In this study, I describe several performance experiments in which I applied Brazilian theatre artist Augusto Boals Image Theatre method to mobilize a composition process that is artistically exciting, politically relevant, and pedagogically engaging. Over the span of about seven years I used Image Theatre as the bedrock of my artistic practice as a director of social justice themed works for the stage. I show how using Image Theatre as a tool for performance composition can balance artistry (theatrical practice), analysis (cultural studies), and activism (collaborative struggles toward justice). To do so, I review relevant literature on Boal and Image Theatre to show how my research contributes to the ongoing conversation about the ethics and applications of Boals method, then describe three major performance projects in which I used Image Theatre as a method for staging collaborative performances addressing social justice topics. In each case study, I offer descriptions of the performance composition process and final performance product in order to reflect on several practical strategies for directors and teachers interested in creating collaborative performances that call for social change.

This manuscript attempts to act as an organizational entry pamphlet, in providing a wealth of knowledge to those who are looking to get into collegiate coaching for the first time. The majority of participants were selected from the coaching staff of NCAA Division I collegiate women's basketball teams, with a total of 55 participants involved in this study. Although this study was conducted specifically for new collegiate women basketball coaches that are starting the job for the first time, successfully, the results of this study can be applicable to any coach and any sport. Based on the responses of these participants, the main concepts that new coaches should focus on are: Grow in knowledge, Build Relationships, Do your Job, Know your value, Have Great Character, and Have a Balance. As far as what type of goals do coaches have, the primary goals that new coaches should focus on is Mentorship, holding a Standard of Excellence, and on Coaching/Education. The secondary goals that new coaches should have in order to pursue their primary goals, are the lessons that they learn through their experiences and mistakes, which will guide them and lead them to success. The study also supported the hypothesis derived from the socioemotional selectivity theory, which predicted that younger coaches would be more focused on knowledge related goals (goals that optimize the future) while older coaches would be more focused on emotionally meaningful goals (goals related to feelings). Knowing this information can help guide new coaches on how goals change over time and why. Lastly, all the coaches identified the importance of communication in developing and maintaining strong working relationships, not only with their players and staff, but also with administrators, boosters, and for networking purposes.

The HBO television program Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a new and unique take on the typical political comedy show popularized by programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Uninterrupted by commercial breaks and with full creative control, host John Oliver and his team spend 30 minutes on Sunday nights discussing a typically underreported story at length, abandoning the monologue and interview portions reminiscent of traditional political comedy shows in favor of a long-form style investigation into a particular issue or topic. The main segment of each episode is then uploaded to the social media website, YouTube, within 24 hours of the shows airing for free viewing by anyone with an Internet connection. As a result, the show has garnered both critical acclaim and an active fanbase of millions who view, share, and interact with the show by responding to numerous calls to action that usually follow each segment. This study seeks to analyze the shows potential effects on news production, specifically within the context of intermedia agenda setting, the ability for the shows content to lead news outlets to cover the topics discussed during each episode in the time following the episodes airing. Through keyword searches, counts of news coverage on online news entities in periods both before and after the shows air date were collected in an effort to determine if there are more articles in the days following a Last Week Tonight episode than in the days preceding one. Paired sample t-tests were used as the primary method of statistical analysis to compare the means of each set of counts. Results indicate at least a moderate effect of the show on levels of news coverage across 25 different episodes for both traditional and native online news entities.

<p> This dissertation explores how the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy Movement (OM) <i>writ large</i> generated new forms of rhetorical invention through its emergence in geographical places and virtual spaces across the world. The genesis and development of Occupy on these &ldquo;radical&rdquo; grounds provide an empirical grounding to theory on the <i>chora,</i> rhetorical invention, and the vernacular, where the word occupy and the tactic occupation designate vital sites <i>(topoi)</i> of rhetorical activity: seats/sources of local meaning(s) that occupiers used to bring new lines of thought to life. The radical uptake of &ldquo;occupy&rdquo; would create what Edward Schiappa calls a definitional rupture: a disruption of the &ldquo;natural attitude&rdquo; around the meaning or usage of a word. To suture this gap, I acknowledge the ethical and normative ramifications that accompany the act of definition as a political act and then conduct a philological analysis on &lsquo;occupy&rsquo; and &lsquo;occupation&rsquo; by tracing these words to their earliest or &ldquo;radical&rdquo; roots. I then attend to the emergence of OWS in the place of Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza, followed by its first call to action and popular uptake in virtual streams and media, where both places produced new vernacular modalities and media. In gesturing to the disaster sociology literature on emergent citizen groups (ECGS) and emergent phenomena, this assembly of Occupy in time, place, and space, radically reconceives &lsquo;what it means&rsquo; to &ldquo;occupy&rdquo; common places and spaces towards the creation of new socio-economic realities in response to crisis.</p>

