VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Sano-Franchini, Jennifer"

Browsing by Author "Sano-Franchini, Jennifer"

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Communicating Performance: First-Year Writing Syllabi as Rhetorical Contact Zones
Sederstrom, Olivia Marie (Virginia Tech, 2019-07-03)
Syllabi are an integral part of any college experience and an understanding for how the genre functions on a rhetorical level is an under-researched area in the field of higher education. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis—looking at language and genre structures—I gathered a selection of 25 First-Year Writing syllabi within the Department of English at Virginia Tech to help address this concern of a lack of research. Using qualitative research methods—specifically those dealing with language and genre coding—I worked through my syllabi selection to ascertain how the genre functions rhetorically. Using Mary Louise Pratt's idea of the "contact zone" as well as Rhetorical Genre Theories and Actor-Network Theory, I argue that beginning with an understanding for how the genre of syllabi function rhetorically will also help us understand how the genre can be communicative, in the sense that it sends a message, as well as performative.
Deliberation, Dissent, and Advocacy: A Rhetorical Study of Teachers' Lived Experiences with Education Reform
Garahan, Katie Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-23)
Contemporary K-12 education reform policies have focused heavily on the teaching profession through increased accountability measures and decreased job security. In the rhetoric of contemporary reform, teachers are often praised as heroes capable of overcoming any obstacles and at the same time blamed for the perceived failures of public schools. This dissertation examines the impact of such policies and corresponding representations on the lived experiences of K-12 teachers in North Carolina, specifically highlighting the strategies through which teachers gain rhetorical agency within the discursive space of reform. To do so, I apply an analytical frame of public sphere theory and employ a mixed-methods approach that combines archival methods and fieldwork (e.g. participant observation and interviews). This dissertation argues that teachers' discourses provide alternative narratives to the dominant view that modifying the teaching profession is a cure-all for educational problems. I first develop a history of contemporary education reform in North Carolina and argue that within these discourses, teachers are represented as heroes able to do more work with less pay under increased scrutiny. Then, analyzing images of protest signs collected at the May 16 teacher rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, I argue that teachers rhetorically perform their professional identities as student advocates, champions of public educators, and political dissenters. As such, they dismantle dominant representations of their profession and advance a notion of public education that values collaboration, equitability, and the public good. Last, I examine how teachers negotiate the tension between their goals and the constraints of policy, arguing that contemporary reform undermines teachers' expertise. At the same time, teachers devise strategies to work toward their visions of public education. Such strategies include building relationships, being persistent, de-prioritizing policy, and cultivating community.
Exhibit on Asian America
Fralin, Scott; Nguyen, Quynh; Lian, Joseph; Kim, Michelle; Lumba, Allan E. S.; Phan, Jenna; Sano-Franchini, Jennifer (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-08)
This exhibit was created as an introduction to the history, culture, politics, activism, and social contexts of the experiences of Asian Americans. Especially during Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, we want to emphasize the importance of mapping and understanding our histories—through stories, photos, policies, art, literature— and how they have shaped our experiences as Asian Americans today. This exhibit is split up into 5 themes: histories of inclusion and exclusion; activism; high-stakes topics and current events; culture; and identity. Within these sections, our committee members have curated content that provides a snapshot of progress and development of the Asian American identity, through the lens of that certain theme. Consider reflecting on and defining what the Asian American identity means to you, at the middle table. As you peruse and take in our exhibit, we hope you gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the struggles, experiences, nuances, and realities of our Asian American community. If you are Asian American, we truly hope this exhibit has empowered you to explore deeper within yourself for what it means to be an Asian American. During this month, reflect on our legacies in the US; we do not care to have our experiences, histories, and struggles defined by anyone else but ourselves.
