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Writing program administrators (WPAs) work in constant negotiation with institutional forces outside of individual control, where the concerns of infrastructure impact writing programs continuously. In periods of transition, where new WPAs are entering a program, or the institution itself is shifting around the established program of a seasoned WPA, the ability to understand and rhetorically act in concert with one's infrastructure can often determine the success of a writing program. In this dissertation, I conduct a mixed-methods examination of the phenomenon of WPA infrastructure, situating infrastructure as a rhetorical lens for understanding writing program administrators' work as they face moments of transition in their career. Through a combination of meta-analysis of a subcorpus of WPA lore and stimulated recall interviews with current WPAs in the field, I form a picture of the phenomenon of infrastructural rhetoric and promote its use as a holistic lens to rhetorically engage with complex institutional systems. / Doctor of Philosophy / A writing program administrator (WPA) is an individual who oversees, manages, and implements a writing program on a college campus. Whether they are the organizer of a writing center or the administrator for a first-year writing program, often their job is to direct the vision and resources of the college to achieve goals in writing knowledge. Throughout their operations, WPAs must work within the constraints set down by their institution, colleagues, and physical space. However, while WPAs are often well prepared by their training and education to deal with teaching and writing issues, interactions with these surrounding "infrastructural" constraints often leave WPAs feeling blindsided. In this dissertation, I explore moments of WPA breakdown in their engagements with larger institutional forces. I do this both through a detailed examination of a wide range of personal accounts from WPAs, as well as a series of interviews with members of the field. After finding patterns in these breakdowns and gaining a deeper understanding of WPA work, I work within the accounts of these WPAs to conceptualize the term infrastructural rhetoric to understand institutional forces as relational components essential to persuasion.

This dissertation traces the rhetorical history of Virginia Tech's April 16th Memorial from its earliest appearance immediately following the April 16, 2007 shootings up to its present iteration as a permanent memorial on Virginia Tech's campus. Specifically, this study reveals how the April 16th Memorial is a public memory performance that has changed (and continues to change) in its form, function, and significance across time. Based on a data set that includes archival evidence, interview data, and fieldwork, I argue that over the course of its history, the April 16th Memorial has negotiated tensions and fusions between the epideictic and deliberative genres that exist within its bounds. In doing so, the memorial asks audiences to honor and remember the dead while also compelling audiences to deliberate over the social and political issues punctuated by the tragedy. Whereas the epideictic appeals in the memorial aim to reknit the community, the deliberative appeals invite audiences to imagine a better, safer world. By tracing the intersections between these two genres, this study demonstrates how complementary and competing forces in the memorial vie over not only constructions of public memory but also the lessons we are meant to gain from the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. / Doctor of Philosophy / Public memory refers to the shared recollections of history among members of a specific community. Rather than individual memory, public memory is constituted by what communities choose to remember and forget and what gets retold to future generations. Specific artifacts help support the creation of public memory, including archives, museums, monuments, and memorials. Scholars tend to agree that what communities chose to monumentalize in stone often reflects a desire to shape public memory in strategic ways. This dissertation traces the history of the April 16th Memorial at Virginia Tech in order to capture how the commemorative site has influenced (and continues to influence) public memory of the shootings that occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. Using archival evidence, interview data, and fieldnotes collected at the site, I argue that the April 16th Memorial asks visitors to honor and remember the dead while also compelling visitors to deliberate over the kinds of action that might prevent school shootings in the future. This study demonstrates how complementary and competing forces in the memorial vie over not only constructions of public memory but also the lessons we are meant to gain from the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.

Scholars, journalists, and politicians speak frequently about the legitimacy of political institutions; yet there is little known about the precise elements that comprise the concept of legitimacy. I draw from a broad literature across the social sciences to present a coherent, multi-dimensional theory of legitimacy. I advance also a theory of presidential legitimacy rhetoric, arguing that presidents will use legitimacy rhetoric most when prompted by crisis conditions or in precedential contexts which mandate the use of language on institutions' legitimacy. Using text analysis on presidential speeches from 1961-2022, I demonstrate that presidents have indeed used legitimacy rhetoric more frequently during periods of crisis. I find subsequently, with original survey experiment data, that presidential legitimacy rhetoric has a significant impact on public attitudes, though not in the direction of the president's remarks. This dissertation therefore contributes to extant literature on presidential leadership by producing original evidence that presidents are largely defensive and limited actors in the U.S. political system, frequently turning to legitimacy rhetoric to exploit existing political conditions yet nevertheless typically unable to shift public opinion to fit their own views.

<p> As steam-powered industrialization intensified in mid-nineteenth century Britain, the rate and severity of workplace injuries spiked. At the same time, a range of historical dynamics made working class people individually responsible for bearing the effects of industrial injury and carrying on in the aftermath of accidents without support from state or company. By the midcentury, railway accidents were represented as events that put on display the moral character of individual rail workers and widows, rather than &mdash; as in radical rhetorics of previous decades &mdash; the rottenness of state or company bureaucracies. Bearing injury or loss in a reserved manner came to appear as a sign of domestic virtue for working class women and men, though the proper manifestations of this idealized resilience varied by gender. Focusing on dynamics in the railway and nursing sectors, and in the sphere of reproduction, <i>Infrastructures of Injury</i> shows how variously situated working class subjects responded to their conditions of vulnerability over the second half of the nineteenth century. These responses ranged from individualized or family-based self-help initiatives to &mdash; beginning in the 1870s &mdash; strikes, unionization drives, and the looting of company property. Ultimately, this dissertation tells a story about how working class cultural and political practices were remade through the experience of injury and loss.</p>

