Browsing by Author "Hausman, Bernice L."

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    1918 Spanish Flu
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Hausman, Bernice L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2013-10-02)
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    A Case for Rhetorical Method: Criticism, Theory, and the Exchange of Jean Baudrillard
    Gogan, Brian James (Virginia Tech, 2011-03-30)
    This dissertation uses the case of Jean Baudrillard to argue that successful critics must consider rhetorical method as it relates to theory. Throughout this dissertation, I follow Edwin Black in using the term rhetorical method to describe the procedures a rhetor uses to guide composition. The project's two main goals are, first, to demonstrate how rhetorical method can serve as a foundation for worthwhile criticism, and, second, to outline a Baudrillardian rhetoric. In order to meet these goals, I perform close readings of Baudrillard's oeuvre alongside a wide range of sources, including critical writings, classical works, analogic photographs, contemporary texts, and recent obituaries. Chapter one introduces my project and the concept of rhetorical method through an anecdote, which compares the later paintings of Andy Warhol to the writings of Jean Baudrillard. Next, I define rhetorical method and distinguish it from the concepts of critical method and rhetorical object. Then, I reveal the importance of rhetorical method in criticism by reviewing three cross-disciplinary interpretations of Baudrillardian rhetoric. I analyze each interpretation according to its argumentative strength, its treatment of rhetorical method, and its engagement with Baudrillard's reputation as a cross-disciplinary, postmodern rhetor. I argue that rhetorical method asks critics to reconsider the foundations of their interpretive claims. To conclude, I analyze one of Baudrillard's own essays that treats Warhol, assessing the degree to which Baudrillard critically engages with Warhol's rhetorical method. Chapter two demonstrates that understanding rhetorical method opens up new understandings of rhetors and their rhetoric, by critically engaging Jean Baudrillard's dominant rhetorical method: exchange. Baudrillardian exchange radically revises the conventional rhetorical paradigm (to the exclusion of audience) and relies upon the perpetual movement between two agonistic theories of language: (1) the materialist theory—appearance, production, meaning-making; (2) the anti-materialist theory—disappearance, seduction, meaning-challenging. Baudrillard metaphorically describes exchange as a two-sided game and often embraces the anti-materialist theory of language in his writing and photography in order to challenge the materialist theory of language. After providing examples from his aphoristic writing and his analogic photography, I show how Baudrillard mobilizes disappearance as a move in service of his rhetorical method by analyzing one of his last works: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? I argue that, in this text, Baudrillard's rhetorical move of disappearance shifts in accordance with the posthumanist turn in thought, but his rhetorical method of exchange remains consistent with his earlier works. Chapter three deploys exchange as a critical method by generalizing and extending this rhetorical method as an interpretive framework that can be applied to texts other than Baudrillard's own. Specifically, I show how Isocrates's Antidosis is successful in its creation of an ambivalent rhetorical space—a space that upends convention, dissolves logics, and ruptures values—and how James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is unsuccessful. In sum, my analysis of these two texts, one classical and one controversial, considers the ability of each text and its surrounding paratexts to challenge the meaning-making system and break with convention. My analysis further positions Baudrillardian rhetoric as a sophistic rhetoric that offers recourse to rhetors, such as Isocrates or Frey, who momentarily occupy the weaker side of the argument. Yet beyond forwarding a strong counterargument, the attention that Baudrillardian exchange pays to value systems proves a framework that is particularly amenable to questions of the public good. Chapter four offers a metacritical commentary on the use of Baudrillardian rhetoric as a critical method as well as on the construction of Baudrillard as a rhetorical theorist. Focusing on the relationship between method and theory in rhetorical criticism, I argue that rhetorical criticism is a productive enterprise and that existing explanations of this enterprise are insufficient because they abandon method. To better explain the method and theory dynamic that produces rhetorical criticism, I turn to Baudrillard's work on the model and the series in The System of Objects. After demonstrating method's affinity with the model and theory's affinity with the series, I argue that the distinction between the model and the series is a rhetorical distinction. With that distinction in mind, I offer a metacritical commentary about the ways in which rhetorical scholars have treated Baudrillard's