The purpose of this study is to analyze the rhetorics of fear operating in public discourses surrounding metal music. This analysis focuses on how the public rhetorics deploy identity on listener populations through both the mediation and legislation of identities. Specifically, this mediation takes place using both symbols of fear and arguments constructed on potential threats. Texts for analysis in this study include film and television documentaries, newspaper articles, book-length critiques of and scholarship on heavy metal, and transcripts from the U.S. Senate Hearings on Record Labeling. "Heavy metal" and "metal music" are labels that categorize diverse styles of music. While there is no exemplar metal song that accounts for a definition of the genre, the terms have been consistently used in rhetorics of fear. These rhetorical movements produce and deploy deviant identities, depend on the construction of cultural crisis, and generate counter rhetorics of agency for individuals and subcultures. The study moves 1) chronologically through metal history, 2) geographically from the United States to Norway, and 3) contextually through media events that produce the public discourses of identity, crisis, and counter rhetorics. This study charts the rhetorical movements that have created fear within communities, leading to threats of legislation or criminalization of segments of the population.

Injustice continues to be a highly discussed topic in many scholarly disciplines, including rhetoric and law. Scholars in both fields are exploring how language in legal discourse contributes to systematic inequality, discrimination, and unfairness--racial and nonracial. This rise in scholarly interest correlates with civic concern, as there have been many court cases in the last few decades that have captured public and media attention. One of these cases involved Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, two teenage boys who were convicted for murdering three 8-year-old boys. Echols and Baldwin were tried during the late 20th-century satanic panic, a well-documented social phenomenon in which many Americans found themselves jailed for crimes they did not commit. In Echols and Baldwin's case, the prosecution leaned on the rhetorical situation of the satanic panic, convicting the teenagers with hardly any physical evidence, few reliable witnesses, and little proof that either defendant knew the victims. Though the case was later overturned, no claims of prosecutorial misconduct were admitted as justification for a retrial. This thesis analyzes the prosecution's closing arguments with a focus on Burkean pentadic ratios. The prosecution successfully convicts the defendants by claiming that Echols and Baldwin killed the boys to satisfy satanic beliefs, which becomes the pentadic element "purpose." Other pentadic elements are always contained within or paired with this purpose, thus emphasizing and prioritizing the larger rhetorical situation, the ongoing satanic panic, to promote a sense of fear in the jury that ultimately leads them to convict. The thesis concludes by suggesting that courts consider the rhetorical situation outside the courtroom as well as within to protect others against similar miscarriages of justice.

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation explores questions of personal change and the power of narrative with respect to both an individual and to the wider social environment. In chapter one, I explore the connections between the various facets of liminality and agency, with a focus on how it is that people can consciously craft specific ways of being an agent. In chapter two, I explore the nature of disagreements that involve our most fundamental commitments from within the context of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous <i>On Certainty</i>. Wittgenstein was pessimistic that argumentation could help in such cases, yet left it an open question as to whether they could be otherwise resolved. Here, I suggest the practice of storytelling as one strategy to resolve these disagreements. Finally, in chapter 3, I examine recent takes on conspiracy theories that include evaluating conspiracy theories as contrarian claims to secret knowledge as well as highlighting the political function that many conspiracy theories can play. Here, I will develop a claim that is common to both camps: conspiracy theories tell stories. By analyzing the characters and narrative structures at play in conspiracy theories, we can gain a deeper understanding of why conspiracy theorists think they know what they know, why particular conspiracy theories reference certain groups or agents rather than others, and why some tropes appear and reappear in conspiracy theories.</p>

The process of secularization has brought significant changes to the religious landscape in Sweden. The influence of the dominant Lutheran Church has diminished, paving the way for individual belief systems such as Satanism. Secularization has made the mediatization of religion possible, which in turn has anticipated changes in the public representation of religion. Media has played a crucial part in the public representation of Satanism in Sweden, mainly during the 1990s, which created the phenomenon Satanic panic. The Satanic panic spread through media outlets which reported crimes such as church and graveyard vandalisms and connected them to satanists. The panic was in some cases based on actual incidents; however, the cases were often merely rumors. This study examines how Satanism is portrayed in daily press and Religion education textbooks for Upper Secondary school in Sweden. Further, this study analyzes the change in the portrayal in these text types from 1980 to 2020 and investigates whether the secularization process in Sweden has contributed to the potential change. The reason for including textbooks in the study is to compare them to the daily press in order to discover potential differences in their portrayal of the religious movement, which provides a pedagogical aspect as well.