Performative pedagogy combines performance methods and theory with critical pedagogy in an effort to carry out the dual project of social critique and transformation. Performance offers an efficacious means of completing this project by privileging students historicized bodies, by implementing contingent classroom dialogue, and by exposing students to the value embedded in performance risk. In this study, I apply performative pedagogy to an English as a Second Language (ESL) context in response to its problematic pedagogical history. In particular, I argue that Augusto Boals Theatre of the Oppressed practice should be adapted as a method for doing performative ESL pedagogy. Boals practice enlists body-focused performance techniques to encourage participants to investigate their oppressions and rehearse solutions to them. I suggest that performative pedagogy is especially salient for adult students in a community-based ESL environment. Adult ESL students typically include a number of immigrants and refugees to the United States whose efforts to learn English have concrete influences on their respective lives. In this project, I constructed a performative pedagogy within two sites inside a community-based ESL school. First, I devised a performance workshop using Boals image theatre techniques to instigate analysis of students language-based obstacles. I eventually moved to a second site, an intermediate-advanced ESL course, to initiate an explicit performative pedagogy that divided each class meeting into a problem-solving performance section using Boals forum theatre and a structural language section using structural language lectures and grammar drills. My fieldwork suggests that forum theatre, in particular, provides ESL students a means of acquiring communicative competence, particularly in the sociolinguistic and referential senses. Forum theatres efficacy can be seen in its commitment to students lived experiences, its move to address students internally-based language obstacles, and its attention to students bodies as sites of critique and transformation. The value of using Theatre of the Oppressed in an ESL classroom concerns its capacity to particularize language instruction to the concrete areas of language use that students identify as most salient to their lives by creating unique performance spaces within which students assert their voices.

The current study seeks to explore the communication in successful career-induced long distance marriages. Elements examined are relational dialectics, relationship satisfaction, communication satisfaction, feelings of (mis)understanding, couple types, relationship sustenance, imagined interactions, and social support. The current study has three primary contributions: 1) the quantitative exploration of a communication in a growing marital framework, 2) the successful quantification of dialectics, and 3) the overall support for studying long distance marriages. The current study reports data collected from 92 individuals in non-military career-induced long distance marriages. All participants completed an 18-page questionnaire consisting of quantitative measures for the variables listed above, followed by four open-ended questions designed to elicit respondents feelings about the living-apart experience. Findings reflect four primary variables: relationship sustenance, feelings of understanding/misunderstanding, communication satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. Shared tasks as a relationship sustenance strategy successfully predicted feelings of connection, whereas the shared networks sustenance strategy successfully predicted feelings of inclusion and revelation. Feelings of understanding/misunderstanding were significantly related to relationship satisfaction. Seclusion and autonomy-connection were also significantly related to relationship satisfaction, when also considering the frequency of visits during the separation. Communication satisfaction was significantly related to feelings of understanding/misunderstanding, while also significantly related to openness and closedness. Feelings of understanding/misunderstanding were significantly related to openness, closedness, and pre-separation marital length. In addition, relationship sustenance was successfully predicted by feelings of understanding/misunderstanding. These results indicate success of the dialectic measurement beyond reliability. These findings indicate that dialectics do play a role in the relationship satisfaction, communication satisfaction, and feelings of understanding of long distance married couples. Furthermore, the feelings of understanding/misunderstanding scale performed well both as a predictor and outcome variable, indicating a potentially important communication-related variable at work in long distance marriages. Finally, sustenance strategies at work in long distance marriages are significantly related to dialectics and feelings of understanding/misunderstanding. These findings offer a more complete and potentially predictive view of long distance marriages than was previously available.

Imagined interactions (IIs) are a type of social cognition and mental imagery whereby actors imagine an interaction with others for the purposes of planning. Within actual encounters, verbal fluency is a characteristic that contributes to the speaker's credibility. The planning that takes place through imagined dialogues can help a speaker overcome disfluency found in speech. This study shows that improvements in speaking style are also dependent upon the trait of communication apprehension that an individual experiences. Visualization can decrease apprehension levels, thus producing higher verbal fluency. Results from this study indicate planning's influence in the reduction of silent pauses but not vocalized pauses. Finally, the complexity of one's imagined dialogue has been found to play a role in an increase of verbal fluency.

This study uses the methods and discourses of creative/performative writing and formal aesthetics to evoke the visual aesthetic principles exercised and developed by the Bauhaus and its Stage Workshop. It explores the creative connections between visual and written forms that can affect meaning through primary, universal expression and comprehension. First, a graph links creative/performative writing and avant-garde theater concepts with related Bauhaus performance documents. This initial graph contains the key forms of visual and written expression used in the remaining sections. These further areas of inquiry include, an evocative rendering of the multiple and partial histories that include the Bauhaus, an investigation of formal aesthetics and as interpreted by the Bauhaus, and interpretation and investigation of three of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop performances applying written and aesthetic methods aimed at richer analysis. The Bauhaus' development of formal aesthetics, particularly the Stage Workshop performances, provide a dynamic testing ground for how creative/performative writing and formal aesthetics can aid in expression and comprehension of visual artistic works. As both methods and subjects of inquiry, creative/performative writing and formal aesthetics offer a means of stressing the evocative and citational power of creative discourses, by emphasizing a visual/experiential model for scholarly research. The study concludes with a call for further investigation of the power of primary formal aesthetics upon comprehension and expression of experiences that might otherwise lose consensus due to cultural variables.

