This dissertation interrogates the ways in which place-based belongings are constituted through outdoor recreation. By applying material-discursive theories of rhetoric to spaces of outdoor recreation on the Colorado Plateau such as the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort, rock climbing landscapes in the Navajo Nation, adventure mountain biking practices that trace a 19th century stagecoach route, and ultra running trails at Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation and on ancient trails that connect Hopi Villages, and elsewhere, I examine the affective relationships between those activities, landscapes, and cultures. Drawing on spatial and environmental rhetoric and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality, I analyze affective investments in white settler colonialism to argue that such spaces are more than recreational. The framework I have developed to better explain such spaces, Recreational Colonialism, positions outdoor recreation as the new language of colonialism. Recreational Colonialism is both a discourse and a performance that-in many ways explored in this dissertation-connect outdoor recreational discourses to a trifecta of oppressions through which white settler colonialism depends: white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (Universität Hannover, 1990). / Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-282).

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While there is a long history of rhetorical studies that focus on oral and written discourses, the relatively recent trend of studying rhetorical images, materiality, and rhetorical bodies presents a shift toward an expanded perspective on what constitutes texts and what can be considered rhetorical. The study of bodies as rhetorical texts prompts the questions of how language is material and visual in nature. In my dissertation I examine the relationship between rhetoric and the body through Judith Butler's theories of materiality and performativity. Using Butler's theories of performance as a lens, I analyze the rhetoric of plastic and cosmetic surgery and demonstrate the role of performance in the perpetuation of and response to rhetoric of the body. Cosmetic and plastic surgery are performatives in that they not only confer a binding power on the action performed by altering the body through surgical and non-surgical means, but also initiate various citational practices within the field of medicine and in popular culture (through various mediums such as television, magazines, billboards, and websites). These procedures result in images and claims that authorize particular social expectations of beauty, youth, and sexuality.I examine a range of mass media texts related to cosmetic surgery (television shows, magazines, news clips, websites, and films) that portray different normative and deviant performativity of the body. In my research, I include interviews from volunteers in Los Angeles; my analysis involves local individuals' relationships to plastic and cosmetic surgery and their various body performatives in terms of normativity and agency. By comparing global and local perspectives, I argue that media sensationalizes the agent/victim binary in order to sell plastic and cosmetic surgeries, as well as related texts. The local stories serve to counter assumptions about the role of power in plastic surgery, revealing a far more complicated relationship between clients, rhetoric, and the reasons behind their surgeries; the agent/victim binary that is emphasized in mass media fails to capture lived experience and creates a detrimental rhetoric of empowerment.

This dissertation accesses memory and archival studies for inclusion in the discipline of rhetoric and composition in order to study "collective invention" (Bisecker, 125) practices as they occur in memory places, such as that of the archive. I theorize a pedagogy and memory practice for writing studies classrooms and communities by providing an autoethnographic case study across three levels of composition and rhetoric classes and community archives including the Writing After Katrina Archive Project and the Arizona Memory Project, where I explore the links between memory, place, and the process of rhetorical invention. In doing so, I hope to examine the agentive potential for students, emerging scholars, and community partners to reflect on various acts of composing, such as composing ideas, composing writing, and composing knowledge through the study of memory places and the creation of archives. Using the space of the archive as a pedagogical tool, my project seeks to redefine the space and place of the "archive" from that of a dusty space reserved for scholars, to that of a potentially generative location where critical dialogue is organically produced around the acts of what I term, rhetorical (re)invention. Rhetorical (re)invention, like the production of memory, is a social process of meaning of making that can be extrapolated from local resources. In doing so, this project continues the important work of scholars in both memory studies and rhetoric and composition studies in redefining the archive, reframing invention, and positing a pedagogical framework for teaching college writing and rhetorical studies.

In this dissertation, I use ethnographic observations, interviews, personal narrative, and analysis of youth slam poetry in conversation with theories of identification to demonstrate how members of the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam (TYPS) perform, inhabit, and develop a consciousness indicative of coalition and critical inquiry. TYPS poets demonstrate evidence of what I propose as critical latticework, an image and heuristic that brings together identificatory screen-work with rhizomatic and intersectional perspectives on growth and development. Through my analyses of poetry, interviews, and the activities of this youth slam community, I aim to illustrate the value of critical latticework as a perspective that can contribute to altering our perceptions of youth as developing in one direction, with one sense of healthy progression to adulthood. A critical lattice is another way of perceiving the activities of identification that take place in in-between-and-through-spaces, as well as the potential activism and labor occurring in those spaces, which act as more than screens but spaces of growth and significant chaos. I argue that an understanding of critical latticework is transferrable to writing classrooms, offering a practical image with which students of writing can imagine and move with fluidity to generate meaningful discourse and expand their perspectives on identity and writing.

Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship to include rhetoric and composition, applied linguistics, and heritage languages, my dissertation, Negotiated Identities of Second-Generation Vietnamese Heritage Speakers: Implications for the Multilingual Composition Classroom, is a qualitative study that explores how Vietnamese heritage speakers negotiate multiple identities in different social contexts. I define heritage speakers as asymmetrical bilinguals who were raised in a non-English speaking household but whose dominant language is now English. While findings from this study reveal that heritage speakers struggle to claim a linguistic identity because of discrimination from members of different Vietnamese communities, they nonetheless—through reflexive and interactive positioning—resist these communities' discriminatory practices by constructing and negotiating multiple identities that enable them to reimagine themselves as legitimate members of an imagined Vietnamese community. By focusing on speakers' negotiated identities, this dissertation departs from the traditional emphasis in heritage language and composition studies that equate language proficiency with cultural identity. Instead, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of identity formation that not only engages speakers' multiple spheres of belonging but also informs current pedagogical practices that seek to incorporate speakers' heritage languages as linguistic resources in the composition classroom.

This dissertation examines the rhetorical function and social implications of the "dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy"--that is, the popular depiction of young motherhood as the tragic downfall of a woman's life. I employ feminist poststructuralist and visual rhetorical critique to analyze historical and contemporary teenage pregnancy prevention materials as well as journalistic representations of young mothers. Building from this analysis, I argue that the dominant narrative pathologizes teenage mothers, prevents a focus on structures of inequality and poverty, sustains racialized gender ideologies, and encourages practices that perpetuate disparities for pregnant/mothering young women. In addition, this project explores strategies for resisting this discourse. Specifically, I review scholarship that has contested the dominant narrative and identify counter-rhetorical practices that some young mothers use in their published first-person narratives. Finally, drawing on focus groups I conducted with 27 young mothers, I illustrate that visibly young pregnant and parenting women are often publically confronted by strangers because they embody an urgent and much-debated social issue. I offer the concept of "embodied exigence" as a way to understand how discursive and material realities of the body may construct rhetorical situations and how the body may function as a site of constrained agency. Building from rhetorical theories of agency, exigence, and feminist work on the visibility of motherhood, I assert that in moments of embodied exigence, marginalized young mothers may seize the opportunity to resist dominant rhetoric and act as rhetors in their own right.

This project offers an extended inquiry into the ways that multimodality and digitality influence contemporary practices of public memorialization. My project has two primary ambitions. First, I revisit methodologies for analyzing multimodal public memorials. Second, I advocate for public memorials that advance social justice by inviting and protecting a multiplicity of diverse, even competing memory discourses. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the development of public memory studies, spatial rhetorical studies, and multimodal studies. I argue that space, modality, time, lived practices, and marginalized practices must all be addressed to adequately understand how public memorials form discursive networks of power and meaning. This argument is heavily informed by the work of Chicana feminist and decolonial scholars, who contend that socially just history-making uncovers and recovers narratives that have been suppressed or ignored. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze two case studies of multimodal public memorials commemorating September 11, 2001: The Garden of Reflection Memorial in Pennsylvania and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. Chapter 5 offers a methodology for analyzing multimodal public memorials as memory ecologies. I end the project by suggesting several options for deploying multimodality and digitality in public memorials in order to encourage socially just and multivocal memory practices.

This dissertation addresses the rhetoric of deficiency that frames Latina/o students as lacking with regard to education. This dissertation begins by examining the cultural deficit model entrenched in colonial narratives of history that justify unequal access to resources in the US. I argue that the reimagining of the pejorative trope of 'pocho' by reconnecting it with its etymological root pochteca provides a trope of resistance to deficiency rhetoric, and a trope that embodies rhetorical strategies for Latina/o students navigating academic institutions. Additionally, this dissertation furthers the advocacy of culturally relevant reading and writing assignments and practices, while at the same time arguing that the discursive productions responding to culturally relevant writing demonstrate rhetorical strategies. The analysis of a student publication that responds to and integrates dichos provides a site of analysis where students identify rhetorical strategies that help them navigate obstacles related to education. The use of Twitter by a predominantly Latina/o summer bridge program provides an additional site of analysis where the writing of students in digital spaces allows them to perform latinidad, and create support networks that help them succeed in school. The pedagogical chapter of this dissertation analyzes the Arizona House Bill 2281 and the rhetoric that frames the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies program as racist and anti-American; following this analysis come suggestions for incorporating culturally relevant aspects of the TUSD MAS curriculum into rhetoric and composition curriculum.