Forum Conversations is an organisational theatre method for helping individuals to deal with their difficult conversations in the workplace. It uses professional actors to simulate participants’ ‘difficult others’ and to play out confrontational conversations from participants’ own experience. This study adds to the empirical base of research into organisational theatre. It further conceptualises organisational theatre methods as reflective or refractive. This qualitative, interpretive study examines the perspectives of both participants and actors through a dramatistic lens and also assesses if and how the Forum Conversations method has affected changes in behaviour and approach in the ways individual participants communicate with others in the workplace. In this assessment a novel, methodological approach based on attributions made by participants was used to make comparisons between individuals’ pre- and post- Forum Conversations views about their difficult conversations. Outcomes included improvements in confidence and awareness but also of agency in participants’ dealings with others. The interaction between actors and participants is discussed in terms of a partial dialogism that dwells in the moment of exchange between interactants. From the actors’ side the study highlights the subtly layered reflexivity of the actors in process and also of their tendency to accentuate performance skills. In this context, the interaction is seen to compare with the way professional actors might use rehearsal to prepare for theatre performance. Overall, it is concluded that Forum Conversations is a powerful learning method that enables participants to embody their learning experience and leads to sustained individual change that occasionally includes personal transformation both at work and at home.

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In releasing the songs "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" and "American Soldier" in the aftermath of September 11, country artist Toby Keith enacts a tradition that has been established in the world of country music since the Civil War, that of producing wartime songs of patriotism. I conducted an organic analysis of both songs as rhetorical acts produced and consumed within a particular rhetorical context. Because country music is fundamentally a discourse that celebrates the attitudes, values and experiences of its audience, I first analyzed these two songs as instances of epideictic rhetoric. As an epideictic rhetor, Keith reinforces the traditional values of the country music audience, uniting them in celebration of the communal identity that renders them a rhetorical community. That shared identity enables Keith to advance a rhetorical vision of a post-September 11 reality, attributing meaning to the events of September 11 and the ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. I use pentadic analysis to illuminate the vision presented in each song, and I utilize both media coverage and the Billboard charts to determine how well this vision "chained out" amongst the country music audience. Lastly, I utilize media coverage to explore the rhetorical context in which these songs were written and consumed. / Master of Arts

The intention of this essay is to examine how the political commentators from three different kinds of media (evening, morning, public service) portray the party leaders after the election of 2018 in Sweden. My first specific research task is to analyze how the commentators portray the party leaders according to Kenneth Burke´s pentadic analysis. Hereafter, I aim to identify the intended audience that the commentator could have in mind. For this question it is important to analyze how they use language as a way to depict the political reality. The theoretical framework for this essay is based on Burke´s dramatism, terministic screens and identification, and Edwin Black´s second persona. The result shows that two of the commentators have fairly the same way to present the narrative of the dramatic pentad. They frequently highlight the purpose of the way the party leaders handle the situation. The other commentator, from the evening paper, strongly emphazises the lack of action from the politicians after the election. All commentators use a language that mostly depicts the politics as a game or strategy – but the tone differ from accusatory to understanding towards the party leaders. The analysis shows that the overall intended audience probably is quite politically interested, but from different political parties and ideologies.

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On January 8th, 2011 tragedy struck in Tucson, Arizona. A gunman opened fire on Representative Gabrielle Giffords' "Congress on Your Corner" event, wounding thirteen and killing six ("Arizona Shooting"). Four days later, President Obama spoke to a grieving crowd at the University of Arizona's McKale Memorial Center. This study seeks to demonstrate how the dramatistic process and the pentad provide insight into how Obama guides the nation through the process of relieving the guilt. Specifically, Obama's call for mortification instead of scapegoating as the means for victimage is examined in light of the context and organizational structure of the speech. In addition, a pentadic analysis of the speech is conducted, showing Obama's stress on the agent-agency ratio and a corresponding idealist-pragmatist outlook. Finally, conclusions are drawn about what this study adds to the academic literature on national eulogies, the presidency, and rhetorical studies at large. / Graduation date: 2012

