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Not everyone has a background in the sciences or medicine, but everyone at some point will need to interpret medical information and use it to make decisions that will significantly impact their own life or the life of a loved one. Understanding who to trust when seeking medical advice can seem daunting in an age of instant access to a nearly limitless number of online sources and the constantly evolving presence of social media. Through the rhetorical concept of ethos, broken into phronesis (practical wisdom), arête (virtue), and eunoia (good will), we can analyze methods used by different rhetors to determine how they build authority and earn their audience's trust, thereby influencing the audience's beliefs and actions. Vaccines are a salient topic to analyze for ethos building, as there is an ongoing and passionate debate from various rhetors vying to influence patients and parents to vaccinate according to different beliefs surrounding public health, safety, and individual liberty. Analyzing public-facing information from opposite sides of the debate, specifically from healthcare professionals, government organizations, and lay people, can help us see different methods utilized when creating an ethos about the same topic. Understanding how rhetors build ethos may help us understand what those rhetors consider important and may help us reach them as an audience more effectively. It was found that when ethos-building, professionals and government organizations focused more on building expertise and goodwill towards the general population while anti-vaccination lay rhetors focused more on individual connections and goodwill towards small groups perceived as vulnerable. Through studies such as this focused on the rhetoric of medicine, we can learn to create better communications and documents about vaccines and healthcare that earn trust and that influence members of the community towards safeguarding public health.

According to Deborah Britzman, a queer pedagogy enables a destabilization of identity, a destabilization of various socio-cultural and economic norms, and recognition that language reflects current dominant socio-cultural ideologies. While queer pedagogies have been applied to courses in various disciplines and queer texts and readings have been presented within a range of literature courses, the role of a queer text in the composition classroom bears further examination. To answer the question, "What purposes can be served by using a queer text in a composition course?" I conducted qualitative research, using interviews, observations, and textual analysis in three first-year composition classes as three teachers and nine students read, discussed and wrote about Eli Clare's text, "The Mountain," for the first time. The language and style of the text disrupted assumptions about how texts should function and exposed students to stylistic techniques they challenged, critiqued or used to achieve specific rhetorical effects of their own. Students had a stronger sense that authors make specific choices and that those choices affect how an audience reads a text. However, students' and teachers' enactment and understanding of academic norms may contradict the possibilities presented by a queer text like Clare's. Understandings of academic discourse based upon an ethos of certainty tend to work against the destabilization of identity and the questioning and uncertainty Clare's text fosters. While queer scholars claim that certain pedagogical approaches to texts reflect and encourage a queered understanding of identity norms and knowledge, critics of queer theory express skepticism about its applicability with undergraduate students. This study illustrated that a queer text can enable composition teachers (even those unfamiliar with queer pedagogical techniques) to enact goals those of us who teach and study composition value, including: reading texts for multiple purposes; extensive use of revision; experimentation with substance, style and audience. Yet, the study also demonstrated that we need a better understanding of how and why a queer text works (and how to communicate that to students), a better understanding of what constitutes academic writing and more self-reflection about how identities shape and are shaped by socio-cultural and discursive ideologies and material reality.

In this dissertation I make a case for multigenre essays to be made more available to students in all disciplines, but especially to students in freshman composition classes. I also present the results of a case study where I acted as teacher/researcher investigating how students experience the writing and reading of multigenre essays. By multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: (1) when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs, poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain in rhetorical flexibility---experimenting with and finding the right genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say; (2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to a given topic; and (3) they gain in their ability to push at the perceived boundaries of a discourse. In this dissertation I discuss how eight students in an experimental writing class responded to the writing and reading of multigenre essays, to what extent they found them worthwhile and/or pleasurable, their thoughts in reference to audience and subject matter, how they used multigenre essays for cognitive travel, and how writing multigenre essays gave them a way to push against the perceived boundaries of their discipline. My data come from four essays the students wrote, reader response assignments, reflection letters, and from interviews with five of the students. Overall students found the writing and reading of multigenre essays more difficult but more satisfying than that of standard academic prose. In some cases multigenre essays made them think in new ways about audience and subject matter; for almost all students, multigenre essays made them think differently about an essay's form and how a change in form allowed them to position themselves differently within their discipline.

Digital stories—two- to five-minute videos consisting of a first-person voiceover set to a slideshow of personal photographs—combine personal reflection with digital technologies. The stories and the process of making them appeal to many organizations, particularly those with a mission of outreach or education. However, despite the inexpensive and fairly easy-to-use digital technologies involved, organizations have typically had difficulty implementing the practice. This dissertation presents a case study of one organization that hoped to implement digital storytelling, detailing the 15 months after its Writing Director completed a digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop. The case study organization, Tech Year, is a one-year intensive college and job-readiness program for urban 18-24 year-olds. The case study aims for descriptive detail, and reflects 300+ hours of site visits, 29 interviews, and extensive document collection. Everett Rogers’ theory of organizational innovation is used to frame the case study description. Tech Year hoped to integrate digital storytelling into its Business Writing curriculum and imagined a number of other utilities for digital storytelling related to fundraising, recruiting, and student development. During the 15-month research period, a wide range of digital storytelling-related activity happened at Tech Year, including a pilot of digital storytelling in the Business Writing classroom. At the conclusion of the study, however, Tech Year had not settled on a sustainable organizational use or uses for digital storytelling, and organizational members were uncertain whether the practice would persist. Besides telling an implementation story, the study has a second major aim: to explore theoretically informed reflective tools that might be used by researchers and organizations to assess and direct ongoing digital storytelling implementation efforts. A novel methodology that examines digital storytelling pilots through the lens of North American genre theory, called genre-informed implementation analysis, is both described and applied to the case of Tech Year.