writing and constructed him as a rhetorical theorist. To conclude my discussion, I turn to Baudrillard's own critical commentary about his rhetoric as it relates to his notion of the simulacrum. Analyzing his discussion of "the rhetoric of simulation" in The Perfect Crime, I argue that Baudrillard was indeed a rhetorical theorist in the most robust sense, since he engages with both theory and method. Chapter five argues that critics should consider rhetorical method to be as important to rhetoric as ethos. To support this argument, I examine two instances of criticism which involved unflattering obituaries and their responses: Jonathan Kandell's 2004 obituary of Jacques Derrida and Carlin Romano's 2007 obituary of Jean Baudrillard. I, first, analyze these obituaries in accordance with a conventional understanding of rhetoric as representation and, second, in accordance with each theorist's rhetorical method. While conventional responses to these obituaries could repudiate them for their negative tones and nasty messages, I contend that both theorists actually sanction these admittedly distasteful texts. In other words, the unconventional approaches of both rhetorical theorists to writing—namely, the Derridian différance and the Baudrillardian fatal strategies—seem to endorse the respective obituaries. I argue that these obituaries further suggest two new models of obituary writing, both of which are grounded in revised understandings of poststructuralist epideictic rhetoric: (1) a Derridian model that exposes the inadequacy of the contextual component of epideictic rhetoric; and, (2) A Baudrillardian model that revises the relationship between epideictic rhetoric and the value contemporary society places upon vitality. In my conclusion, I propose a methodological definition of rhetoric: Rhetoric is the meeting of two methods. As I argue, this definition of rhetoric is not only grounded in the history of rhetorical studies but it also possesses much potential in contemporary times. As contemporary rhetorical studies emerges as an interdisciplinary endeavor, this methodological definition of rhetoric will allow rhetoricians to explain what rhetorical studies actually studies and how those studies are conducted. It will allow rhetorical critics to bracket the questions that forestall the study of rhetoric and explore a variety of methodological interstices. This definition can further imbue rhetorical studies with a research status tied to method that it has so desperately sought at certain historical junctures.
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    Conscientious Object-ion: Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Medical Controversy
    Lawrence, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-12)
    Vaccination is power—power to prevent disease, power to shape populations, power to define sickness and health, and power to compel scientific beliefs into the bodies of people around the globe. It is unsurprising, therefore, that vaccinations have garnered centuries of dissent. Specifically, the conscience—the parent or patient’s perceived right to make vaccination decisions based on personal perceptions of acceptable risks—has been used since vaccination’s inception as a rationale for individual rights to refuse vaccines in the face of the very public health goals that vaccinations aim to achieve. Existing studies of vaccine disputes in medical literature have understood vaccine questions to be a problem of scientific knowledge or literacy, claiming largely that vaccine skepticism arises from a lack of proper comprehension or understanding of the scientific and medical bases for vaccination or statistical evidence proving vaccines are safe and effective. Studies of vaccination controversy in social science, communications, and historical literatures have largely examined the role that alternative notions of risk valuation, sources of trusted health information (such as preferring the advice of friends and neighbors to doctors), or conceptions of uncertainty have played in largely parental decision making about childhood vaccinations. Despite these extensive studies of vaccine sentiment, vaccine skepticism and refusal remains a small, though significant, voice in public debate. This dissertation examines vaccine discourses as object-oriented rhetorics—as rhetorics shaped and defined by the physicality of the vaccine’s operation—as a way of re-conceptualizing the vaccine debate. Using object-oriented theories from computer programming, philosophy, and rhetoric, this research examines the professional and public voices that make up contemporary vaccine controversy. Through three data sets, including interviews with physicians, parent discourses produced on the Internet, and survey responses from young adults, this dissertation observes that vaccines function as objects that have multiple, coexisting operations for different actors across the medical system. Consequently, vaccination controversy can be conceptualized not as accurate versus inaccurate understandings of science or as a conflict of perspectives, but instead as a by-product of multiple ontologies of vaccines at work under competing disease exigencies.