First-Year Writing Teachers' Emotions and Grammar Instruction: A Mixed Methods Study
Franklin, Cheyenne R. (Virginia Tech, 2021-11-08)
This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers' experiences learning grammar impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson and Martha Kolln agree that some knowledge of grammar helps students' rhetorical acuity but not when taught with rules and isolated exercises. CCCC's "Students Rights to Their Own Language" and the work of scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have shed light on the language-identity relationship and the damage that standardization inflicts on a person's sense of self. This pedagogical paradigm has created tension for writing teachers and their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic. Joseph Williams wondered at the rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay "The Phenomenology of Errors." This dissertation builds on Williams' work, suggesting we look to teachers' histories to understand their emotions and find usefulness in these emotions. Using grounded theory, I code six interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their memorable encounters with grammar instruction. I then identify patterns in these stories and the interviewees' practices and compare them against the results of a nation-wide survey of over a hundred first-year writing teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the instruction impacts the learner's sense of self. I trace a connection between these encounters and teachers' feelings of empathy for their students and passion for grammar instruction's reform. I argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers locate points of empathy for their students' experiences of grammars and promote productive conversations about grammar instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that educators of first-year writing teachers implement grammar-focused reflection into their teacher training as a way of leveraging teachers' emotions toward the topic of grammar to facilitate productive conversations about grammar instruction. In the first chapter, I question the impact of teachers' emotional resonances from personal encounters with grammar instruction. I introduce my emotional encounter with grammar instruction and describe the emotional reactions I have encountered when attempting to engage writing teachers in conversations about grammar instruction. After reviewing the project, I situate my work in scholarship on emotions in composition. My findings respond to Joseph Williams' "Phenomenology of Errors" in which he explores why people respond strongly to "grammar errors." My work also contributes to inquiries in teacher training and the use of self reflection as professional development. I suggest that student teachers reflect on their past encounters with grammar to better empathize with their students' experiences. Chapter Two constructs a history of grammar instruction in America, from the 1860s to the present, mid-twenty-first century. Through this review, I show how pedagogical debates and language anxiety have always followed grammar and, depending on the person's skill and class, made it the source of anger, fear, hope, or shame. I highlight the social and educational shifts that formed grammar around the ugly shapes of class and race discrimination, including the East Coast's development, regional dialects, and increased demand for education. Chapter Three details my methods of investigation. Here I explain the rationale behind my study design, which uses surveys and interviews. The interviews provided qualitative details beyond what the heavily structured survey could and allowed teachers to describe their beliefs and experiences in their own words. It was important to collect these first-hand accounts to better understand the internal processes behind teachers' reactions. The survey provided quantitative data with which to identify overarching trends and test theories devised from the interviews. These steps in turn indicated the generalizability of the findings. This chapter also explains my use of Critical Incident Theory to write the survey and interview questions and my use of grounded theory to code and analyze the data. In Chapter Four, I present the results of the nation-wide survey and the six, one-on-one interviews. By comparing responses to different survey questions, (e.g. number of respondents to report having had positive emotions at the time of their experience and now hold negative emotions toward teaching grammar), I determined that the teachers' emotions at the time of their experience did not correlate with any particular teaching practices or feelings toward teaching grammar. However, 72% of all teachers surveyed and 89% of teachers who had "very negative" emotions at the time of their experience reported that their experience has impacted their teaching of grammar. This means grammar studies that hope to change teachers' practices will need to consider how to address teachers' past experiences. Chapter Five is the first of two analysis chapters. By attending to content and word choice of survey and interview responses, I find that the teachers whose stories include evidence of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction tend to show empathy for students' diversity and the negative experiences their students may have had with grammars. Furthermore, most of these teachers spoke of teaching practices they implement to serve multilingual/multidialectal students. Teacher training can benefit from these findings since self-reflection on transformational learning experiences could be used in teacher training to help teachers appreciate the issues surrounding grammars and respond to them with sensitive practices. In Chapter Six, I show how in addition to empathy, teachers with epiphanic encounters also tend to feel passion. I use the term passion to designate heightened emotions, such as anger or excitement, that compel teachers to teach new perspectives on grammars in classes and/or social settings. I find that this emotion is not always pleasant for the teachers experiencing it, but their beliefs in a more equitable teaching of grammars motivates them to spread alternative understandings of writing instruction and grammars' role in it. Additionally, this chapter compares the survey data to the interview data and finds evidence that the pattern of passion exists in this larger sample. This finding strengthens the likelihood that this trend extends to most first-year writing teachers, making grammar-focused reflection a viable tool to motivate new teachers to continue valuable conversations needed to spread new knowledge about grammars. In the final two chapters, I present a lesson plan to be used to prepare student teachers to address grammars in a way that honors students' identities and language rights. This activity has teachers reflect on their emotional encounters with grammar instruction and consider how their students' experiences may be similar or different. The discussion questions push student teachers to dig deep into the complicated and uncomfortable issues surrounding grammar instruction. After the lesson, students should understand the most common debates about grammar instruction and have strategies to teach grammars rhetorically and respectfully.