Few research studies have focused on WAC program development. Those that exist do not examine the ideological grounds for programmatic changes. This dissertation explores the dynamics of such changes through a four-year ethnographic study of WAC program development at a small, public, liberal arts college. The study employed extensive participant observation, interviewing, and document collection to trace how curricular and cultural changes around writing take shape and what ideologies and rhetorical practices come into play during that complex change process. The site for the study is of special interest because WAC there was in transition from an informal coalition focused on changing culture and pedagogy to a potentially institutional program equally invested in curricular reform. My study documents the interactions that characterize the change process, using Jenny Edbauer's conception of rhetorical ecology for its explanatory power in non-linear discursive environments. I analyze rhetorical encounters between a wide range of institutional constituents, including administrators and faculty from multiple disciplines. In these encounters, higher education's historic ideologies surface and interact in complex ways with WAC's ideologies. Using critical discourse analysis, I unpack these interactions and ideological multilectics, examining how language and values circulate among multiple users, texts, and sites within the rhetorical ecology of one college, influencing the shape of program developments. WAC scholars suggest that contemporary practitioners need to forge alliances with other cross-curricular initiatives in order for WAC to continue as a viable educational movement. My analysis of how WAC advocates at one college positioned their efforts in relation to other curricular changes reveals both benefits and costs resulting from such alliances. Although alliances can produce significant reforms, working with groups that have divergent ideological premises risks positioning WAC in subordination to others' ideological priorities. Two intertwined strategies appear to mitigate this problem: (1) ideological recentering on WAC's core theoretical commitments and (2) formation of recombinant multilectics by identifying the ideologies in play and considering how, or whether, core WAC ideological commitments align with them. Acts of recentering that incorporate deliberate multilectics may be key survival strategies for WAC programs as they interact with other cross-curricular initiatives.

This project explores digital media productions based specifically on food and cooking in order to demonstrate that new communication technologies are increasingly incorporating all five of the bodily senses. In doing so, they contribute significantly to the emergence of new ideological apparatuses appropriate for a global community. These apparatuses – including the formation of a posthumanist subject, the use of technology to support embodied cognition, and the establishment of entertainment as an ideological institution – have become the harbingers of a rhetorical evolution. Based on the work of Gregory Ulmer, along with Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe, this evolution expands the work of Plato and Aristotle by overcoming the privileging of mind over body and abstract reasoning over concrete physical experience. As such hierarchies become turned on their heads, a renewed emphasis on materiality and embodiment demands virtual products that stimulate the body. As such, a phenomenon I have named disembodied consumption takes place whereby users' chemical senses can be incited through participation with digital technologies. Through the stimulation of these physical senses, and in turn the connected emotions, today's digital citizens are practicing the rhetorical method referred to by Ulmer as conduction. By examining sites, blogs, and postings that include references to food and flavor, I reveal examples of conduction and show how this method is necessary for the development of well-being, and the defeat of compassion fatigue in digital society.

This dissertation examines the pervasiveness of storytelling in theme parks and establishes the theme park as a distinct narrative medium. It traces the characteristics of theme park storytelling, how it has changed over time, and what makes the medium unique. This was accomplished using a mixed methods approach drawing data from interviews with creative professionals, archival research, fieldwork, and an analysis of more than eight hundred narrative attractions. The survey of narrative attractions revealed the most common narrative expressions to be dark rides and stage shows. Source material tends to be cultural tales (legends, fairy tales) or intellectual properties (generally films). Throughout major periods and world regions, setting, scenes, and visual storytelling are the most ubiquitous narrative devices. Three dozen techniques and technologies are detailed in this project. Significant impetuses for narrative change over time are the advent of technologies, formalization of the industry, explicit discourse on storytelling, formation of design philosophies, and general convergence of media. There are at least a half dozen key distinctions in theme park narratives compared with other mediums: dimensionality, scale, communality, brevity, a combinatory aspect, and a reiterative nature. Also significant is that creative professionals view themselves as storytellers, purposefully design with narrative systems, embed them in spaces, and participate in public dialogue surrounding narrative and design principles. This study was initiated to expand the literature on emerging media and narratives within the Texts and Technology approach and to fill a gap in the scholarship, as designer standpoint is rarely considered in analysis. This is the first large-scale study of storytelling in the global theme park industry. It uses underrepresented creative voices as participants and recognizes their contributions as storytellers. Finally, the project lays the groundwork for future inquiries into theme parks as storytellers and spatial narrative mediums.

Research in writing studies has focused on students who make the traditional transition from high school to first year composition, to the entry level discipline specific courses in their chosen majors (Wardle, 2007, 2009; Sommers and Saltz, 2004; Beaufort, 2007; Carroll, 2002). Very little scholarship addresses those students who "skip" first year composition and find themselves in entry level discipline specific courses classrooms. With three former students, I conduct a case study over the course of eight months via a series of face to face, facetime, skype and email interviews. Each of these students, through earning high test scores in high school, forego first year composition and move directly to entry level discipline specific courses. Using third generation activity theory as a lens (Engeström, 1996, 1999, 2001; Roth and Lee, 2007; Russell, 1995, 1997; Kain and Wardle, 2002), I examine these students' understanding of what they have experienced in high school writing—specifically high school English class—what they think college writing will demand, and finally what, in fact, they find the college writing demands to be. Not only do I find that each of the students felt very prepared for the demands they will encounter, but they remained confident. The study does, however, illuminate unforeseen challenges for both students and those who teach them: student literate lives are incredibly complex, and there is a real potential for a writing gap between formal writing instruction and when students will engage in intensive discipline writing tasks.

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