The purpose of this study was to analyze the rhetorical strategies of the Open Convention Movement, a conglomerate of political mavericks who arose during the Democratic Presidential primary campaign of 1980. It consisted of both supporters and antagonists of incumbent President Jimmy Carter, primarily because of opposition to a proposed rule which would have required delegates to the Democratic National Convention to vote, on the first ballot, for the presidential candidate whom they represented in their state-wide primaries.

The 1952 Presidential campaign ushered into national prominence the Democratic nominee, Adlai Ewing Stevenson. His sudden and dramatic emergence as an important factor in world politics was due in part to his unique oratory. Dynamic in style and content, his speeches commanded the rapt attention of the American people for three intense months during which he delivered over two hundred and fifty. Of interest and importance is the new insight into national problems that he gave to the American voter as a result of these orations. The problem is to analyze, through his public addresses before and during the 1952 campaign, the power of his oratory with respect to the enforcement of ideas, and to more fully understand his personality and philosophy.

This study proposes to analyze the qualities of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speeches as determined through a general survey of his speeches and a particular study of those of 1941. As President Roosevelt is considered an effective speaker of the day, a consideration of those qualities of composition, delivery and audience reaction which have contributed to the effectiveness of his speeches should have value. The year 1941 was selected because it was decisive year in the destiny of our country and as such affected his speeches.

This paper explores vilification in the popular counterterrorism show, Fox’s "24." A critical, in-depth analysis of three prominent antagonists from the show illustrates the different ways in which they are vilified. Each of the three characters is examined to understand which type of villain he or she embodies in "24," which of the show’s moral codes the villain affronts, and how he or she is punished or treated as a result. The analysis considers the broadcast of the show’s first six seasons in relation to neoconservative and Christian Right values that characterized the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. It finds that the show’s characterizations of all three villains—an Islamic extremist, a femme fatale, and a shirking bureaucrat—reinforce dominant xenophobic, patriarchal, and hypermasculine values, which underscored the Bush administration’s war on terror.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

In the last several years lists of theater organizations in California newspapers hare grown steadily. This writer asserts a need for study of active amateur and semiprofessional theater groups in California for gaining knowledge and understanding of cultural activities taking place about the Western United States. Such material would help students and adults interested in drama gain information where theaters remain active according to particular tastes. After receiving a list of nonprofessional theater members of American National Theatre and Academy's California regions, theater activity presented itself to be of such quantity within the state that it became necessary to make definite limitations of the research area to do justice with the planned study. The final decision was made for this survey to cover communities surrounding the University of the Pacific's Stockton campus, referred to as Central California.

The growth of interest in drama and the realization of the educational value of dramatics has developed a new place for the college theatre. Pacific Little Theatre was organized eleven years ago to fulfill a definite need and has since grown slowly and steadily into a most active producing unit, serving both school and community. Indeed Pacific Little Theatre can be taken as an excellent specific example of the contribution which can be made to campus and community life by the college aside from its main function as fundamental ground for students in the theatre arts.

This multiphasic study explored the narratives of five first-time Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating during the historic confluence of conflicts in 2020 America. After positioning the liminal 2020 circumstances within an antiracist research lens, the author analyzed, first through grounded theory and then secondarily through poetic inquiry, how these five participants described their protest experiences. The grounded theory phase yielded an overarching theory that first-time protestors experienced a dual process of unsuturing and of calling-out, with three subthemes categorized within each of these two processes. The author moved into analysis with the poetic inquiry phase, crafting poems guided by six subthemes of empathy, silence, permission-seeking, identity, story uncertainty, and direct action, and yielding six total poems produced from participant words. The author concluded that poetic inquiry has promise as a tool toward a functioning antiracist identity, while advising on reflexive antiracist future directions for such work.

The Reagan administration launched a two term campaign to win support for the Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua. The rhetorical war began in secrecy and ended in scandal. With Reagan's reputation as a "great communicator" and the priority he assigned to the Contra cause it seemed surprising to find virtually nothing on the topic in a search of the communication journals through mid 1992. The central research question of this thesis is whether President Reagan used rhetorical strategies and similar depictions to other presidents in his prowar rhetoric against Nicaragua. A common theme of war rhetoric is the dehumanizing of the enemy in order to justify retaliation and to deflect the attention of the audience away from the realities of war. Robert 'vie, using Burke's dramatistic analysis, found over a hundred and fifty years of presidential rhetoric a predictable pattern of justifications for war. He found motives for war arranged in a hierarchy with "rights" as the primary god-term for purpose. Before a textual evaluation this study reviewed the history of the region the role of the rhetor and of the media. 'The data included a computer scan covering all of Reagan's statements on Nicaragua (59,000 words), a brief overview of 45 speeches and a detailed examination of three nationally televised speeches. The television speeches were analyzed in light of the following: a) Rhetorical exigencies surrounding the appeal were researched. b) Key players in the drama and their effect on the rhetoric were reviewed. c) Main arguments and counter-evidence were related to the speeches. d) A metaphoric analysis was conducted with particular emphasis on mega-images. e) Identification strategies in Burkeian terms were applied to the speeches. f) The speeches were subjected to a pentadic analysis to determine ratios and their relationship to motive. g) The effects were reviewed in terms of the press, Congress and polls.

This study focused on the persuasive efforts of Laura Clay (1848-1941) as they represented a particularly southern argument for woman suffrage as opposed to the northern, or National American Woman Suffrage Association, suffrage argument. As a Kentuckian, she believed she understood southern attitudes on the three major issues she encountered during her thirty-two years as a suffragist. The three issues were those of woman's traditional role, the race question, and state versus federal legislation. The arguments of Miss Clay concerning these issues were premised on justice and expediency, which formed the rationale of suffragist rhetoric. Her arguments, tailored to southerners, supported the national rhetorical position by advocating a new role for women equal to the status of men based on the Christian and natural rights doctrines and the changed society caused by industrialization. She argued the race issue by stipulating an educational prerequisite, rather than a color qualification, for female enfranchisement. With her rhetorical skills, she sought to bring her southern audience to embrace the national position on these first two issues. However, she could not accept the national association's decision to push solely for a federal amendment, to the neglect of states rights. Laura Clay's adherence to states rights ultimately set her at odds with the course of the national suffrage association, which she had served as first auditor for sixteen years.