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    Controlling Bodies: Mothers, Adolescents, and Bad Advice
    Canipe, Cayce Leigh (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-24)
    Since the 1990s, medical and media articles containing the word "obesity" inevitably included the word "epidemic" as well. These articles usually pointed to the exponential growth in overweight and obese persons in high-income and low-income countries alike. A recent field of literature called "fat studies" has sought to question this so-called epidemic, bringing to light inconsistencies or down-right falsehoods present in obesity research. While researchers in this field have importantly uncovered many myths surrounding obesity and overweight, examinations of the rhetorical strategies used to approve potentially dangerous weight loss or weight maintenance procedures remain few. This thesis project hopes to cover just a portion of that gap by examining two groups targeted most directly by obesity researchers: women and children. Particularly, this research examines potentially dangerous recommendations made by doctors and the media to pregnant obese women and obese adolescents. Ultimately, this project uncovers dualisms of wrong versus right bodies and fat stigmatization in the "objective" language of health about obesity. This polemic leaves pregnant women and adolescents little choice except either to conform or to face a world of media and medicine that blames these two groups for the "choice" to remain fat.
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    Cultural Encounters in Medicine: (Re)Constituting Traditional Medicine in Taiwan under Colonization, Modernity, and Exchange
    Tsai, Hung-Yin (Virginia Tech, 2021-08-04)
    Today we have many alternative medicines, not a few of which connect back to aboriginal cultures. Some of these alternative medicines were born under the influence of European imperialism, as they were not "alternative" until modern empires and modern medicine came to these distant regions. The present study begins with a broad question: how did conceptions of the relationship between modern Western medicine and traditional local non-Western medicine come to be? To explore the historical origins of these two conceptions, I focus herein on Japanese colonial Taiwan (1895–1945), where modern medicine became dominant while traditional medicine also flourished. My research finds that the historical realities of colonial Taiwan were not reflected in the progressive narrative of medicine. According to this narrative, modern medicine became dominant around the world while traditional medicines were swept into the ash heap of history because only modern medicine was the true, effective science of preventing, diagnosing, and treating physical ailments. The history of colonial Taiwan teaches us a much different lesson: practitioners of traditional medicine there were a significant part of the public health system during the colonial period. For example, they rallied against the plague in the late 19th century, diagnosing and treating patients when antibiotics had yet to be developed. Even so, the island witnessed an institutional medical shift, in which licensed practitioners of modern medicine deified modern medicine and denigrated traditional medicine, labeling the latter "primitive" and "non-medicine." In response, practitioners of traditional medicine produced new narratives aiming to challenge this colonial boundary between medicine and non-medicine. These practitioners' fundamental argument was that traditional medicine, though epistemologically different from modern medicine, was still legitimate medicine. From this effort, we now have the widely held belief today that both modern medicine and traditional medicine are legitimate, but distinct, medicines. This historical outcome of colonial resistance occurred worldwide. In my study, I identify the social, political, and colonial contexts of medical resistance in Japanese Taiwan, revealing their roots in issues related to inequality, distrust, economic affordability, and conceptions of body and health care.
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    Cumberland Plateau Health District 2009-2010 Flu Season Vaccine Study: Final Report
    Marmagas, Susan West; Dannenberg, Clare; Hausman, Bernice L.; Anthony, Elizabeth; Boyer, Stacy Bingham; Fortenberry, Lauren; Lawrence, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2011-08-31)
    The Cumberland Plateau Health District of the Virginia Department of Health commissioned a team of faculty at Virginia Tech in 2011 to conduct a small pilot study of seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccination practices in Far Southwest Virginia. The study was conducted between February and July 2011. The purpose of the study was two-fold: Understand the reasons why two specific populations (parents of elementary school-aged children and 18-25 year olds) chose to vaccinate or not vaccinate for H1N1 and seasonal flu in 2009-10, and Identify the contributing factors (e.g. logistical barriers, intentional reasons, or parental disengagement) that led to a decision to either vaccinate or not vaccinate. The study was conducted in a small rural county with a significant portion of the population living below the poverty line. The area ranks low in Virginia for health outcomes with more than one quarter of residents reporting to be in poor or fair health in nationally tracked county health statistics. The study had three components: a survey of 86 family units in two elementary schools, indepth in-person follow-up interviews with nine families, and a survey of 158 18-25 year-olds in two educational institutions in the region.
