Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness and radical environmentalism, to figures and statistics, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? Because humans have a need to...
Within the field of science communication, the voices, perspectives, and experiences of the LGBTQ+ community have long been kept at the margins. This has led to a gap in material that recognizes queer individuals and communities as audiences, communicators, and stakeholders in STEM. I address this gap by generating a...
In order to assist WAC/WID practitioners and science writing faculty in incorporating translingual perspectives in disciplinary writing instruction, this study extends translingualism to language practice in the sciences by conducting a corpus study of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant changes across abstracts authored in English, French, and...
Composition scholars who have written about trauma have typically focused on creating classrooms that are conducive to healing and learning. In doing this work, however, they have considered neither how PTSD nor other people’s responses to it can impact one’s perceived rhetoricity in the college classroom. In other words, they...
At This Point, an undergraduate-focused science podcast, works to expand the accessibility of science by exploring topics that, at this point, may seem too complex to understand. This thesis project describes the process of creating At This Point and demonstrates how the podcast fulfills the criteria of effective science communication....
Night is an extraordinary resource. Unlike air, water, or soil, nighttime is a spatio-temporal phenomenon, which leads to many crucial roles. It provides refuge to wildlife species, triggers hormonal and behavioral responses among a wide variety of organisms, and serves as an essential migratory backdrop for species that navigate by...
A 2014 Pew Research poll revealed large gaps between public opinion and scientific opinion over environmental and biomedical issues (Funk and Rainie). Similarly, a number of recent popular books have described a growing public mistrust in scientific expertise (Mooney; Storr; Specter). Why is it, then, that so much of the...
This thesis pursues a flexible understanding and definition of
dis/ability as a broadly and liberally applied mark of stigma. It asks questions that develop a deeper understanding of how disability influences mētis, a knowledge or cunning use of the body. Through this framework of mētis, this thesis explores technologies as...
The common imagining of archives characterizes these spaces as monolithic, hallowed sites of preserved truths, carefully catalogued and stored, static and frozen in history and waiting to be uncovered. My thesis works to dispel this myth and identify rhetorical elements of the archive’s structure in order to assess how the...
This thesis complicates the traditional associations between authorship and alphabetic composition within the comics medium and examines how the contributions of line artists and writers differ and may alter an audience's perceptions of the medium. As a fundamentally multimodal and collaborative work, the popular superhero comic muddies authorial claims and...