Communications

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4907

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Core-Periphery Value Dynamics in Peer Production Community Systems
(2026-04-20) Ross, Mercedes; Hill, Benjamin Mako
Peer production communities generate much of the world’s sharedknowledge through decentralized collaboration among contributors with varying levels of participation. This study addresses a foundational question: Who provides value in these environments, and what kinds of value do different contributor groups offer? I examine how changes in core and peripheral membership influence knowledge production, and how peer production systems function when either group is diminished or absent. I analyze a natural experiment created by the 2012 split between Wikitravel andWikivoyage, which produced two communities with contrasting contributor structures: one that retained a strong core but a smaller periphery, and another that retained a large periphery but lost most core of its contributors. Using difference-in-differences models applied to article-level data, I compared long-term changes in information production (article length) and polish (structured listing tags). The results show that Wikivoyage experienced faster sustained growth in both information and polish after the split, while Wikitravel grew more slowly despite continued peripheral participation. These findings suggest that core contributors play a central role in coordinating and sustaining long-term knowledge production, while peripheral contributions alone are insufficient to support comparable growth.
Rethinking Openness: Public Visibility and Restricted Participation in Women-Only Online Communities
(2026-02-05) Tang, Ran; Mako Hill, Benjamin
While openness is often treated as a single construct in research on online communities and feminist scholarship, we argue that this framing collapses two distinct dimensions: visibility, or whether the public can observe a community's content, and open participation, or who is permitted to participate and contribute. Drawing on interviews with moderators in women-only online communities on Douban, this paper examines how community leaders shape participation structures to effectively manage highly visible spaces. We show how these groups sustain a high level of visibility to amplify women's voices and feminist ideas, and restrict participation to maintain solidarity and safety. The analysis demonstrates that openness is an ongoing process in which communities continually weigh benefits against the risks of being open and adjust their openness in response to changing external risks and internal dynamics. Reconceptualizing openness as multidimensional provides a clearer framework for understanding how marginalized communities navigate competing needs in shifting environments.
"The crown is heavy": A textual analysis of masculine ritual aggression in the Kendrick v. Drake Hip Hop beef
(2025-10-02) Allen, Joel D.; Tounsel, Timeka N
Using a textual analysis to examine the Kendrick Lamar - Drake beef as a case study of ritualized aggression in Hip Hop, this essay analyzes how artists perform, negotiate, and challenge racialized and socially privileged masculine forms. This research analyzes diss tracks, media discourse, and audience interactions to make meaning of the racial and gender politics present in the Kendrick v. Drake rivalry. The study interprets Kendrick's performance of Black masculinity as adhering to hegemonic expressions typical in Hip Hop, emphasizing cultural authority and lyrical dominance. Kendrick's approach contrasts against Drake's hybrid forms of masculinity that subvert established aesthetics, while strategically incorporating machismo displays. Ultimately, this essay advances that ritual aggression through Hip Hop beef – as seen in the case of Kendrick v. Drake – is a practice whereby audiences validate performances of contemporary Black masculinities, privileging select identifying portrayals over others.
Listening Between the Lines: Dialogic Listening in Transracial Adoptive Families
(2025-10-02) Rosenboom, Helen Lee; Joseph, Ralina
This article asserts that dialogic listening is an effective skill for the co-creation of understanding and connection within transracial adoptive family units. I analyze and explore this listening style within the parameters of a case study. This case study dissects a conversation observed between a twenty-six-year-old black man and his eighty-one-year-old adoptive white father regarding topics surrounding identity and racial negotiation. The dialogue from this interaction creates the perfect opportunity to explore how the concept of Dialogic listening is essential in listening through difference. Dialogic listening calls for open-mindedness and mutual respect. It also emphasizes deep engagement where all parties not only work to understand the context, but the emotions and experiences behind those contexts. Many adoptive families face unique communication challenges such as cultural, racial, and intergenerational differences can be amplified as the children begin to question what it means to discover their identities outside of their adoptive family unit. In many of these situations the adoptive parents and children, especially around social issues and identity, encounter exchanges that are complex and emotionally charged. Dialogic listening allows the family members to move from basic level understanding to engaging with the deeper narratives that shape their views.