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    Cyborg Butterflies, Liminal Medicine: Thyroid Hormone Treatment, 1890-1970
    Crandell, Allison S. (Virginia Tech, 2011-05-03)
    In this thesis, I develop a history of thyroid hormone treatment (THT) that centers on the bodies of animals and women between 1890 and 1970. This history contextualizes the current debate between two forms of THT, desiccated and synthetic. Drawing on the discourses present in biomedical journals, I trace how medical practitioners used the animals and women to demonstrate and make sense of THT's effectiveness over time. As such, I study what Catherine Waldby terms the "biomedical imaginary" or the speculative fabric of scientific thought, to demonstrate how an "ordinary" medical technology crosses and reinforces the conceptions of gender and animality. THT emerged in the 1890s as an organotherapy, or a medicine made from animal organs. Like other organotherapies, general physicians used THT for a wide variety of ailments that had not been scientifically proven through the practices of vivisection or animal experimentation. From its emergence, THT served as a site of tension between scientific researchers and general practitioners. This tension only increased when a synthetic form of THT was invented in the 1920s, when scientific researchers embraced synthetic THT and general practitioners continued using desiccated THT. At the center of the controversy were the productive and subversive relationships of animals and women to biomedical meaning-making. Over the twentieth century, methods of defining THT's effectiveness and purity were defined in opposition to these bodies. These chemical measures combined the specialist and physician's measurement of THT's clinical effectiveness, which led to a preference for synthetic THT.
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    Discussing Sexuality in the English Classroom: Using Bakhtinian Analyses and Positioning Theory to Explore Teacher Talk
    Scott, Brigitte Condon (Virginia Tech, 2013-04-03)
    This dissertation is an examination of the ways English teachers may be complicit in reproducing an abstinence-based sex education discourse in their own classroom practices and discussions of literature. Working from disciplinary research in sex education, sociology, English education, anthropology, and public health, I explore English teachers\' experiences in negotiating the effects of, reactions to, and expectations for discussing sexuality, intimacy, and gender in a school community. Using feminist positioning theory and Bakhtin\'s concepts of dialogism and ventriloquism, I explore how teachers approach, grapple with, contribute to, and leverage dominant institutional discourses in their practices, thereby mediating knowledge, possibilities for conversations, and institutional norms. An amalgam of teaching philosophies, methodologies, and political ideologies underscores teachers\' voicing patterns and discursive positions, helping to further inform an understanding of how contentious social issues are negotiated in the classroom. The agentic discursive positions teachers take up provide insights into teachers as mediating agents within institutional discourses, but not necessarily as change agents of institutional norms.
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    Epideictic Space: Community, Memory, and Future Invention at Civil War Tourist Sites
    Fields, Cynthia Fern (Virginia Tech, 2015-04-26)
    This dissertation examines American Civil War tourist spaces in order to describe how epideictic rhetoric has distinct spatial functions that affect the identity of tourists. Through an analysis of three Civil War spaces in Virginia--Lexington, Appomattox Court House, and the Museum of the Confederacy--I argue epideictic space is a locus of invention that has the performative power to create community, public memory, and a vision of the future through the movement of bodies in space. Through a consubstantial ethos established between space and audience, epideictic creates kairotic space and time by collapsing past, present, and future in order to create a narrative history with which the community can identify. This study traces rhetoric related to the Confederate flag, slavery, nationalism, and reconciliation through an analysis of the Civil War spaces in which these discourses are embodied. I suggest that creating a productive rhetoric of blame starts through connecting blame, such as remembering slavery, to the materiality of space and through creating narratives of responsibility that connect memory to a vision of the future.
