of the fabric of American culture. Focusing on the Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America exhibition at three United States cultural venues I argue that audiences employ discernible meaning making strategies to interpret these lynching photographs and postcards. This examination also features analysis of distinct institutional characteristics of the Andy Warhol Museum, Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, alongside visual rhetorical analysis of each sites exhibition contents. Through phenomenological categorization and analysis of audience comment books maintained by each institution, I maintain that museum visitors employ various types of cultural knowledge about past and present black-white race relations. Audiences undertake comparative analyses of the distant past with the contemporary historical moment to make sense of lynching imagery and history as simultaneously both a discrete historical epoch and part of a constellation of racist and violent activities characterizing American history which continue to influence race relations today. From analysis of museum audiences responses to lynching photography exhibitions, this study concludes that an overwhelming portion of Without Sanctuary audiences locate racism, discrimination, and prejudice at the individual level of society, not the collective or systemic level, highlighting an important barrier beleaguering the task of racial reconciliation and national healing around the phenomenon and practice of lynching.

This dissertation explores the rhetorical imaginary of internetworked societies by examining three cases where actors in the blogosphere shaped public deliberation. In each case, I analyze a trope that emerged organically as bloggers theorized their own rhetorical interventions, and argue that these tropes signal shifts in how citizens of networked societies imagine their relations. The first case study, on the blogospheres reaction to Trent Lotts 2002 toast to Strom Thurmond, examines how bloggers flooded the zone by relentlessly interpreting the event and finding evidence that eventually turned the tide of public opinion against Lott. Flooding the zone signifies the inventional possibilities of blogging through the production of copious public argument. The second case study, focusing on the 2003 blogging of the Salam Pax, an English-speaking Iraqi living in Iraq on the precipice of war, develops the idea of ambient intimacy which is produced through the affective economy of blogging. The ambient intimacy produced through blogging illustrates the blurring of traditional public/private distinctions in contemporary public culture. The third case study, on the group science blog RealClimate, identifies how blogs have become sites for translating scientific controversies into ordinary language through a process of shallow quotation. The diffusion of expertise enabled by the interactive format of blogging provides new avenues to close the gap between public and technical reasoning. The dissertation concludes by examining the advent and implications of hyperpublicity produced by ubiquitous recording devices and digital modes of circulation.

Advisor: Ronald J. Zboray FROM HOLLYWOOD TO SHANGHAI: AMERICAN SILENT FILMS IN CHINA Qian Zhang, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Abstract My dissertation re-constructs the history of Hollywood movies in 1920s Shanghai through archival work in both China and the United States. Before that decade, film exhibition in China was little more than a novelty with limited social influence. The 1920s saw a boom in American film production and attempts to develop foreign markets for it. Consequently, Hollywood films flooded into China, just ahead of the development of the local national film industry in the late 1920s, and hence shaped the environment for that development. As heralds of a new medium with unprecedented capacity for shaping peoples perceptions, beliefs, and viewpoints, American films were received and interpreted by Chinese audiences in a transnational context. My research is mostly based on rarely or never used primary sources both in the United States and China, mainly in archives including the U.S. official documents of the Department of State located at the National Archives, the special collection of the United Artists at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Library, indexed New York Times, and D.W. Griffiths unpublished documents such as D.W. Griffith Papers 1897-1954, 1927 Yearbook of Chinese Cinema, 1920s fan magazines such as The Movie Guide, The China Film Pictorial, The Stage and Screen, The Photoplay World, Photoplay Pictorial, The Movie Magazine, and Cineograph, a collection of film plot sheets, and local popular magazines such as The Good Companion. Through my dissertation, I have found that the promotion and consumption of American films in 1920s Shanghai did not result in a homogeneous American culture as the Chinese re-deployed, re-invented, and appropriated American films for local political, cultural, and social discourses. During that turbulent decade, Hollywood films played into the Chinese political discourse of nationalism and modernity. The modernity discourse was prominent in the Chinese filmic texts and extra-textual filmic spheres. Hollywoods impact on China can be examined by the reaction of the Chinese film industry toward American films, the changing lifestyle of Chinese locals, and their perception of American people and values.