Online Communities’ Sensitivity to Unexpected Information: The Roles of Governance and "Cross-talk"
(2025-08-01) Lin, Haomin; Hill, Benjamin Mako BMH
To stay on-topic, online communities exclude unexpected information, i.e., content they have no prior knowledge of, whose on-topicness is uncertain. However, unexpected information is valuable because it can enhance community members’ understanding of the information and drive online communities to explore novel topics that enrich their discussions. Of course, online communities vary in their sensitivity to unexpected information. Utilizing a dataset comprising discussions in 3,238 active communities on Reddit, this study investigates the effects of online communities’ formal and informal structures on communities’ sensitivity to unexpected information. The results indicate a negative association between formal structures represented by community governance and sensitivity to unexpected information, while showing a generally positive relationship between informal structures represented by "cross-talk" (i.e., conversations within a discussion that exclude the initiator of the discussion) and sensitivity. The findings uncover how cross-talk and community governance correlate with online communities' sensitivity to unexpected information, illuminating the effects of the informal and formal structures of online communities.
Elephant and Wild Rice: Bringing Rhetorics of Materiality into Judicial Spaces
(2025-08-01) Lynch, KC; Harold, Christine
Rhetorics of new materialism have articulated an awareness that humans are not alone or centered in their interests and behaviors, and that possession of this worldview makes us accountable to nonhuman entities and things. Past scholarship on new materialism has focused on the necessity and development of such awareness; I take this to be a first move—an epistemic condition for moral action. For the rhetoric of materiality to fulfill its ethical responsibility, we must act through advocating for, and in consideration of, nonhumans. One way to do so is by advocating for nonhumans in court. Despite being traditionally conservative in their rhetoric, legal spaces and actors are producing discursive openings for new materialist awareness to inform jurisprudential philosophy, decision making, and action. Using close reading, I analyze rhetorical artifacts from two cases that involve new materialist rhetorics. The first is Nonhuman Rights Project v. Breheny (2022), in which a nonprofit animal rights organization argues for Happy, an elephant, to be transferred from the Bronx Zoo to an elephant sanctuary. Happy’s advocates argue for her transfer under habeas corpus. The New York Court of Appeals rules against Happy’s release, reasoning that habeas corpus applies only to humans. The second case is Manoomin v. Minnesota DNR (2021), in which Chippewa Anishinaabe peoples argue against the Minnesota Department of Natural resources granting a permit for a pipeline construction project to drain five billion gallons of water from an area adjacent to Tribal lands. Manoomin is a wild rice that grows on water, and its wellbeing is inextricable from that of Anishinaabe peoples. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals ultimately ruled against Manoomin because of the location of water-taking was outside the boundary line of Tribal lands. This project begins to bridge the scholarly gap between rhetoric of materiality and jurisprudence, demonstrates how public understanding of materiality is moving into legal spaces, provides examples of how to analyze legal artifacts for discursive openings for rhetoric of materiality, and contributes new materialist scholarship by moving it from description of necessary awareness to ethical and legal action.
Who Are We to Argue? How Conservative Media Mobilize Identity in Science-Hostile Discourse
(2025-08-01) Cook, Polly Straub; Bennett, W. Lance; Powers, Matthew
Conservative hostility toward the science advocacy of Greta Thunberg and Anthony Fauci has hampered efforts to tackle the crises of climate change and COVID-19. However, the discursive processes that establish and mobilize links between partisan identity and attitudes toward science communication remain poorly understood. This research utilized political discourse analysis on 400 articles from conservative media, 200 of which referenced Thunberg in the title, and 200 of which addressed Fauci. The analysis of these "least similar cases" revealed that conservative media portrayed Fauci and Thunberg as agents of the political left who were using science as a tool to dominate the right in a populist, binary struggle over which group should embody American identity. In both instances, conservative media leveraged aspects of conservative identity to morally justify rejecting the messaging of Thunberg and Fauci. While most conservative content avoided direct engagement with the science advocated by Thunberg and Fauci, a subset that did represented conservative identity as respectful of scientific expertise. I describe a discursive method of justifying the rejection of the work of experts while avowing respect for science as an "epistemology of moral discernment," in which conservatives present the moral character of a science communicator as a criterion for assessing claims of truth. I conclude that "selective science hostility discourse" is best understood as a strategy for morally legitimizing politically motivated rejection of the truth claims and policy recommendations of science communicators.
Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces
(2025-08-01) Tosaya, Lando; Joseph, Ralina L
University of Washington Abstract Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces Lando Tosaya Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Ralina L. Joseph Department of Communication Black Femme Cosplay: Navigating Identity, Creativity, and Cultural Representation in Fandom Spaces explores the transformative power of cosplay as a site of identity formation, resistance, and community-building for Black femme-presenting individuals. Through an interdisciplinary framework that draws on Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism, critical media studies, and cultural performance theory, I examine how Black femme cosplayers navigate hypervisibility, racialized exclusion, and gendered stereotypes in fan culture while asserting agency, visibility, and joy through embodied creative expression. Using a hybrid ethnographic methodology, including participant observation at major and regional comic conventions, in-depth interviews with thirty-nine Black femme cosplayers, and digital ethnography, this study uncovers the ways cosplay becomes a liberatory praxis for participants marginalized within both society and fan spaces. I argue that Black femme cosplay is not simply aesthetic mimicry or fandom engagement; it is a deliberate and radical reimagining of self and world, grounded in cultural resistance and speculative possibility. By tracing the history of cosplay and its intersections with racial representation, I contextualize how Black femmes disrupt the normative whiteness of fandom through racebending, genderbending, and Afrofuturist reinterpretations of canonical characters. Their artistic practices reveal an affective labor that reclaims narratives historically used to stereotype and marginalize Black women. Drawing on the legacy of speculative fiction and the evolving tenets of Afrofuturism, this dissertation positions cosplay as a critical cultural site where Black femme participants project futures in which they are not only visible but central, powerful, and limitless. This work contributes to conversations in communication, media, and cultural studies by affirming the intellectual and creative labor of Black femme cosplayers. It challenges dominant structures in fandom and academia by centering community-based knowledge, multimodal storytelling, and lived experience. This dissertation contends that cosplay, for Black femmes, is not merely play, it is a profound form of freedom work, a visual archive of self-authorship, and a radical assertion of joy in the face of systemic exclusion.
Ties with Thais? Chinese Media Expats and China’s Soft Power Footprint in Thailand
(2025-08-01) Wang, Hai; Powers, Matthew
This dissertation investigates China’s global media expansion through a qualitative study of Chinese expatriate journalists stationed in Thailand. Moving beyond top-down narratives that portray these journalists as mere instruments of China’s soft power, this research centers their lived experiences, professional aspirations, and everyday negotiations at the intersection of media practice and geopolitical mission. Drawing on four months of fieldwork in Bangkok and Beijing in 2023, the study employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of illusio to understand how Chinese journalists construct meaning in their expat work in Thailand. The three empirical chapters respectively examine journalists’ job attractions, their everyday work, as well as their evolving conceptions of professional excellence. Findings reveal that China’s soft power is enacted not through ideological indoctrination but more through journalists’ self-perceived belief in the job and everyday acts of professional reconciliation—balancing institutional objectives with personal and professional commitments. This bottom-up perspective challenges binary frames of state control versus journalistic autonomy and offers a sociological account of how Chinese soft power is negotiated and enacted on the ground, thus making it possible to better assess its strengths and limits. These findings also highlight the human dynamics behind China’s global media presence and the contingent nature of journalistic agency within evolving geopolitical projects.