Making Sense of Digital Content Moderation from the Margins
Fernandes, Margaret Burke (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-10)
This dissertation, Making Sense of Digital Content Moderation from the Margins, examines how content creators who are marginalized by race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and disability understand their experiences of content moderation on the social media platform TikTok. Using critical interface and narrative-based inquiry methods with six marginalized content creators on TikTok, I argue that marginalized creators navigate the opaque content moderation infrastructure of TikTok by drawing on their embodied experiences. The key research questions ask how these content creators interpret TikTok's platform policies and processes through their interactions on the app and how these interpretations influence content creation on TikTok and how creators feel about moderation in the absence of platform transparency about how content is moderated. To answer these questions, I conducted narrative-driven interviews with six TikTok creators and analyzed these stories alongside online testimonials in eight Change.org petitions. My analysis revealed that lack of transparency around TikTok's algorithmic curation and moderation contributes to content creators feeling alienated, exploited, frustrated, and unwelcome on the platform and influences content creators to adapt their content to avoid moderation, oftentimes by self-censoring themselves and aspects of their marginalized identities. Over time, the accumulation of content moderation micro-interactions diminishes the ability of marginalized content creators to trust content moderation processes. My analysis also shows how TikTok's user experience design and opaque content moderation practices contribute to an affective platform environment in which creators are compelled to speak out and across creator networks about such gaps in experience and platform policy. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings about content moderation and transparency contribute to conversations in writing-related scholarship, especially as it pertains to writing assessment, technical communication, and algorithmic research methodologies.
A Pedagogical Model for Realigning the Priorities in Technical Communication Between Industry and Academia
Lee, Sanglin (Virginia Tech, 2014-05-19)
Although there have been many attempts to mediate the longstanding gap between technical communication academics and practitioners, the field has yet to become a unified community. This study tracks the history of the field to identify the causes of the breach. The goal of this thesis is to assess technical communication's current industry and academic environment based on data collected from interviewing selected academics and practitioners. For my research, I compared my interview findings to the information from my bibliographical research in order to contribute to creating a healthy research-to-practice loop by producing a course syllabus for a senior seminar for the Professional Writing option within Virginia Tech's department of English. This syllabus contains readings, assignments, projects, and industry tests that are meant to help students contribute to bridging the gap between academia and industry by combining the important components from both sides of technical communication. Research indicates that important professional skills for the workplace include knowing how to transform writing into products through topic-based writing, structured authoring, and information typing. Examples of other important professional technical communication skills include search engine optimization and content repurposing. Advanced technical communication-related jobs in industry include content strategist and information architect. Methods of diminishing the gap between academics and practitioners and providing an environment that is conducive to collaborative research include generating awareness among technical communicators about what the other group does, changing the paradigm for research and faculty requirements for technical communication academics, and the two groups collaborating to develop more technical communication-related internships for students.