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    An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Project Report
    Hausman, Bernice L.; Pencek, Bruce; Ramakrishnan, Naren; Eysenbach, Gunther; Ewing, E. Thomas; Kerr, Kathleen; Gad, Samah (2014-04-07)
    This project research report describes the results of four case studies undertaken as part of Virginia Tech’s “An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Flu Pandemic,” which was funded through the Digging into Data Challenge of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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    Forget Jerusalem: William Faulkner's Hyperreal Novel
    Germana, Michael Joseph (Virginia Tech, 1999-04-14)
    This paper explores the relationality between Modernism and Postmodernism as well as between literature and theory by examining the works of two writers: master novelist William Faulkner, and high priest of Postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard. Specifically, this paper examines Faulkner's eleventh novel—the oft-neglected If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—as a proto-postmodern text which, when examined by the light of Baudrillard's theory of simulacra and simulations, informs the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism. This paper treats each author's work as a lens through which to view the other. The result is both a re-vision of Faulkner's social philosophy and a re-examination of the epistemic break that separates Faulkner's philosophy from that of Baudrillard.
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    Gender Identity and the Family Story: A Critical Analysis
    Benson, Kristen Edith (Virginia Tech, 2008-12-11)
    This research explored how transgender people and their partners experience the process of disclosing their gender identity, experiences of mental health, and how couple and family therapists can be helpful to relationships involving transgender people. The purpose of this study was to better understand transgender relationships to prepare couple and family therapists to work with this population. Participants were seven self-identified transgender people and three of their partners. In-depth interviews were used to explore experiences of transgender people's relationships. Nine themes were identified: decision to disclose, the road to acceptance, perceptions of sexual orientation, change, delineating between purposes for seeking mental health services, belief that therapists are not well-informed about transgender issues, value of well-informed therapists, couple and family therapists should be well-informed, and loved ones understanding of gender identity. This study provides insight into transgender people's relational issues relevant to couple and family therapy. Phenomenological, narrative and feminist lenses provide frameworks to view these findings. Implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.
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    Gender, Politics, and Radioactivity Research in Vienna, 1910-1938
    Rentetzi, Maria (Virginia Tech, 2003-03-25)
    What could it mean to be a physicist specialized in radioactivity in the early 20th century Vienna? More specifically, what could it mean to be a woman experimenter in radioactivity during that time? This dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of the women experimenters of the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna between 1910 and 1938. As one of three leading European Institutes specializing in radioactivity, the Institute had a very strong staff. At a time when there were few women in physics, one third of the Institute's researchers were women. Furthermore, they were not just technicians but were independent researchers who published at about the same rate as their male colleagues. This study accounts for the exceptional constellation of factors that contributed to the unique position of women in Vienna as active experimenters. Three main threads structure this study. One is the role of the civic culture of Vienna and the spatial arrangements specific to the Mediziner-Viertel in establishing the context of the intellectual work of the physicists. A second concerns the ways the Institute's architecture helped to define the scientific activity in its laboratories and to establish the gendered identities of the physicists it housed. The third examines how the social conditions of the Institute influenced the deployment of instrumentation and experimental procedures especially during the Cambridge-Vienna controversy of the 1920s. These threads are unified by their relation to the changing political context during the three contrasting periods in which the story unfolds: a) from the end of the 19th century to the end of the First World War, when new movements, including feminism, Social Democracy, and Christian Socialism, shaped the Viennese political scene, b) the period of Red Vienna, 1919 to 1934, when Social Democrats had control of the City of Vienna, and c) the period from 1934 to the Anschluss in 1938, during which fascists and Nazis seized power in Austria. As I show, the careers of the Institute's women were shaped in good part by the shifting meanings, and the politics, that attached to being a "woman experimenter" in Vienna from 1910 to the beginning of the Second World War.