Embodied Dialogic Love: How Restorative Justice Facilitators Perceive Power and Offer Meaningful Disruptions
(2025-08-01) Irwin, Laura; Joseph, Ralina
As Restorative Justice (RJ) programs emerge throughout the U.S. as alternatives to the Western adjudication system, I examine an understudied yet impactful element of RJ: facilitators. RJ itself is a framework rooted in Indigenous worldviews to reveal intersectionality in our relationships especially after a harm has occurred in order to restore harmony and pursue justice in the community. Nevertheless, when situated within or in partnership with the domination systems of the U.S. that intersectionally oppress such as the criminal-legal system, significant tensions emerge. RJ facilitators are a locus of sociopolitical and institutional frames whose positionality and role are not only a unique, understudied perspective from which to critically examine the relationship between RJ programs and state institutions but also can interrupt historically oppressive power dynamics. This dissertation examines how RJ facilitators navigate the complexities of power, identity, and institutions to create dialoguing environments focused on self-determined healing. Through in-depth interviews with 23 RJ facilitators across the U.S., I investigated how facilitators conceptualized themselves and RJ in relation to power. From the data and through women of color feminist and grounded theory analysis, a grounded framework emerged to conceptualize the localized practices and perceptions of RJ facilitators: Embodied Dialogic Love (EDL). This framework provided an understanding of how facilitators engage with their own identities and situate themselves in relation to power through RJ processes and programs. Ultimately, I argue that Embodied Dialogic Love is a reflexive and communicative framework practiced by restorative justice facilitators that guides how they create meaningful disruptions to craft healing environments while navigating complex tensions they face when addressing systems of power. Facilitators adopting an EDL framework demonstrated an orientation to care for others and centralized the needs of the parties, meaning facilitators also held a heightened awareness, understanding, and curiosity for their own embodied social identities and the ways in which their social location and historic institutional power and relationships impacted their work. Facilitators communicated embodied love by co-creating a dialogic environment where they sought to empower parties to pursue healing while also interrupting institutional power and navigating tensions. By conceptualizing RJ and RJ facilitator practices and perceptions through EDL, this project contributes to larger discourses on social change (particularly in restorative justice), the future of RJ and its relationship to state institutions, and how facilitators operate as powerful players who interrupt power, co-create dialoguing spaces, and foster collective empowerment for self-determined healing.
Maternal Voices in Times of Change: Centering Motherhood Discourses to Inform Tailored Postpartum Depression Interventions
(2025-08-01) Bertero, Mercedes Guadalupe; Gonzalez, Carmen
This thesis details a study examining the compounded impact of a global pandemic on mothers experiencing postpartum depression (PPD). In 2020, an online cross-sectional mixed-methods survey was conducted with 500 mothers who gave birth within the previous 12 months, with 317 participants meeting clinical criteria for PPD based on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. Participants provided 452 responses to open-ended questions designed to capture the unique challenges of balancing motherhood and mental well-being during COVID-19. Thematic analysis revealed three emergent themes: experiencing fear, experiencing isolation, and lack of resource support. The themes illustrate how crisis contexts exacerbate existing vulnerabilities for new mothers that may hinder access to effective mental health support. Fishbein's (2009) Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction (IMBP) is employed as a conceptual interpretive framework when examining mothers’ accounts to understand how their concerns may inform support-seeking behaviors during high-stress life events. The study’s findings and discussion offer direction for the development of comprehensive interventions that more thoroughly address the multilevel mental health needs of new mothers.
Utter(ing) Unspeakability: Identity, Meaning, and Mediatization in the Greg Haidl Gang Rape Trial
(2013) Lacoste, Monique H.