Reading, Writing, Rhetoric: A Rhetorically Emplaced Study of Writing Education in an Appalachian Region
Brooks, Katie Beth (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-22)
This dissertation, Reading, Writing, Rhetoric: A Rhetorically Emplaced Study of an Appalachian Region, explores the themes of ideology, stereotypes, and rhetorical emplacement through a study of education in Southwest Virginia. In this project, I used two methods of data collection: historical research and interviewing. These two methodologies employed together construct a sweeping scope of Appalachian Virginia's experiences with rhetorical emplacement in relation to educational practices and ideologies by encountering some of the earliest stories told about the region and contemporary accounts of teachers who currently work in Appalachian Virginia. My main research questions ask how stories told about Appalachia have affected educational practices within the region, and to answer that question I sought out the history of the stories told about Appalachia through historical research, then, in order to attend to the present realities of the region, I interviewed high school English teachers who identify as Appalachian and work in Appalachian Virginia high schools. The historical and ethnographic methods I employed in this dissertation study allowed me to understand the circulation and variances of particular stories placed onto and developed within (Hsiung) the Appalachian region by first examining the historical interaction of the region with the stories about the region and then understanding how those narratives exist in the world today. By using grounded qualitative coding, I created codes from the historical data set—the codes were: isolation, language, education, expectations, culture, and literacy—and compared them to the interview transcripts, I conclude that while illiteracy has long been a stereotype of the region and one that Appalachians will likely combat for the foreseeable future, the teachers in my study build their pedagogies to support rhetorical thinking and rhetorical situation.
Rhetoric Beyond the Digital/Physical Divide: The Internet and Digital and Physical Hybridity
Kulak, Andrew Michael (Virginia Tech, 2019-05-10)
In this dissertation, I report findings from three case studies of rhetoric about the internet based on a rhetorical theory of the internet as physical and digital hybrid. I understand digital and physical hybridity as connections between physical and digital objects enabled by the internet that trouble a delineation between digital and physical space. I begin my study by tracing the history of the internet and its relationship with materiality. While the vastness of the internet is not something that can be readily understood, it is something that spreads across space and time, resulting in effects that demand rhetorical response. I describe rhetorics of purification as rhetorical responses to the internet that isolate physical and digital objects and ascribe to these objects different qualities. These rhetorics can be productive in rendering the internet and its effects salient within different discourses, but they can also be limiting in terms of aspects of the internet that they elide. To situate my work, I review literature in the field focused specifically on the emergence of digital rhetoric and its theories, methods, and objects of inquiry. I describe a primary method of rhetorical analysis for locating rhetorical strategies used to account for internet technology in different discourses, with supplementary methods including distant reading and interface analysis. In the first case study, I consider a social media app that leveraged smartphone geolocation technology to situate anonymous online discourse within physical locations and analyze responses to the service and posts on the app. In the second case study, I consider legal decisions in the United States focusing on the rhetorical moves that make internet interactions matter within the context of internet surveillance and privacy rights. In the final case study, I consider online-only writing courses and the impact of online platforms on pedagogy through a procedural interface analysis. In conclusion, I focus on the relevance of these studies to ongoing conversations in digital rhetoric concerning social media, internet privacy, and pedagogy.
The Rhetorical Making of the Asian/Asian American Face: Reading and Writing Asian Eyelids
Sano-Franchini, Jennifer (ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2013-05-01)
In The Rhetorical Making of the Asian/Asian American Face: Reading and Writing Asian Eyelids, I examine representations of East Asian blepharoplasty in online video in order to gain a sense of how cultural values change over time. Drawing on scholarship in and around rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian American rhetoric, cultural studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory alongside qualitative data analysis of approximately fifty videos and the numerous viewer comments that accompany them, this study is a rhetorical analysis of the discourse on East Asian blepharoplasty in online video. These videos--ranging from mass media excerpts and news reports, to journals of healing and recovery, to short lectures on surgeon techniques, to audience commentary--offer insight into how social time is negotiated in the cross-cultural public sphere of YouTube. I do my analysis in two steps, first looking at how rhetors rationalize the decision to get blepharoplasty, and second, examining the temporal logics that ground these rationalizations. As result, I've identified five tropes through which people rationalize double eyelid surgery: racialization, emotionologization, pragmatization, the split between nature and technology, and agency. Moreover, I've identified at least five temporal logics that ground these tropes: progress, hybridization, timelessness, efficiency, and desire. Using these two sets of findings I build a framework for the analysis, production and organization of multimodal representations of bodies.
