Browsing by Author "Grant, Leonard Francis III"

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    Images of Reintegration: Alternative Visual Rhetorics of the Returning World War II Soldier
    Grant, Leonard Francis III (Virginia Tech, 2015-11)
    During World War II, comic books and movies buoyed the public's spirits and offered hope to combat the uncertainty of a world at war. However, these visual media often did so at the expense of portraying authentic military veterans and the struggles they faced repatriating after WWII. This presentation examines two cases, the comics of Bill Mauldin and John Huston's Let There Be Light, that slipped the boundaries of their genres to portray the unglamorous lives soldiers returned home to. By defying viewers' expectations, these images created powerful visual arguments for greater social opportunities for returning warriors. This presentation offers a rhetorical analysis of the visuals these artists created and reviews how their legacy is being continued today with comics and movies that are designed to help warriors repatriate and the public to understand their needs.
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    Race and/or Reconciliation : Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Veterans in Society
    (Virginia Tech, 2016)
    The Veterans in Society (ViS) research group is proud to present the proceedings of the Third Conference on Veterans in Society: Race and/or Reconciliation, with papers that represent a wide range of research and community engagement, and a focus that speaks to the growth of our work over the past several years.
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    Traumatic Formations and Psychiatric Codifications: A Rhetorical History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
    Grant, Leonard Francis III (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-06)
    Since it was first included in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a medical and cultural phenomenon. Moreover, it has led to the belief that PTSD is a universal aspect of human experience. Traumatic Formations and Psychiatric Codifications: A Rhetorical History of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder challenges this view by examining the rhetorical processes by which PTSD and its predecessor diagnoses were codified. Using critical techniques taken from rhetorical studies, Science and Technology in Society studies, and historiography, this dissertation examines the social, medical, and institutional formations that created the need for psychological trauma to be codified as an actionable psychiatric diagnosis at four specific historical moments, beginning in Victorian England and culminating with the offical codification of PTSD in 1980. By attending to the rhetorical processes of codifying unique post-traumatic illnesses over the course of 150 years, this dissertation argues that post-traumatic illnesses are better understood as dynamic entities that respond to specific social problems. Furthermore, it finds that the diagnoses themselves must conform to the constraints of their day as determined by the institutions (government, military, or disciplinary) that call upon psychiatric medicine to intervene in social problems. Traumatic Formations presents four historical case studies: railway spine in Victorian England, shell shock in World War I, post-Vietnam syndrome in the 1970s, and PTSD in 1980. After introducing the project in the first chapter, Chapter 2 examines how British legal courts in the late ninteenth century called upon physicians to determine whether train accident survivors were entitled to monetary compensation for their psychological injuries. To make psychological trauma legible to legal courts, British physicians codified railway spine as a psychological effect of a physical injury, thus connecting victims' mental problems to the accidents they survived. Chapter 3 analyzes how the shell shock epidemic in World War I ushered in a shift in theoretical understandings of psychological trauma. When psychiatrists located near the frontlines of combat demonstrated that soldiers did not need to be exposed to exploding munitions to manifest the symptoms associated with shell shock, medical professionals and the British military came to understand shell shock as a psychological problem rather than a physical malady. Chapter 4 examines how a small group of antiwar psychiatrists advocated for military veterans who had trouble readjusting to civilian life after fighting in the Vietnam War. They persuaded the American public, the federal government, and mental health clinicians that the veterans' adjustment problems were the result of a new psychological illness called post-Vietnam syndrome. Chapter 5 analyzes how post-Vietnam syndrome become PTSD. In the process of convincing the APA to include PTSD in the 1980 edition of the DSM, many of the unique features of post-Vietnam syndrome were compromised so that the PTSD diagnosis could be applied to people who were traumatized by events other than war.
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    Vaccination Persuasion Online: A Qualitative Study of two Provaccine and two Vaccine Skeptical Websites
    Grant, Leonard Francis III; Hausman, Bernice L.; Cashion, Margaret; Lucchesi, Nicholas; Patel, Kelsey; Roberts, Jonathan (Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2015)
    Current concerns about vaccination resistance often cite the Internet as a source of vaccine controversy. Most academic studies of vaccine resistance online use quantitative methods to describe misinformation on vaccine-skeptical websites. Findings from these studies are useful for categorizing the generic features of these websites, but they do not provide insights into why these websites successfully persuade their viewers. To date, there have been few attempts to understand, qualitatively, the persuasive features of provaccine or vaccine-skeptical websites. The purpose of this research was to examine the persuasive features of provaccine and vaccine-skeptical websites. The qualitative analysis was conducted to generate hypotheses concerning what features of these websites are persuasive to people seeking information about vaccination and vaccine-related practices.