This essay in rhetoric examines TV commercials for some of the biggest online casinos in Sweden. The aim is to identify if these gambling companies are targeting young people under 18 years old in their communication. Therefor I analyzed a total of three commercial movies – one from each gambling company – to determine which audience they are directing their communication to. To be able to do this I used Edwin Blacks theory the second persona and Kenneth Burkes theories identification and dramatism. With the use of the pentadic analysis method I found several factors that young people can identify themselves with. According to my results in the analysis I found that the second persona for each TV commercial was young people. Therefor I determined that some of the biggest gambling companies have young people as one of their target groups. I discuss my result in comparison to earlier research about both gambling commercial and children’s ability to understand and trust TV commercials. I also discuss the problematic of these kinds of commercials that targets young people and I’m therefore trying to create awareness about this issue.

This thesis examines the persuasiveness of anti-smoking television advertisements aimed at teens and produced by Philip Morris's Youth Smoking Prevention Program and the American Legacy Foundation's truth campaign. The advertisements are analyzed rhetorically using Kenneth Burke's dramatistic approach, supplemented by theory related to persuasive advertising, characteristics of at-risk adolescents, persuasive attack, and persuasive defense (apologia). The analysis indicates that strong central themes present in both the Philip Morris and truth campaigns act as a means of rhetorical persuasion, but are not necessarily rhetoric designed to persuade adolescents not to smoke cigarettes. The truth campaign advertisements contain both strengths and weaknesses. The weakness of the truth ads is related to an over-reliance on allegory-type scenarios meant to communicate anti-smoking sentiments and the theme of manipulation. Truth ads that contain clearer messages conveyed by appealing central characters are a more effective means of communicating not only an anti-smoking ideology, but also the theme of adolescent empowerment. This thesis's analysis more alarmingly indicates that the Philip Morris ads are in no way an effective means of smoking prevention. The Philip Morris campaign acts as a persuasive defense with the intended purpose of image repair and may encourage adolescents to think of Philip Morris and their tobacco products in a positive light. Conclusions suggest that due to the vast impact of media the glorifies smoking and other self-injurious behaviors; infrequent appearance of pro-social media appeals; insidious coercive tactics of the tobacco industry; possible limitations in determining the effectiveness of pro-social media appeals due to adolescent self-perception (or third person effect variables); and lack of attention paid to more vulnerable or at-risk youth, the real need may not be better pro-social media campaigns, but rather media literacy campaigns. In doing so, youth may become empowered, critical thinkers able to make life choices based on personal preference and the desire for self-fulfillment, instead of being coerced into a belief system induced by the bombardment of media.