Seizing the Initiative: Rhetorical Implications of US Army Doctrine
Hayek, Philip (Virginia Tech, 2016-10-05)
Army doctrine imbues the organization and its personnel with characteristics of professionalism. Texts analyzed for this dissertation present the Army professional's demeanor and awareness in terms of an ability to recognize and capitalize on fleeting opportunities. These doctrinal texts show that the Army professional embodies the rhetorical concept of kairos. In rhetoric studies, Kairos is understood to be an independent force that a rhetor must accommodate and also as an ability whereby a rhetor creates an opening for action; both models are rooted in reasoned action. Recent work on bodily rhetorics makes room for an immanent, embodied, and nonrational model of kairos as a kind of instinctual awareness. An analysis of how the notion of professionalism is conveyed in the selected corpus shows that the Army's philosophy of command is communicated in terms of kairos, and offers insight into how the Army professional is taught to recognize and act on opportunity. Army doctrine provides an example of how all three models of kairos function in the education of the Army professional.
Slack, Social Justice, and Online Technical Communication Pedagogy
Sano-Franchini, Jennifer; Jones, Andre M., Jr.; Ganguly, Priyanka; Robertson, Chloe J.; Shafer, Luana J.; Wagnon, Marti; Awotayo, Olayemi; Bronson, Megan (Routledge, 2022-06-14)
This Methodologies and Approaches piece interfaces conversations about social justice pedagogies in technical and professional communication (TPC), Black TPC, and online TPC instruction to discuss the social justice affordances of Slack in online instruction. Drawing on our experiences using Slack within an online graduate course during the COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how Slack supports pedagogical community building and accessibility in online instruction before presenting a framework for assessing instructional technologies in terms of social justice.
Standards, Shame, and Outrage: A Rhetorical History of Sexual Assault and Policy Change in the US Military
Natishan, Georgia Kathryn (Virginia Tech, 2020-08-26)
The purpose of this study is to examine the discourse surrounding sexual assault and policy change in the U.S. military. As rhetoricians continue to embrace public sphere theory, the field has started asking what rhetoric's role is in solving public problems. My research questions were twofold: how do rhetorical processes construct social realities around sexual assault and how have these processes impacted policy change? These questions seek to further examine the rhetorical nature of publics and public spheres, specifically those surrounding the military and its interaction with the civilian public. In order to answer these questions, the case studies herein make use of rhetorical histories, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and public sphere theory. Also integral to these cases is the study of anger as a rhetorical force. The role of anger in this discourse is important, as it informs the narrative that grows out of each case study and it shapes public response to formerly private problems. Rhetoric's intervention in these cases shows the power of policy, language, and the material impact of both. The major guiding principle of my methodology is that institutions are shaped and brought to life through rhetorical processes and that these processes construct social reality inside and out of the institution in question. This dissertation examines public facing documents – memos, press releases, speeches, interviews, and leaked documents – and arranges them chronologically to offer a broader view of the discourse around sexual assault in context. The two case studies examine how the culture reinforced by uniform and fitness policies enact gender-based violence and follow the public responses to these incidents.
Thriving in the Academy: Thai Students' Experiences and Perspectives
Inthajak, Atinut (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-21)
In this dissertation, I investigate how Thai doctoral students adapt to and navigate academic expectations in their nonnative language. Through coded semi-structured interviews with eight participants from six different universities across the U.S., I analyze the lived experiences, stories, and challenges faced by Thai doctoral students in Humanities disciplines as students in Humanities are believed to rely more on writing as a mode of inquiry than students in STEM. I explore how, and to what extent, they cultivated agency to meet the expectations of the academy and how they assimilated into the U.S. academic culture. I initially hypothesized that writing was the most challenging skill, given that composition program and classrooms are virtually nonexistent in Thai curricula and students coming into the U.S. academy from such educational backgrounds would have limited exposure to formal writing instruction. Interestingly, through thematic coding schemes, I found that, while writing was challenging, there were other significant factors impacting their education. In my analysis, I found that students also had to navigate academic reading, participation in active classroom discussions, and acculturation into U.S. academic setting, all of which challenged their learning experiences. I argue in the dissertation that these complex social negotiations, not accounted for in most pedagogical structures in U.S. education, result in inequitable access to curriculum and undo hardships on students. By amplifying the voices of Thai students, this project highlights the ways that Thailand's educational system, deeply entrenched discourses of loyalty to Thailand's monarchy and the Criminal Code Act 112, impacts Thai students' formation and navigation of academic identity while encountering the U.S. Academy.
