Espionage as a communication phenomenon is investigated through three recent case studies. Emphasis is placed on understanding intelligence and espionage as communication, but more importantly the discourses surrounding the label of espionage. These discourses are paradoxical, in that the heart of the discourse remains secret. Discourses about espionage are clearly persuasive. Indeed, the topic of espionage is the most socially prominent way in which modern American society negotiates issues about what properly counts as a secret, and what counts as treason. Yet here is the rhetorical challenge: how can the discourse be persuasive when the evidence itself must remain a secret? The results suggest that, contrary to traditional rhetorical expectations about the importance of evidence for persuasion, in the context of espionage the suppression of evidence is advantageous for persuasion. Secrecy itself is what sells. The discursive absence is highlighted, which in turn invites particular reading strategies. Audience expectations are activated, and a paranoid reading of overdetermined cues is invoked.

Between 1876 and 1900, large numbers of manufacturers began to advertise more widely in an effort to create national markets for their products. They commissioned lithographic firms to produce chromolithographed cards, booklets, calendars, and posters, which were then distributed to stores, stuffed into packages, or tacked up on bill-posting boards. The enormous increase in visual advertising in the late nineteenth century, then, must be understood in the context of the production, distribution, and consumption of chromolithography. While chromolithographic advertising may not have had the cultivating and democratizing influence on American society that reformers believed it could, it did blend in with other cultural forms, thus integrating the discourse of visual advertising into everyday life across class boundaries. Produced under a complex, irrational, and inefficient system by men and women from many walks of life, it was a crucial component in the development of consumer culture. Not only were individual brands developed largely through chromolithography, but also the very idea of the brand was made intelligible during the chromo era. Chromolithographic advertisements drew upon existing cultural forms and visual vernaculars to communicate an ideology of consumption by visually articulating consumption to whiteness and citizenshipand elevating it to a position as the most significant realm of activity. With a large number of firms vying for advertising work, lithographers desperate to compete turned to independent artists with original ideas in order to distinguish themselves and thus help them land contracts. As a result, watercolor and pastel artists from a range of social positions, both women and men, were brought into the process of visual-advertising design. The lithographic craftsmen who printed, and also sometimes designed, the advertisements identified as both consumers and workers, while expressing dismay that their trade had become little more than the humble handmaid of advertisers.

The specialized vocabularies and complex methodologies of scientific practice complicate efforts both to communicate scientific information to lay publics and to enable those publics to sort out competing scientific claims when public policy decisions hang in the balance. Consequently, technical experts strive to invent rhetorical practices and argumentative strategies that appeal to non-scientific audiences. One such strategy involves the use of popular fictional films to support technical arguments that bear on public policy questions. Film references are not simply clever labels or cursory illustrative examples, but important communicative acts that serve a unique rhetorical function in public argument on scientific matters. Scientists, science journalists, and science educators use films as metaphors, narratives, or heuristics to help galvanize public attention or teach scientific and technological principles to non-scientific publics. However, this rhetorical exercise invites debate over the appropriateness and efficacy of using fictional films to educate publics about factual science. The citation of film as evidence in public argument expands the rhetorical landscape to include texts that transcend traditional modes of address within the scientific community. This dissertation draws from rhetorical theory and film studies theory to investigate how science interlocutors reference films in public discussions of science. It examines three public discussions of science and the film references highlighted in such discussions: The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island accident, GATTACA and policy debates over genetic science controls, and The Day After Tomorrow and climate stewardship policies. Each case study reveals how advocates articulate and maintain the boundaries of acceptable scientific arguments. By attending to how the use of films as resources for the invention of arguments, this research suggests avenues for engaging scientific controversies that are not predicated on intimate knowledge of a particular scientific practice.

This project is a cultural study of bicycles and the politics that inform the everyday practice of cycling. Through a close examination of media, rhetoric, and protest, I focus my attention on groups of people who believe that bicycles are not merely forms of transportation, rather, they are instruments of communication, sources of identity, vehicles for pleasure, and tools for technological, cultural, and political critique. This 'counterculture' is comprised of feminists, socialists, punks, anti-globalization activists, writers, environmentalists, and others who have created and developed a politics of cycling through a dialectic of communication and action. Through this dialectical process, these cyclists have not only created an important body of knowledge that speaks to issues of gender, class, culture, technology, and ideology, they also demonstrate both how these issues are interrelated and how people can actively negotiate and contest their meanings. As such, they reveal the capacity for others to effectively utilize grassroots organization, alternative media production, and non-violent direct action as a means to initiate political mobilization and positive change in an era of corporatization, globalization, and widespread cynicism. More than anything, they remind us that revolution can, and must, begin in our everyday lives.

