THE BATTLE OF DEER CREEK CROSSING: A Case Study of Rhetorical Exigence and Environmental Rhetoric Michael John Bannon, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 This dissertation is a case study that analyzes rhetorical tactics and strategies surrounding the environmental public argument over the fate of Deer Creek Crossing, a proposed commercial development in Western Pennsylvanias Allegheny River valley within three miles of the birthplace of pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson. Drawing predominantly from primary sources, it contributes to our understanding of how lengthy rhetorical processes evolve and what influences them. The study shows that the analysis of context as manifested in the rhetorical situation and analyzed through a rhetorical history framework can clarify both singular events and prolonged argumentative processes by uncovering aspects of those events and processes which may be less apparent in a more narrowly focused study of individual rhetorical artifacts. The opening chapter provides necessary background and lays out the theoretical foundation supporting the analysis of the Deer Creek Crossing controversy. Chapter two analyzes the use and misuse of public forums, including the press, in governmental decision-making associated with the Deer Creek Crossing case. Chapter three investigates the adaptation of arguments and changes in tone in response to exigencies and constraints arising from the denial of the first permit application. Chapter four reconstructs the rhetorical decision-making process that led to the deployment of Rachel Carsons name, analyzes the argumentation arising in opposition, and examines the fight for scientific authority. Chapter five evaluates the decision-making processes of regulatory agencies charged with approving environmental permits, as well as the intricate and highly structured legal processes that dominated courtrooms, in which the last and most decisive actions were undertaken. Chapter six explores the implications of the Deer Creek Crossing case for environmental rhetoric and for the effect of particular strategies and tactics on environmental public argument from the perspective of environmental activists, of developers, and for rhetorical scholarship.

During the 1990s, a number of developing countries became interested in upgrading the technology of their national media industries to acquire Internet, satellite broadcast, and cellular phone capacities, because digital technologies like these offered opportunities for sustainable development. Each of these countries had a divergent understanding of what constituted national or, increasingly, regional interests. Yet, Western policymakers and global financing institutions aggressively promoted standardized neoliberal policies, including privatization and deregulation of national media industries--the subsequent opening of these industries to free market forces. Although little empirical evidence existed to support the benefits of this policy framework, development aid from these Western institutions was often contingent upon the adoption of it. The justification was simply that the application of neoliberal policies to national media industries was understood to be superior to any others. Scholarship in political economy of communication made strides in criticizing the dominance of Western policy frameworks and the effects of neoliberalism on national media industries in the developing world. Within a political economy model, the imperative of the present project is to consider the bi-lateral relationship between the developed and the developing world as one that can also be located within a more regionalized and heterogeneous structure. In the last decade, regional economic alliances have become recognized as a feasible method for developing countries to enter into the global political economy. These alliances are often flexible networks among a dozen or more countries, and the reasons so many join are as varied as their membership. The most common reasons are because they foster: cost-sharing of communication technology acquisition, technology transfer and training programs among nations, financing through regional development banks, as well as policy frameworks that are not as heavily determined by neoliberal macroeconomic prescriptions. Most importantly, they provide a place wherein developing countries can maintain their own national identities, but still benefit from a collective force in the global market place. Central to this analysis are Vietnam and its membership in the Association of Southeast Nations, and South Africa in the South African Development Community, both of which in their own way signify the viability of this alternative model.

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.