The 1962 Democratic primary for the United States Senate seat from Louisiana was not much of a contest, with incumbent Russell B. Long handily defeating his opponent, Phil A. St. Amant. But the defamation case that stemmed from that campaign has had a lasting impact on defamation law in the United States. While the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in St. Amant v. Thompson often now gets lost in the myriad decisions labelled as Sullivans progeny, the ruling established standards for the application of the actual malice test established in New York Times v. Sullivan. The confusion over these standards is shown by the shifting results in the St. Amant case as it progressed through the trial and appellate courts, and in the debate amongst the justices of the Supreme Court. This dissertation examines the law of defamation prior to the trial in Deputy Sherriff Herman Thompsons libel case against St. Amant, including its origins in English common law, the development of the principles of the First Amendment, and the influence of Louisianas unique history on defamation law in the state. It then examines the circumstances of the 1962 Senate campaign, and the televised statement that led to the lawsuit. It then examines the court proceedings in the trial and appellate courts in detail, with a particular emphasis on the behind-the-scenes deliberations of the U.S. Supreme Court justices. Finally, the dissertation examines the lasting legacy of the St. Amant v. Thompson decision, including how it has been cited and used in subsequent cases, both nationally and in Louisiana. It concludes with an analysis of the legacy of the case and its meaning for libel law today and in the future. The St. Amant case came in the midst of a redefinition of the meaning of the First Amendment, expressed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court precedents from the 1960s thorough the 1980s. Until this work, it has been an underappreciated part of this history. This dissertation is an attempt to examine the case and place it in its proper role in the legacy of First Amendment jurisprudence.

This study tested the spiral of silence in both Social Networking Sites (SNS) and online discussion forums. It argued that online expert participation may influence people's willingness to take part in an online discussion. A two (opinion climate) by two (expert participation) experiment was designed to examine how expert participation influenced the relationship between peoples willingness to speak out and opinion climate with the controversial topic: abortion. In this study, the spiral of silence effect was only found when experts were present in the discussion.

From an advertising perspective fathers are a highly attractive consumer demographic. In order to market to this audience it is important to understand how fathers are framed. With an increase in the number of fathers identifying themselves as caregivers according to the 2012 census, effective marketers would be well-served if they understood what type of frame applies when fathers are employed vs. stay at home. This analysis used framing theory to determine how message givers use frames within their advertisements to explain which particular aspects of the father are given salience. This study is a content analysis of father frames in advertising over a variety of highly circulated mens magazines from 2009-2014. This analysis divided the magazines into two-time periods and looked for examples of care-giving fathers, wage-earning fathers, and recreational fathers in advertisements. In addition, the analysis looked at the question of competence in these advertisements, observing if the fathers were depicted as competent or not. The research supported that the dominant father frame of the pre-2012 time period was the care-giving father and the dominant father frame of the post-2012 time period was the recreational father. Fathers were not mostly observed as competent. This study supported the idea that the post-2012 father frame in male-based highly circulated magazines is more likely to be a father who leads their children in leisurely activities.

<p> New Jersey governor Chris Christie has gained widespread media attention for his aggressive public persona, his involvement in the Bridgegate scandal, and for weighing almost 400 pounds at the beginning of his political career. In this thesis, I conduct a metaphor analysis on political cartoons featuring Christie. By alternately focusing on his weight and his Italian heritage, cartoons utilize body-centric attacks to transform Christie into monsters, inanimate objects, manual laborers, women, and other entities, inextricably tying Christie's politics to his physicality. I argue that Christie's body is heavily gendered throughout the cartoons, reinforcing the conservative masculinist script and hegemonic masculinity. Thus, I end this thesis by exploring how the denigration of Christie's body could prove damaging to Christie's career and aid in the construction of non-normative bodies in the public sphere.</p>

Cooperative and relay wireless communication networks use one or more distinct wire- less nodes as relays to combat performance impairments, which include signal atten- uation due to power loss over long distances and the signal power fluctuation due to multi-path fading. The second one is the primary focus of this thesis. Diversity is an effective weapon to combat the fading effects and using multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver is a way of achieving it. However, using multiple antennas may not be practical for some mobile terminals due to the limited physical size, battery power and computational capability of these mobile terminals. Therefore, cooperative schemes have been proposed in which several wireless nodes cooperate with each other to achieve diversity even though each node has only one an- tenna. Many cooperative schemes have been proposed including Amplify-and-Forward (AF) and Decode-and-Forward (DF) [1] to achieve this diversity. This thesis primarily proposes and studies a DF scheme. For the DF schemes, imperfect decoding at the relay is one of the major limitations to the achievable performance. To address this problem and yet remain simple to implement, a novel DF based cooperative scheme is proposed in this thesis. This proposed scheme uses a distributed Turbo coding (DTC) scheme and is resilient to relay errors. It is analyzed by using the approximate Gaussian density evolution method. The analysis shows how the iterative Turbo decoding performs with different bit error rates (BERs) at the relay. Based on the results, a novel scheme, which adaptively changes the code used at the relay, is then proposed to further improve performance. The diversity offered by the proposed scheme is achieved at the cost of decreased spectral efficiency compared to a non-cooperative network. To recover some of the spectral efficiency loss due to cooperation, the proposed single source node cooperative scheme is extended to a two source nodes (users) scheme. The relay node forwards a combined packet which is formed by combining multiple users' information packets into a single packet. The results show that combining multiple users' information packets using superposition modulation can achieve better performance than that of using "XOR" operation (network coding) when two users have different channel qualities, which is very common in a wireless communication environment.

This is a presentation of 29 slides at the Scholarly Communication panel session of the 2006 Annual Conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, 19 January, 2006, San Antonio, Texas. Reports the findings from a study that investigated the value of the Journal of Education for Library & Information Science (JELIS). As far as growth is concerned, JELIS is in a holding pattern. Practitioners have decreased as authors and most articles continue to focus on Curriculum in library schools. Articles on distance education and cognition are increasing as are authors from foreign countries (outside US and Canada), and the number of co-authored articles.