The dissertation conducts a rhetorical analysis of Japan's foreign worker problem from the early 1980s to 2005. To this end, it provides three episodes in a two-decade case study in media representations of "llegal" foreign workers, specifically the emergence and the dominant framing of the foreign worker problem in the media and one organized resistance to the dominant framing of the problem. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Japan's foreign worker problem to set contexts for rhetorical criticism in subsequent chapters. Specifically, it outlines Japan's immigration policies, offers a historical account of its foreign worker problem, and supplies statistical data to document the recent trends and current status of labor migration in Japan. Chapter 3 explores the gendered nature of Japan's foreign worker problem. A distinctive feature of the migratory pattern in postwar Japan is that those who came to Japan for work initially consisted overwhelmingly of women. Nevertheless, their influx was not cast as a foreign worker problem; instead, it was generally framed as a peculiar issue of Japayuki-san. Importantly, the term Japayuki-san functioned to fixate the stereotyped image of female migrants as young sex workers from poor Asian countries. Chapter 4 demonstrates that the popular media, through a barrage of alarming crime reports interspersed with frightening visual graphics, play a critical role in constructing the public knowledge that "llegal aliens" are posing an unprecedented security threat to Japan. Chapter 5 underscores the importance of collective symbolic struggles by investigating how overstaying foreigners, activists, and academics collaborated during a special residence permission campaign from September 1999 through February 2000. The chapter also suggests that sustained and favorable media attention was crucial in bringing the campaign to success. In conclusion, the dissertation stresses the need for contesting the very language used for framing the foreign worker debate. Under the current discursive frame, foreign workers are inevitably reduced to economic units, which in turn limits the scope of the controversy to assessments of economic benefits and costs from accepting foreign workers. A rhetorical move needs to be made from "foreign worker" discourse to "immigration" discourse so that full-blown discussions about immigration could take place.

This dissertation provides a cultural analysis of the figure of the extraterrestrial in US culture. The sites through which the extraterrestrial appears -- spiritualism, so-called space brother religions, unidentified flying objects, and alien abduction -- are understood as elements of an ongoing displaced utopian imaginary. This mode of utopian thought is characterized by recourse to figures of radical alterity (spirits of the dead, ascended masters, and the gray) as agents of radical social change; by its homologies with contemporaneous political currents; and through its invocation of trance states for counsel from the various others imagined as primary agents of change. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the extraterrestrial functions as the locus both for the resolution of tensions between the spiritual and the material and for the projection of a perfected subject into a utopian future.

The centralized structure of ownership of the local television industry in the United States today has resulted from a combination of regulatory and market pressures. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which centralizing tendencies in ownership structure have been accompanied by the centralization of operations. As station groups add more stations and seek to operate the stations they already own in an ever more profitable manner, changed industrial practices are vitally important because they have direct effects upon the product of those stations, especially local television news. In analyzing such centralizing tendencies, the project focuses not only on centralization of ownership and operation, but on two further factors as well: changing interpretations of the public interest and the development of technologies for local television stations. Changing interpretations of the public interest provision of regulatory law permitted and encouraged station groups to grow larger, redefining the structure of the local television industry, even in the times of heaviest restriction. In terms of technological development, after a brief period of equipment designed simply to get product on the air, television equipment developers followed a consistent guiding principle of staff reduction and job simplification which aided this momentum towards centralization. The combination of changing ownership structures, shifts in understandings of public interest, and new technologies has resulted in new business models built around invoking economies of scale, including centralcasting and multi-channel operation. These new business models have dramatically altered the program product of local television stations, especially local news. News programming, which initially entered broadcasting in response to the regulatory mandate that broadcasters serve the public in return for free access to the public airwaves, has been transformed into a primary source of local station revenue. This commodified version of news programming is the logical result of practices begun in newspapers and continued in radio broadcasting. The news product of local stations is an area of vital concern in the present day media environment, as the quantity of news on the air increases without a corresponding increase in newsroom resources, jeopardizing the quality and veracity of those news programs.

