Browsing by Author "Gerdes, Julie Marie"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Discouraging Truth: Pre-Performance Examinations and Collegiate Student- Athlete Mental Health
    Ballowe, Hannah Marie (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-07)
    This study examines how yearly pre-performance examinations (PPEs) for collegiate student-athletes support holistic student-athlete health. Specifically, the study evaluates PPE documents within the ambient environment of intercollegiate athletics and uses ambient rhetoric to demonstrate how PPE documents reify values from the collegiate athletics environment that a student-athlete's physical health and athletic participation is more important than their mental well-being. I argue that the influences of the collegiate athletics environment on the PPE documents inhibits the documents from adequately fulfilling their role of identifying pre-existing health conditions. I highlight three key features of the PPE documents—an underrepresentation of mental health questions, a prioritization of athletic participation, and the use of binary question framing—that do not support student-athlete mental health. These three features on PPE documents discourage student-athletes from being truthful on the documents and guide them to choose between prioritizing their health or their athletics participation. Finally, I connect my scholarship to social justice in technical communication and advocate for the use of ambient rhetoric and the consideration of environment in future rhetoric of health and medicine studies that evaluate institutional medical documents.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Institutional Global Maternal Nutrition Communication: Unblackboxing Rhetorical Power Dynamics in Transnational Spaces
    Ganguly, Priyanka (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-13)
    Grounded at the intersection of rhetorics of health and medicine (RHM), technical and professional communication (TPC), and transnational institutional communication, my study aimed to explore the transnational issues of negotiation and power and (mis)articulations within the realm of global maternal nutrition (MN) communication design. Specifically, I sought to demystify the behind-the-scenes interactions and negotiations among funders (in this case, USAID headquarters), contractors (global health designers for a project called "Advancing Nutrition"), and local partners (Global South program implementers). To achieve this goal, I conducted a rhetorical analysis of twenty-eight publicly available Advancing Nutrition MN artifacts, including program guides, worksheets, toolkits, and multimedia discourses. Additionally, I performed fifteen episodic narrative interviews with key informants from the Advancing Nutrition team, USAID, and local implementing agencies in India, Kyrgyz Republic, and Ghana. Through the theoretical lenses of power as assemblage and articulation, my findings suggested a continual flux of (re)articulation tension within global MN communication design. This tension stemmed from power assemblages—a confluence of historical-political-ideological forces at the production site in the Global North and the rigid socio-cultural framework at the implementation site in the Global South—in transnational content creation spaces. This tension manifested in maternal-child nutrition indicators, temporally bound MN program design, community narratives in local implementation sites, and an emphasis on normative views of women's nutrition. Despite the power differentials among funders, contractors, and implementers, global health designers employed tactical technical communication approaches, including coalitional actions and reconstructive moves, to empower women and mothers in the Global South. Thus I conclude that technical and health communication scholars can help global institutional actors create socially-inclusive communication design and foster intentional community-engaged interventions by both attuning themselves to and exposing globalized power structures in the context of public health document creation.