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This dissertation theorizes and applies what I term revisionary rhetoric, a rhetoric that emerges at the intersection of feminism and revision. I define revisionary rhetoric as a rhetoric of relationship, thereby drawing attention to the fact that all human relationships, including those that exist between readers and writers, enjoy moments of intimacy, closeness, and connection, but they also involve inevitable separation, loss, disappointment, and pain. However, theories and practices of revision within the discipline have focused on a writer's attempts to revise in order to connect with her audience through achieved consensus. The assumption is that to be persuasive writers should revise in order to remove those textual moments that might offend or confuse potential readers. In privileging clarity and connection in our work on revision, I believe we've failed to theorize how readers/writers contend with the inevitable disconnections that permeate their experiences with texts. We can, of course, simply ignore that these moments exist; we can teach our students to delete them from their drafts all in the name of "effective" revision. But to do so sends a troubling message to our students: that when they can't relate to or connect with something they read, they can simply skip it, ignore it, forget about it, and move on. Revisionary rhetoric responds to the reality of disconnection by describing strategies writers can use to make themselves heard as they demonstrate their commitment to listening to others. Such a paradox demands a revisioning of silence as it deconstructs a voice/silence binary, for listening demands participatory silence. After revising silence through three disciplinary contexts, I identify key textual features of revisionary rhetoric--metadiscursivity and intertextuality--and, through an examination of sample texts, I describe how these features reveal the constructed nature of all texts and thereby create gaps, or silences, out of which readers can respond. I specifically analyze the ways in which multigenre texts enact revisionary rhetoric, and I argue for more of them, both in the field and in the classroom, for they demand the kind of rereading that is necessary to practice a relational rhetoric.

This project explores the productive form and function of rhetorics that produce and are produced by the US crisis of migration. Occupying the disciplinary interstices of rhetorical theory, transnational feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, and critical analyses of race, this project presents an analysis of citizenship as defined by DREAMer activism. "DREAMer" is the popular label given to undocumented young activists who initially mobilized in support of the DREAM Act. I analyze multimodal texts from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance's (NIYA) "Bring Them Home" campaign, a DREAMer-led set of actions advocating for migrant belonging, and argue that in addition to their radical possibilities, migrant-rights rhetorics also reify neoliberal discourses of gendered, sexualized, and racialized oppression that sustain the dehumanization of migrants of color in the US. At a time when migration crises are gaining increasing global attention, this project challenges scholars and activists to imagine discourses and practices that avoid reproducing racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppressions. I analyze multimodal texts related to the Dream 9, Dream 30, and Dream 150 actions in which groups of DREAMers who had been deported or left the US on their own accord presented themselves at various US Ports of Entry and asked the US for asylum. Part of NIYA's "Bring the Home" campaign, these unprecedented actions transformed traditional migrant-rights activism by asking for DREAMers to be allowed to "return home," thus, crafting the nation-state as the home in which DREAMers belong. Employing rhetorical analysis, I argue that DREAMer activism helps to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive to migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of belonging, these migrant rhetorics also reinforce neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that legitimize the continued exclusion of migrants of color from the national imaginary.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2004. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This Study investigates how favor asking may be expressed in Xhosa. Both favor asking and requesting are situated in a context, where the meaning of each is necessarily driven by the way the interlocutors interpret each other's speech. Again favor asking and requesting share the same underlying intent in that a speaker tries to get a hearer to do something. People in the working environment, more especially in the educational sector, have lots of projects to do and they are obliged to ask for favors for such projects. In the process of asking for favors, they are faced with a wide choice of strategies to choose from. In this study, the data shows consistent use of request strategies within specific contexts. The results of this study are consistently interpretable in that the more polite is the request for compliance; the greater is the degree of compliance. In Xhosa, unhedged performative and obligation are request strategies with the highest frequency of occurrence. There are also certain strategies in Xhosa that have a low frequency, i.e., imperative, ability, hedged performative, willingness, wishes, permissions and desire. Therefore they are not considered possible compliance strategies in Xhosa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek hoe die verskynsel van guns-vra in Xhosa uitgedruk word. Sowel guns-vra en versoeke word geritueer in 'n konteks, waar die betekenis van elk noodwendig gedryf word waarop die gesprekvoerders mekaar se spraak interpreteer. Guns-vra en verskoning deel dieselfde onderliggende bedoeling daarin dat die spreker poog om die hoorder iets te laat doen. Persone in die werksektor, meer spesifiek die opvoedkundige sektor, het talle take en projekte om uit te voer en hulle het noodwendig talle gunste om te vra vir die doeleindes van hierdie take. In die proses van gunste-vra, het sprekers 'n wye keuse van strategieë om aan te wend. Die data in die studie toon 'n konsekwente gebruik van versoekstrategieë in spesifieke kontekste. Die resultate van hierdie studie is konsekwent interpreteerbaar daarin dat hoe meer beleefd die versoek vir voldoening is, hoe groter is die graad van voldoening. Hierdie studie toon aan dat in Xhosa, ongekwalifiseerde performatief en verpligting die strategieë is wat die hoogste frekwensie van verskyning het. Die studie toon voorts aan dat daar ook bepaalde strategieë in Xhosa is wat 'n lae frekwensie het, naamlik die emperatief, vermoë, gekwalifiseerde performatief, bereidheid, wense, toestemming, en begeerte. Dus word hierdie strategieë nie beskou as moontlike voldoeningstrategieë nie.