This dissertation examines the rhetorical dynamics of South African AIDS policy under President Thabo Mbeki. From 1999-2004, Mbeki bucked global consensus surrounding the etiology and treatment of AIDS and prohibited government distribution of anti-retroviral drug treatments. In defense of these policies, the President offered scientific arguments founded on the theories of Western AIDS dissenters. He also made the case that South Africas unique experiences under apartheid demanded a strong tolerance of dissent and debate. The international condemnation of these views was striking. Over the course of the controversy, rhetoric played a central role in shaping the views of both sides. Advocates marshaled public arguments in response to the exigencies of the controversy. Contextual constraints also forced the rhetors to adapt their messages. Each chapter of this dissertation examines a different rhetorical element of the controversy. They include the cultural context of South Africas transition to democracy, the development of AIDS dissent in the Mbeki administration, the early development of AIDS dissent in the West, the technical clash of scientific arguments in Mbekis Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel, and indigenous social movement resistance to the governments policies.

The recent proliferation of special effects in Hollywood film has ushered in an era of digital transformation. Among scholars, digital technology is hailed as a revolutionary moment in the history of communication and representation. Nevertheless, media scholars and cultural historians have difficulty finding a language adequate to theorizing digital artifacts because they are not just texts to be deciphered. Rather, digital media artifacts also invite critiques about the status of reality because they resurrect ancient problems of embodiment and transcendence. In contrast to scholarly approaches to digital technology, computer engineers, interface designers, and special effects producers have invented a robust set of terms and phrases to describe the practice of digital animation. In order to address this disconnect between producers of new media and scholars of new media, I argue that the process of digital animation borrows extensively from a set of preexisting terms describing materiality that were prominent for centuries prior to the scientific revolution. Specifically, digital animators and interface designers make use of the ancient science, art, and technological craft of alchemy. Both alchemy and digital animation share several fundamental elements: both boast the power of being able to transform one material, substance, or thing into a different material, substance, or thing. Both seek to transcend the body and materiality but in the process, find that this elusive goal (realism and gold) is forever receding onto the horizon. The introduction begins with a literature review of the field of digital media studies. It identifies a gap in the field concerning disparate arguments about new media technology. On the one hand, scholars argue that new technologies like cyberspace and digital technology enable radical new forms of engagement with media on individual, social, and economic levels. At the same time that media scholars assert that our current epoch is marked by a historical rupture, many other researchers claim that new media are increasingly characterized by ancient metaphysical problems like embodiment and transcendence. In subsequent chapters I investigate this disparity.

This dissertation is a rhetorical biography of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864-1937), the foremost British proponent of pragmatism at the turn of the previous century. Beyond reconstructing the development and receptions of Schillers thoughts, this dissertation brings the resources of rhetorical criticism to bear and focuses, in particular, on his style and its significance both in his own lifetime and afterward. While spending most of his career in England, Schiller came in his time to be one of the most widely discussed figures in what is often considered a distinctly American philosophical movement. This rhetorical biography analyzes, in chronological order, the most substantial and often contested arguments that Schiller engaged in so as to promote, first, Jamesian pragmatism and, secondly, his own pragmatic humanism. These arguments were meant to defend the principles of pragmatism and pragmatic humanism against the dominant strains of Idealism then current in both British and American philosophy. But they were also supported by reference to a wide range of topics: psychical research, formal logic, science, religion, and eugenics. This dissertation examines how Schillers arguments exemplify the positive and negative aspects of the rhetorical category of style. More specifically, this rhetorical biography posits that Schillers use of the stylistic figure repetitionthe reiteration of key claims so as to emphasize their importance and to engage the pathos of the audiencehelps to explain why Schiller is now a largely forgotten instigator of pragmatism, conceived herein as both a philosophical concept and a historical movement. This dissertation also demonstrates how traditional methods of rhetorical criticism, often focusing on the set text or oration, can be profitably extended by way of archival materials, public documents, and a focus on the range of arguments offered over the expanse of a subjects career.