Towards a Decolonial Haole Rhetoric
Homer, Matthew Jordan (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-14)
This dissertation examines the concept of haole, a Native Hawaiian articulation of whiteness, in two multimodal texts related to the proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna-a-Wākea in Hawai'i. Specifically, I analyze the Aloha 'Aima mural at the University of Hawai'i and the 'Imiloa web interface, as two examples of delinking whiteness through decolonial enactment. Building on this analysis, this project theorizes a decolonial haole rhetoric by redefining the rhetorical character of whiteness from outside a Eurowestern frame. Haole is an example of decolonial enactment because it responds to cultural rhetorics by engaging with the loci of enunciation rather than attending to meaning. Haole rhetoric is a form of whiteness that responds to Hawai'i's specific history of, and resistance to, colonialism. I argue for white settler allyship that works from the rhetorical ground of colonial wounds to counteract the colonial control of meaning. In this dissertation, I have developed a haole methodology that includes the following tenets: 1) any presence of whiteness manifests coloniality; 2) Indigenous knowledges are always taken on their own terms and never through Eurowestern frames of thought 3) the aim is always to inform meaning-making practices for white settlers, as opposed to Indigenous people; and 4) engagement of cultural rhetorics aim of epistemic disobedience, or delinking, from settler logics. Shifting whiteness from communicative identity to inhabiting whiteness as a decolonial enactment manifests whiteness in the peripheries of decolonial futures. An embrace of decolonial haole rhetoric and methodology maintains the colonial history between white settlers and Native Hawaiians, where rather than feigning innocence, white settlers instead consider histories of colonialism as sites on which to build responsible relationalities that may be productive for efforts of decolonization. This project demonstrates how Indigeneity can inform haole epistemological delinking, and how obligations, friendship, and intimacies are forged in colonial situations.
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.
White Memory and the (Counter)Stories We Might Tell
Gray, Katherine Maire (Virginia Tech, 2023-09-05)
White Memory and the (Counter)Stories We Might Tell examines public history narratives to explore how Virginia Tech, a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), tells stories about its relationships with marginalized communities. I ask what we should do with archives that exceed institutional progress narratives. Specifically, I foreground White memory, a process through which (mis)remembering public history creates a network of meaning-making practices that undergird and support hegemonic storytelling and worldmaking. To explore White memory, I constructed two case studies of Virginia Tech public history events. Using queer and decolonial archival methodologies, I practice what Mira Shimabukuro (2015) called "rhetorical attendance"; then, I construct counterstories to call storytellers to account for flattening and compression in progress narratives. First, I examined 1872 Forward, VT's sesquicentennial celebration, held in March 2022. Then, I explored Denim Day Do-Over, a 2019 event in which White memory obscured queer protests. Through juxtaposition, I discovered and highlighted narratives in tension. These tensions make clear the struggle for equity at a PWI and challenge the notion that progress is linear. Successful institutional diversity work with and for marginalized people requires three key characteristics: ongoingness, accountability, and relationship. One-time diversity events are not enough to change the conditions of institutional inequity. Rather, to combat tendencies towards White memory, Virginia Tech must create ongoing, accountable relationships by working in coalitions with marginalized communities. Ultimately, I argue that institutional work with marginalized communities must continue beyond special events to make material, in addition to symbolic, changes.

Browsing by Author "Sano-Franchini, Jennifer"

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