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    Getting Over the Self: The Decentered Subject and Contemporary Political Theory
    Davis, George V. (Virginia Tech, 2000-05-09)
    Regardless of one's position on what has come to be called postmodern theory, there is no denying that this theoretical perspective is challenging the legitimacy of many of the traditional concepts of political and social theory. Foremost among these challenges is the opposition that postmodern theory pose to any attempt to provide foundational certainty on which subjectivity, our sense of who we are and our place in the world, can be established. This thesis explores this postmodern "decentering" of subjectivity and argues that is a useful insight for contemporary political theory. Using the work of Judith Butler and William Connolly, I argue that a perspective that refuses to assume any foundational premises on which essential subjectivity can be established leads to a more ethical negotiation of difference and, ultimately, to a re-invigorated democratic ethos that allows for multifarious ways of being to be politically recognized.
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    The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Virus: a twenty-year journey of narratives and (in)secure landscapes
    Egert, Philip Rolly (Virginia Tech, 2016-04-16)
    This dissertation is comprised of two manuscripts that explore various contestations and representations of knowledge about the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1virus. In the first manuscript, I explore three narratives that have been produced to describe the 20-year journey of the virus. The journey begins in 1996 when the virus was a singular localized animal virus but then over the next 20 years multiplied its ontological status through a (de)stabilized global network of science and politics that promoted both fears of contagion and politics of otherness. Written by and for powerful actors and institutions in the global North, the narratives focused on technical solutions and outbreak fears. In doing so, the narratives produced policies and practices of biopower that obscured alternative considerations for equity, social justice, and wellbeing for the marginalized groups most directly affected by the H5N1 virus. The second manuscript explores a unique aspect of the H5N1 virus's journey as an emerging infectious disease -- its representation as a potential weapon for bioterrorists. The US government's recent attempt to secure what constitutes H5N1 knowledge produced a global debate between scientists and policy makers over how to balance the nation-state's desire for security with the life science's tradition of openly shared research. Known as the dual-use dilemma, this debate set up binaries of impossible reconciliation between the two groups. This dissertation argues that the dual-use dilemma obscures larger questions of justice. I propose a new concept of justice, knowledge justice, as an alternate more globally inclusive framework for exploring ways out of the dilemma. The concept is premised on the assertion that if knowledge is framed to obscure justice issues, then the justice questions of owning that knowledge can be used as a way out of the dual-use dilemma. Thus, knowledge becomes a question of justice that should be as important to policy makers as more traditional justice considerations of inequities in distribution, recognition, representation, and fairness.
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    Locating Sex: the Rhetorical Contours of Transgender Anti-Discrimination Law
    Collins, Laura Jane (Virginia Tech, 2017-04-21)
    Legislation and litigation aimed at ending discrimination against transgender people has been both critiqued as eliding the structural roots of discrimination and celebrated as an important visibility project that helps to highlight the struggles trans people face. Approaching law as an ongoing interaction where meaning unfolds, I investigate what is being made visible through transgender anti-discrimination law and how it might variously impact trans and gender justice movements in the future. I analyze three different articulations of transgender anti-discrimination law, attending to the rhetorical configurations of sex, identity, and discrimination that emerge in them and the political and ethical implications of those configurations. Ultimately, I argue that this rhetorical mapping complicates how we understand identity to function within anti-discrimination law and, more importantly, that it highlights the ethical possibilities that lurk beneath simple understandings of anti-discrimination law.
