This dissertation explores the relationship between gender and argumentation, complicating narratives that cast debating as an exclusionary practice that solely privileges elite, educated, white men. Drawing on three case studies of womens participation in debate, I argue that debating societies functioned as venues for rhetorical education and performance. Each chapter aims to add to our understanding about debate within historical contexts, reveal insight about the women who debated, and develop or extend concepts within rhetorical and argumentation scholarship. The first case study traces the Ladies Edinburgh Debating Society from 1865 to 1935. This community-based association balanced the desire to achieve ideal rational-critical debate with the need to accommodate and sustain involvement by women of infinite variety, developing what I call an intergenerational argument culture. The second case study explores the relationship between debate history and the history of rhetorical criticism by examining Marie Hochmuth Nicholss intercollegiate debate participation in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. Nicholss debate experience cultivated a sense of gendered rhetorical excellence and a sensibility toward criticism that she would later develop as a major figure in twentieth-century rhetorical studies. The final case study explores how the challenges of debating at a southern historically black college in the 1950s influenced Barbara Jordans rhetorical strategies and political career. Debating allowed Jordan to recognize the importance of viewing the body as a rhetorical resource in negotiating and sustaining access to exclusionary spaces. Though these women came from different socioeconomic, educational, racial, and geographical backgrounds, all used the vehicle of debate to challenge prevailing social norms. They not only honed their critical thinking, writing, speaking, and reasoning abilities through debate participation; they also used their experiences in unexpected ways as they negotiated difference along the intersecting axes of gender, race, class, age, ability, and citizenship. The final chapter argues that the dominant conceptual metaphor of argument-as-war is insufficient in capturing the complex dynamics between gender and argumentation. Instead, I offer an alternative of argument-as-travel, a more flexible metaphor that acknowledges the range of diverse participation in debate and accounts for the methodological choices involved in doing feminist rhetorical historical scholarship.

As an abstraction that identifies the inner thinking self, the mind is a powerful resource for rhetorical invention, enabling both the generation of discourse and epistemic sense-making. This dissertation provides insight into the discursive life of the mind, examining how different instantiations of the concept were put to rhetorical use in three specific historical cases. In each case study, I examine a conception of the mind that originated in the realm of institutional science and that made its way into public culture, often circuitously, and frequently transformed in the process. The first case study analyzes a nineteenth-century phrenology handbook, which reveals how the phrenological mind enabled pre-existing cultural beliefs to be resourced, or respoken as if the objective results of science. The second case study examines Benjamin Spocks use of Freudian ideas to generate child-rearing advice in his classic Baby and Child Care manual. My analysis of Spocks Freudianism leads me to propose that beliefs about the mind constitute a uniquely generative class of doxa that I label psychodoxa. The final case study focuses on the contemporary cerebral self, which asserts the isomorphism of mind, brain, and self. This conception of mind generated considerable interest in Terri Schiavos brain in the end-of-life case that dominated news media in the early 2000s, and I suggest that much of the discourse concerning Schiavos brain relied on recalcitrance to channel invention. The dissertation concludes by considering the minds utility as an inventional resource for rhetoric itself.

In recent years, the city of Detroit's economic struggles, including its cultural expressions, have become focal points for discussing the health of the American dream. However, this discussion has rarely strayed from the use of hackneyed factory metaphors, worn-out success-and-failure stories, and an ever-narrowing cast of characters. The result is that the common sense understanding of Detroit's musical and cultural legacy tends to end in 1972 with the departure of Motown Records from the city to Los Angeles, if not even earlier in the aftermath of the riot / uprising of 1967. In "'Where The Mix Is Perfect': Voices From The Post-Motown Soundscape," I provide an oral history of Detroit's post-Motown aural history and in the process make available a new urban imaginary for judging the city's wellbeing. To do this I utilize archival research and interviews in order to recover the life stories of a group of Detroiters in their struggle to change and be changed by Detroit's soundscape during the post-Motown era. A diachronic study, my dissertation starts by revisiting Detroit's role in the modern soundscape from musicians, dancers, promoters, and critics who experienced the city's numerous ballrooms and clubs, listened to its charismatic radio DJs, and produced its studio-driven sound. However, as my dissertation proceeds, I pay special attention to the emergence of a new soundscape in the 1970s with a new set of heroes—club DJs—and an audience that both reflected and resisted the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of the period. Detroiters experienced the impact of this subterranean population in the ensuing years as the genres of disco, hip hop, house, and techno emerged and the city's residents mixed together as they had rarely done before or since.

This dissertation assesses the rhetorical dynamics of American public argumentation about the appropriate role of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. Four case studies are examined, including the controversy created by fallen priests like General George Lee Butler, the U.S. Senates deliberations on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the George W. Bush administrations campaign to implement its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, and the public debate about the development and deployment of mini nuclear weapons. Collectively, the case studies reveal that a potent combination of institutional interests, restricted access to official deliberative spaces, the deployment of threat discourses, the presumption that nuclear deterrence was effective during the Cold War, and the utilization of technical discursive practices narrowed the scope of public debate about the role of nuclear weapons and allowed advocates of robust nuclear deterrence to construct rhetorical and policy bridges between the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Security and risk management frames dominated public discussions about nuclear weapons, and advocates of nuclear abolition were largely unsuccessful in their efforts to reconfigure public argumentation on nuclear weapons policy.