This study is a metaperformance autoethnography of the Isleno decima singers of Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana. The performance and event of the decima are explored using research techniques including the performance of ethnography. First a basis is provided for the study by presenting a brief historical overview of the Spanish influence in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana. The work of Richard Bauman in Verbal Art as Performance is included in order to key the decima as a performance event. Second, the script, A Tribute to Storytellers: Isleno Decima Singers of Louisiana, performed at Louisiana State University in The HopKins Black Box Theatre, is included to demonstrate the research process of the decima. Third, the study analyzes and interprets the performance of the script in order to explore audience critique and the learning process of performing research as a way of knowing. This study concludes with a performative writing piece addressing my relationship to the study as a member of the Isleno community and scholarly researcher as well as future possibilities of research and performative studies of the Isleno traditions.

There is a need to examine the long term rhetorical strategies of military spokesmen within a democratic state characterized by civilian hegemony. This study uses Kenneth Burke's discussion of cluster analysis to discover the various recurring themes from Chairman to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This form of analysis enabled the researcher to document periodic variances or shifts in emphasis among the four Chairmen whose speeches will be examined. The investigation involved two speeches representative of each of these four distinct periods of the discourse of Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one given to a civilian audience and one given to an audience of military veterans. The snapshots revealed a consistent constraint of talking in the limited space as a subordinate who represents the national security policy decisions of the President. This constraint, seen within each of the four snapshots, indicates a consistent underlying motive to the discourse of each Chairman. Since most organizations go through periodic shifts in their public image, cluster analysis could provide insights into the decline and resurgence of organizations that replace key leaders either on a planned rotation similar to the cycle for the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or due to retirements or even terminations. It may be worthwhile to apply the same method of study to a more loosely structured organization or one in which a leader is given more license to build the authority of his or her office. In many economic, religious and political institutions the leader is not bound to higher authority in a firm statutory manner as he or she is in the military.

Aimed at core problems of contemporary moral rhetoric - pluralistic argument, incommensurable disagreement on ordering terms, and a theoretical move away from essence to relativism - this study is an attempt to restore rhetoric as an art capable of investigating and positing terms of order and being. This restoration relies upon viewing rhetoric as a practice of epistemic mediation between the experiential and language-based knowledge of the local, and the perfected knowledge of the Absolute. I propose characteristically Socratic notions of contingency and ignorance as the bases for this mediated approach. As a recognition of what is unknown and uncertain in relation to the Absolute, contingency and ignorance promote rhetoric as genuine dialogue, an other-recognizing, inclusive, and open-ended practice carried out in the local but aimed at the Perfect. Genuine dialogue allows agents to relationally enact virtue, collapsing virtue and rhetoric together as a craft or techne. The study is structured as an argument against immanent notions of contingency (in historical and political utopianism and progressivism), and a-discursive notions of ignorance, which are demonstrated to violate basic values of dialogue. Concluding remarks focus on the praxis of contingent, ignorant dialogue as enacted in actual policy settings, as well as focusing on future directions and applications.

Gossip occurs in the organization and individuals exposed to these gossip messages must decide how to interpret the gossip. This dissertation explains the definitions and research for gossip, message direction, sex differences, message interpretation, politicalism, and believability. Applying symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory, seven relationships between variables are proposed. The seven hypotheses are tested via a web-based questionnaire that manipulated the message direction and sex of the gossiper and gossip receiver. Two hundred seventy-six full time employees completed instruments measuring gossip believability, purpose, and politicalism. Data were subjected to a MANCOVA, and correlation statistics. Results supported three of the seven hypotheses. Specifically, message direction and sex of the receiver influenced gossip interpretation. Data confirmed a predicted negative relationship between believability and politicalism. Interpretations of results, limitations, implications, and directions for future research are included.

In this study, I document and analyze how I applied Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques in introductory Public Speaking and Interpersonal Communication (IPC) courses. In the first chapter, Boal's democratic praxis is discussed in terms of critical performance pedagogy and Brecht's social aesthetics. I identify the qualitative social scientific method of data collection and analysis I used and base the significance of the study in my testing of TO in non-performance educational contexts and in the integrated communication studies curricula that resulted. In Chapter Two, I summarize Boal's career as an interactive theatre practitioner. My review includes synopses of his practices and the books he wrote. In Chapter Three, I document and discuss the two Boal based assignments I developed for the Public Speaking course. In the first, Boal's newspaper theatre exercises and Gregory Ulmer's "mystory" method are applied to a self-introductory speech assignment. In the second, Boal's "cop in the head" exercises and Joker System are adapted to a group project titled The Persuasive Speech Forum. In Chapter Four, I document and analyze my application of TO to three IPC course assignments. In the first, Boal's concept of Image Theatre informs an assignment in which students show their understanding of IPC concepts of selfhood in a shadow box they create and present. Boal's Invisible Theatre practices are used to test nonverbal norms in the second assignment. In the third, a fusion of Boal's Forum Theatre and Joker System techniques are used by students to investigate interpersonal conflicts and management strategies. In Chapter Five, I summarize the study and my findings, applying myself to the merits, drawbacks and possibilities of the assignments I developed. Lastly, I discuss the role and function of the educator as a Joker figure. The Appendices offer course handouts and representative examples of the students' work which I draw on throughout the study to discuss and evaluate the merits and limitations of the assignments.

This study employs a Burkeian cluster-agon analysis approach to analyze the rhetoric of four members of the Jesus Seminar; namely, Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong as well as that of two of the Jesus Seminars critics; Luke Timothy Johnson and N. Thomas Wright. Specifically, this study sought to discern the orientations or perspectives held by each of the examined rhetors in an effort to locate common ground or similar foundations within two seemingly disparate points of view. In doing so, this study creates a third perspective, or corrective, based on the orthopraxis approach of liberation theology that may be appropriated to dissolve other seemingly intractable rhetorical conflicts that threaten to shut down dialogue in conflicts.