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    Making the Maasai Schoolgirl: Developing Modernities on the Margins
    Switzer, Heather D. (Virginia Tech, 2009-08-25)
    In 2000, the United Nations hosted the Millennium Summit, billed as the “largest gathering of world leaders in history” (UN Millennium Project). This delegation defined The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as the primary set of metrics that serve as benchmarks against which development, the world over, is to be measured. Of these eight goals, one focuses specifically on education and four relate to women and girls’ empowerment.This study of identity formations among Maasai schoolgirls in southern Kenya, then, is designed to shed some new theoretical light on life as a target of these goals. In this dissertation, I consider the lived experience of development in the form of formal schooling from the subjective point of view of Maasai primary schoolgirls. The study explores the textured variation of identities within the single social category, “schoolgirl,’ in an effort to uncover the on-the-ground meanings of development imperatives focused on recruiting girls to school, keeping girls in school, and supporting their achievement. Designed as an ethnographic case study focused on the nine government co-ed primary day schools in Keekonyokie Central Location, Ngong Division, Kajiado District, Kenya, interviews were conducted with 98 Maasai girls aged 12-20, enrolled in primary school at the time of the interviews. Additionally, interviews were conducted with some of the schoolgirls’ mothers and teachers, along with 8 secondary schoolgirls from the immediate area (Lood-ariak). Along with ethnographic data, policy documents and overlapping literatures were reviewed in order to ascertain education-as-development imperatives articulated by local, national, and international development institutions. The purpose of the research is an attempt to capture the complex interrelations between formal schooling, multi-scalar development imperatives, and individual everyday life worlds within the changing economic and social context of postcolonial Kenya in the age of globalization. My research suggests that “the schoolgirl” has emerged as a historically new and profoundly salient social category in contemporary Maasai life that has implications for gender dynamics and iii social forms like marriage, family and household structure and maintenance, and labor relations. I argue that the “schoolgirl” as a category has been created by the collusion of local and global discourses that define girls’ education as a singular and primary development imperative. Moreover, Maasai schoolgirls themselves deploy the discourse of development in their use of the schoolgirl category which enables them to negotiate and redefine who a girl is and can be in Maasailand today vis-à-vis education. Based on literature reviews prior to the research in Kenya, I went to Kajiado expecting to hear stories of the problems associated with the schooling imperative combined with the pressures of adolescence as a biosocial process that can make staying in school a perilous passage for rural African girls. While many participants did describe the obstacles they faced in their pursuit of schooling, I also found that nearly every girl my translator and I spoke with marshaled a poignant and pronounced sense of agency in their use of the schoolgirl category as both discursive tool and practical fact. Deployed and employed by schoolgirls and others on their behalf, the schoolgirl category gives Maasai girls unprecedented room to negotiate current realities and future trajectories. This positive finding not withstanding, the theoretical implications of my research also suggest that the schoolgirl subject position has been (and perhaps could have only been) forged in the particular crucible of the market-driven economic development context defined in recent year by neoliberal ideology, and because of this, there are structural limits to the autonomous and independent existence modern development ideology predicts and requires for and of agents. As I argue, the Maasai schoolgirl subject-position is made—produced, constructed—by and within an intricate matrix of forces, including the discourse(s) employed and deployed by Maasai schoolgirls themselves about their own circumstances. This exposition of Maasai schoolgirls is embedded in a history, political economy, and a symbolic universe. Therefore, the arguments forwarded here must go beyond the mechanical dissection of discourse; they must illuminate the lived realities, contextualized histories, and meaning systems that are enacted and embodied by the storylines and characters that give shape to the arguments themselves. Thus, the earliest chapters (1-3) are dedicated to Maasai subject formation through Kenyan history along with the paradoxical relationships many Maasai have had with formal schooling through out this history, as well as a broader context for girls’ education in selected Sub-Saharan African contexts. By focusing on African schoolgirls as creators of knowledge around their own experiences and highlighting that experience, this study’s findings contribute to at least two broad literatures: iv 1) the critical feminist theoretical literatures that are concerned with the construction of gendered subjects in late capitalism and 2) critical development literatures (both conceptual and practical) that are concerned with the contradictory processes of development and their gendered, and gendering, impacts. As Chapter 5 and my conclusions suggest, feminist development interventions must squarely account for these contradictions rather than be seduced by reductive rhetoric that empties gender analysis of its critical edge. In so doing, development scholars, local practitioners, and everyday people may be better equipped to confront the real gendered effects of institutional changes based on sex, such as recruiting and retaining more girls in school. My ultimate goal is to expand and localize the working knowledge of gender in development contexts so that we might face the matrix of complexity of life in the development zone and thus, perhaps, craft more reasonable, just, and gender-centered interventions aimed at transformative and positive change for all, not just girls.