Mod youth culture began in the postwar era as way for young people to reconfigure modernity after the chaos of World War II. Through archival research, oral history interviews, and participant observation, this work traces Mods origins from dimly lit clubs of Londons Soho and street corners of the citys East End in the early sixties, to contemporary, country-specific expressions today. By specifically examining Germany, Japan, and the U.S., alongside the U.K., I show how Mod played out in countries that both lost and won the War. The Mods process of refashioning modernityinclusive of its gadgetry and unapologetic consumerismcontrasts with the more technologically skeptical and avowedly less materialistic Hippie culture of the later sixties. Each chapter, which unfolds chronologically, begins with a contemporary portrait of the Mod scene in a particular country, followed by an overview stretching back to its nineteenth-century conceptions of modernity and a section that describes Mods initial impact there during the 1960s. They each conclude with a section highlighting the way in which Mod is celebrated by those who never experienced its initial 1960s manifestation. I position British Mod as a youthful response to Victorian modernity that was linked to industrialization, social classes, and colonialism and also to the destruction of WWII. Mods beginnings in Germany are depicted as a cosmopolitan solution to the problematic nationalist past. The presence of U.K. musical groups there excited the countrys youth into reconfiguring their identities while hoping to diminish their own associations with the previous generations Nazism. The 1964 musical British Invasion of the U.S. encouraged male and female teenagers to re-imagine gender roles outside middle-class conventions. In looking at Japan, I focus on Mods visual language and its translation into a non-western, yet, arguably westernized Asian culture. This dissertation examines the adoption and adaptation of this style across geographic space and also maps its various interpretations over time: from the early 1960s to the present. In sum, this study emphasizes Mods transnationalism, which is evident in the cultures fashion, music, iconography, and gender aesthetics.

The beat generation has been examined as a social movement, literary period, and political statement from many different scholarly perspectives. Through the method of rhetorical criticism I tease out an implicit theory of rhetoric from the writings of the principal beat generation founders namely Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Offering a rhetorical read of their major work along with analysis of their letters and journals I offer a theory of rhetoric from both thinkers. In the early chapters I discuss the history of poetic discourses and rhetoric to determine the connection between literary texts and rhetorical theory. I establish the rhetorical, cultural, and social environment of the post-war United States and its interpretation and assessment by both Kerouac and Ginsberg. I then establish linkages between Kerouac and the rhetorical sense of kairos, establishing his contribution to the beat theory by analyzing On the Road. Kerouacs contribution to beat rhetoric is developed through examination of the timely and appropriate. Next I turn attention to Allen Ginsberg and his poem Howl to demonstrate his implicit theory that the limits of the human body are a rhetorical commonplace. Ginsbergs contribution is established as finding great power of rhetorical invention in the limits of the human beings embodied condition. In the final two sections, I show applications of this rhetorical theory through examining Diane Di Primas Memoirs of a Beatnik and Amiri Barakas Somebody Blew Up America for elements of applied beat rhetorical theory, concluding that elements of the beat rhetoric are present in both.

The U.S. Public Health Service Study at Tuskegee, conducted from 1932-1972, is widely considered a paradigm of bioethics failure in American history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, no member of the U.S. government had yet offered an official apology to the victims. Entreated by an interdisciplinary committee of scholars and community members to help lift "the long shadow" of distrust and fear caused by the Study, President Clinton offered words of apology on May 16, 1997 for the deeds of government officials committed decades earlier. This dissertation examines Clinton's address within the broader context of the Tuskegee legacy. Following the critical method proposed by Ryan, the request for an apology and Clinton's speech are paired and criticized as a kategoria/apologia speech set, allowing for richer yields than analyzing the texts in isolation. The ethical and rhetorical implications of treating Clinton's speech as apologia, interpersonal apology, or institutional apology are considered. Finally, the dissertation follows the rhetorical path of the Tuskegee legacy by analyzing a body of empirical research by public health scholars about the possible effects of lingering memories and attitudes about the Tuskegee Study on individuals' willingness to participate as medical research subjects in the present day. The rhetorical situation, as conceptualized by Bitzer and modified by Vatz and Consigny, and McGee's 'ideograph' also serve as critical tools in the analyses of the key rhetorical artifacts of the Tuskegee legacy.