This dissertation explores a turn toward strategic public memories in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community. While GLBTQ people have long used memories to influence and persuade heterosexual audiences, these memories have largely been what Michel de Certeau labels tactical - fleeting, ephemeral texts built upon the detritus of dominant culture. In contrast, GLBTQ people increasingly deploy strategic memories that endure heterosexual forgetting, persist through time, and exert greater control in spaces of power. In four case studies, I examine the possibilities and pitfalls of the strategic turn for securing greater GLBTQ rights. The first case study examines the Alexander Wood statue and how gays and lesbians have used material rhetorics like commemorative sites to make their memories durable and to resist heteronormative forgetting. While highlighting Woods "official" meaning, I also demonstrate how both traditionalist and camp viewers of the statue contest that meaning through performative viewing practices. The second case study, on counterpublic memories of bias crime victim Matthew Shepard, illustrates how counterpublic memories can oscillate between public spheres. In doing so, vernacular memories of Shepard seek to replace dominant memories that obscure systemic antigay violence, endow Shepard with "saintly" qualities, and limit diverse imagining of GLBTQ identity. The third case study, featuring efforts to include GLBT people into California public school curriculums, examines how advocates use a "rhetoric of contribution" to align GLBT people with the strategic rhetoric of American nationalism. This case also highlights the difficult choices marginalized groups must often make to enter strategic spaces, including "strategic forgettings" that render much of the GLBT past incomplete. The final case study details gay and lesbian rhetorical acts to ensure they are remembered as queer in the future. Examining two prominent death displays - Leonard Matlovichs Gay Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Patricia Cronins Memorial to a Marriage - this chapter argues that both marked and unmarked strategies are required to disrupt the reterritorialization of gay and lesbian identity after death. This dissertation concludes by looking at George Segal's Gay Liberation statue, reviewing the value of the strategic turn, and pondering the future of queer public memory.

This dissertation uncovers the processes of negotiation between private citizens, President Woodrow Wilsons administration, the War Department, and the Commission of Fine Arts that led to the establishment and final visual presentation of the United States permanent World War I cemeteries in Europe (sites that are still frequented by tens of thousands of international visitors each year). It employs archival research and the analysis of newspapers and photographs to recover the voices of the many stakeholders involved in the cemeteries foundation. Whereas previous studies have attempted to understand American World War I commemoration practices by focusing on postwar rituals of remembrance alone, my study contextualizes and explains postwar commemoration by analyzing the political ideologies, public rhetoric, and material realities of the war years (1914-1918)ideologies, rhetoric, and material realities that shaped official and vernacular projects of memory after the Armistice. Providing what I believe is the first complete history of American World War I cemeteries in Europe, my dissertation situates these rhetorically charged sites within contemporary political debates about what it meant for U.S. soldiers to die on foreign soil; what would constitute the proper treatment and commemoration of the nations war dead; how much control the U.S. government should have over the lives and bodies of American citizens; and, how best to communicate the nations image to international populations.

The myth of Charles Van Doren, as recorded in mass media retellings of the 1959 television quiz show scandal, is a story of a good-intentioned, intelligent young man who was tempted by the muses of fame and fortune to make a deal with some television devils, then was involved in the cover-up of their deceptions, only to finally tell the truth and yet still pay dearly for his transgressions. The Charles Van Doren story this dissertation tells, however, is more about the loaded phrase the 1950s, which implies simultaneously contradictory narratives of progress and stagnation, assimilation and isolation, hope and fear; more about the Media, our window on the world, our reflection, our bearer of good dreams; and more about the business and government institutions that boosted their own public images while reaping in financial rewardsat the expense of Charles Van Doren, hundreds of other quiz show contestants, and the American public at large. Informed by audience reception, consumerism, cultural memory, genre, popular culture, and technology studies; Cold War history; feminist theory; historiography; literary criticism; mass communication research; media criticism; political economy; and television history, my research utilizes archival records, historical mass media, and other primary and secondary sources to tell a different story of Charles Van Doren than the one most often remembered. Chapter 1 is a tale of the commercial television industry in the Cold War and of the industry practices manipulated by quiz show producers for profit. Chapter 2 considers the female consumers the television industry wanted so desperately to reach and the social implications of intentionally including intelligent women as quiz show winners. Chapter 3 reconstructs the history of crafted symbolism attached to Van Doren across mass media. Chapter 4 features the voices of an American public clamorously protesting the larger American institutions they blamed for Van Dorens fall. Chapter 5 assesses the ways Charles Van Doren has come to represent the quiz show scandal in our cultural memory as well as the significant relationships between the television industry and its regulatory overseers, which have shaped what gets remembered (and how), to protect their own interests.

Proefschrift--Universiteit Nijmegen, 2004. / Mention parallèle de titre ou de responsabilité : Politieke communicatie en communicatiepolitiek in Indonesië : een studie over media, verantwoordelijkheid en verantwoording. Textes en anglais, résumé en néerlandais. Bibliogr. p. 128-140.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 14, 2009) Advisor: Brian Huot. Keywords: writing, assessment, literacy, standardized, testing, social reproduction, critical theory. Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-182)

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Alex Bordetsky, Nancy Roberts. Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-71). Also available online.