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    Negotiating Acceptability of the IUD: Contraceptive Technology, Women's Bodies, and Reproductive Politics
    Takeshita, Chikako (Virginia Tech, 2004-04-30)
    In this dissertation, I deconstruct the commonly held assumption that the intrauterine device (IUD) is an unsafe and/or obsolete contraceptive method that has been used mostly to impose population control on women in developing countries. Simultaneously, I explore the changing meaning of the device over the last 40 years in varying socio-historical contexts. Capitalizing on the analytical tradition of science and technology studies that regards technology as socially constructed, I analyze the IUD as a technology that transformed through a series of material and discursive negotiations. Negotiations over the IUD took place in multiple layers, most notably in the social and political domains that defined the meaning of the contraceptive technology, but also in the domain of science, in which claims about the device's technical features and its relationship with the biological body were made. This work is divided into the examination of four major domains – global population politics, American contraceptive market, American antiabortion politics, and scientific research – within which the IUD took shape both materially and discursively. The historical development of the scientific research and discourse of IUDs are juxtaposed with the prevailing socio-political background to illustrate the intricate relationship between scientific research of contraceptive technology and the politics of fertility control. The final chapter addresses the agency of IUD users, introducing the ways in which women in developing countries have manipulated the IUD to achieve reproductive self-determination.
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    Negotiating Expertise: The Strategies Writing Program Administrators use to Mediate  Disciplinary and Institutional Values
    Beckett, Jessica Marie (Virginia Tech, 2017-04-20)
    A First Year Writing program is an academic unit that manages the curriculum, budget, teaching faculty, and other aspects of writing classes for first year students as part of a university's general education curriculum. Throughout their daily tasks, the directors of these programs must work with the requirements of their institution, must build relationships with their administrators and campus stakeholders, and must work within the mission and values of their institution. However, as higher education becomes increasingly corporatized, these institutional constraints are sometimes at odds with the research, best practices, and theories of language and learning that these program administrators know and use. In this dissertation, I explore the way these differences in institutional situation and research-based practice affect the writing program. After outlining the way these inputs interact within the writing program and create a condition of tension, I locate the specific strategies of Requesting, Enriching, Learning, Showcasing, Collaborating, and Aligning as value-based forms of action that program administrators take to navigate this tension in positive ways
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    ‘Poisonous, Filthy, Loathsome, Damnable Stuff’: The Rhetorical Ecology of Vaccination Concern
    Hausman, Bernice L.; Ghebremichael, Mecal; Hayek, Philip; Mack, Erin (Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 2014)
    In this article, we analyze newspaper articles and advertisements mentioning vaccination from 1915 to 1922 and refer to historical studies of vaccination practices and attitudes in the early 20th century in order to assess historical continuities and discontinuities in vaccination concern. In the Progressive Era period, there were a number of themes or features that resonated with contemporary issues and circumstances: 1) fears of vaccine contamination; 2) distrust of medical professionals; 3) resistance to compulsory vaccination; and 4) the local nature of vaccination concern. Such observations help scholars and practitioners understand vaccine skepticism as longstanding, locally situated, and linked to the sociocultural contexts in which vaccination occurs and is mandated for particular segments of the population. A rhetorical approach offers a way to understand how discourses are engaged and mobilized for particular purposes in historical contexts. Historically situating vaccine hesitancy and addressing its articulation with a particular rhetorical ecology offers scholars and practitioners a robust understanding of vaccination concerns that can, and should, influence current approaches to vaccination skepticism.