Ausgehend von der Fragestellung, wie es möglich ist, dass der Körper durch bestimmte Erscheinungen und Handlungen zur Ressource visueller Kommunikation im Protest wird, leistet die vorliegende Dissertation zwei innovative Forschungsbeiträge: Zum einen wird die Rolle des Körpers in der Interaktionsordnung kollektiven Handelns theoretisch aufgearbeitet. Damit werden zwei miteinander verwobene Lücken im Bereich der Protest- und Bewegungsforschung adressiert: Die unzureichende Auseinandersetzung mit visuellen Aspekten der Aktivität sozialer Bewegungen und die, trotz einiger Aufmerksamkeit für soziale Inszenierung, weitgehende Ausblendung der Rolle des Körpers bei der Betrachtung von Bewegungshandeln. Zum anderen wird auf Grundlage der theoretischen Erkenntnisse eine Methodologie entwickelt, die sich besonders für die Erforschung von Körperlichkeit in Verbindung mit den Interaktionsdynamiken im Protest eignet. Den Körper operationalisiere ich als Visualisierungsmedium im Konzept des Bild-Körpers mit Anleihen bei der Bild- und Drama-Theorie. Die empirische Analyse von Videomaterial zu den Anti-Castor-Protesten in der Region Wendland (Deutschland) des Jahres 2008 zeigte, dass der Körper als Symbolträger in Mikrodramen - kurzen dramatischen Interaktionsfolgen - in Erscheinung tritt, über die der Protest selbst zum mobilisierenden Ereignis wird. Durch Mikrodramen werden die Akteure unmittelbar mit den Narrativen und Master-Frames des Protests verbunden. Der sonst rhetorische Konflikt zwischen Aktivisten und Protestadressaten wird physisch manifest in Zeit und Raum. Die Verkörperung normativ geladener Konstellationen von antagonistischen Charakteren ist dabei ein wesentliches Moment. Die notwendige Spannung wird durch die Kompositionen der Bild-Körper vor allem im Sinnbild der Grenzverletzung konstruiert, worin der Angriff und die Verteidigung des Körpers eine Verbindung zu den emotionalen Konstruktionen der Würde und des Anstands herstellen. / By asking how the human body becomes a crucial resource of visual communication in protest, this research advances scholarship in two main ways. First, I theorize the role of the body in terms of its appearances and actions, and in relation to collective action. Despite some scholarship attending to performative politics, this inquiry addresses several gaps in the theorizing about social movements such as the visual and embodied aspects of protest. Second, to anchor my theorization of the socially and physically situated body, I develop a methodology for researching corporality in association with protest interaction dynamics. I identify and conceptualize the body as a medium of visualization, which I call the pictorial body. Linking the pictorial body concept to the interface between scripts, narratives, and genres (SNG complex) lends the analyses to accounts of visual and dramaturgical theory. Empirically, I use original video data of the 2008 Anti-Castor protest campaign in Germany's Wendland. Findings show that the pictorial body is a primary carrier of symbolism in protest micro-dramas - short dramatic interaction episodes between challengers, targets, and third parties. As the most proximate medium, corporeal mobilizing experience - the call for action - can be treated as an outcome of protest action rather than only as a precondition. I argue that the embodied nature of micro-dramas during protest directly connects actors to movement narratives and master frames by making physically manifest in both space and time what is otherwise a rhetorical conflict. The embodiment of normatively framed constellations of antagonist characters is essential to this. More specifically, a conflictual relationship was crafted primarily by the composition of pictorial bodies in images of border violations, in which the attack and defense of the body connects to the emotionalizing constructs of dignity and decency.

ABSTRACT And concrete diction Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Drottningens juvelsmycke (The Queen's Tiara; 1834) is, along with Amorina, the work primarily associated with the ”poetic fugue” – a concept the author develops in ”Om enheten av epism och dramatism; en aning om den poetiska fugan” (”On the unity of epism and dramatism; a notion of the poetic fugue”; 1821); an essay often considered vague and theoretical by researchers in the field. The meaning of the poetic fugue has been regarded unclear, but mainly considered as some kind of synthesis of epic and dramatic writing. This essay argues that that is not the case, and that this one-dimensional approach both limits the interpretations of the essay and the poetic fugue as a whole. From a multidisciplinary perspective, with myself and my own reader as a part of the fugue itself, the aim of this essay is to highlight a very important overseen aspect of the poetic fugue, and Almqvist’s writing in general – the connections to mathematics, the analogies between abstract and concrete levels, and how these are deeply intertwined. The results in this essay are derived from a close reading technique based on mathematical problem solving called the ideotic method (den ideotiska metoden), and analyzed with Douglas Hofstadter's theory of Strange loops in Gödel, Escher, Bach – an eternal golden braid (1979). This analysis shows that this analogy is not just about the composition of a poetic piece of art, a synthesis of epic and dramatic writing, or the relation between music and text. Instead the results do point to an alternative interdisciplinary interpretation, where the relations between parts and units, realities and fictions, readers and texts, make the poetic fugue more of an analogy for the universe as a whole – a living and breathing ”animal coeleste” in contrast to the Newtonian ”mechanical coeleste”. An analogy which, thanks to its mathematical construction and way of looking at time as non-linear, is connected to both Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory – the science of the very big and the very small, parts and units, of everything, including ourselves.