Between the Steubenville gang rape case, the suicides of several teenage rape victims, and the fatal attack on a young female student in Delhi, contemporary news is full of stories about rape and sexual violence. Different forms of media played substantial roles in each of these cases - as records of the events, as pieces of evidence, as blackmail material, and as an organizing tool and avenue for public outrage. Each of these cases highlights the ongoing problem of rape culture and the complicated nature of representations of sexual violence, while also exposing the power of media as a purveyor of competing discourses, a tool of oppression and violence, and, potentially, an avenue for reclamation. This dissertation investigates media representations of the Greg Haidl gang rape case to show how hegemonic discourses about sexual violence silence sexual assault victims and limit the pursuit of justice. Through an examination of media texts spanning from 2002-2012, this study explores how dominant cultural discourses about rape, innocence, sexuality, and criminality function to construct and constrain understandings of rape. Using a cultural studies framework influenced by feminist theory, critical race theory, geography, and performance theory, this work focuses on examining how the juries in the two Haidl trials “read” the film the perpetrators created of their crime. The study concludes with a short film that “reconstructs” Haidl trial coverage using an artistic praxis influenced by feminist film theory and cultural studies methodology. The film and text explore the idea that dominant discourses of sexual violence construct a subject position for rape victim/survivors that is marked by “unspeakability”. Unspeakability perpetuates the violation of victim/survivors and the dominion of violent and destructive rape narratives. The film suggests that alternative media narratives can provide ways to combat dominant narratives through the expression of more complex and agentic subjectivities. Ultimately, this study argues for the expansion of cultural studies as a form of artistic praxis which might promote new discourses that center the experience of rape victims, provide a way to “speak back” to dominant rape narratives, and generate creative approaches to combatting sexual violence in contemporary culture.
Climate Disinformation Interventions: Negotiating Legitimacy in a Fractured Epistemological Landscape
(2025-05-12) Ma, Luyue; Russell, Adrienne
Climate disinformation poses an increasingly pressing problem, which obstructs public understanding of climate science and collective policy decision making. But research about solutions to climate disinformation is still relatively scarce. This dissertation approaches the problem of climate disinformation as a confluence of social, political, and technological forces that contribute to fractured public consensus on what counts as credible knowledge and who has the legitimacy to produce and represent public knowledge. By focusing on cases of tech-driven disinformation interventions built by various social actors, this research identifies three distinct approaches: scientist-led fact-checking (Climate Central and Climate Feedback), tech entrepreneur-led media literacy (AllSides), and digital platform self-regulation (Facebook). I use in-depth, semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, and ethnography of infrastructure to examine the processes through which these actors employ legitimizing strategies and leverage technology and discusses the implications of these processes on challenges and opportunities for professional journalism. The findings suggest that the issue of legitimacy is central for producing and representing public knowledge about climate change. For actors vying to shape public discourse about climate change, their legitimacy is shaped by distinct cultural ways of knowing and it is constantly contested, negotiated, and adapted to shifting social, political, and technological contexts of climate communication. These diverse epistemological frameworks of negotiating legitimacy provide insights for understanding the shifting dynamics of climate communication, epistemological challenges to repair fractured public consensus on climate change, and potential pathways for addressing climate disinformation. The findings highlight the vital role of journalism in bridging gap between scientific knowledge and public understanding of climate change, exposing fossil-fuel propaganda, and connecting social and environmental justice to the climate crisis. Ultimately, I suggest that effective interventions to climate disinformation requires reimagining institutional arrangements with communities of science, technology, and journalism that incorporate diverse and culturally specific epistemological frameworks.
Identity, Legitimacy, and Voice: Understanding Rule Adoption, Compliance, and Evolution in Online Communities
(2025-01-23) Kiene, Charles; Hill, Benjamin
Online communities have become deeply entangled with 21st century social life, supporting cultural discourse and the production of knowledge and information commons. While much research has focused on the platform-level administration, few have investigated the actual governance practices of the volunteer leaders whose work sustains the millions of online communities. This dissertation explores those practices through the life cycle of online community rules. Through 40 interviews with volunteer leaders from Reddit communities, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse instances, this research investigates the processes and beliefs behind why and how rules are adopted, enforced, and evolve over time. Findings reveal that rules serve multifaceted purposes, including setting behavioral expectations, reinforcing community identity, and signaling legitimacy to external stakeholders. Enforcement challenges often stem from ``grey area'' situations, requiring collaborative sensemaking for consistent rule interpretation, and leaders would often strategically build trust to ensure compliance. Rule changes are influenced by leaders' capacity to address issues and by platform-specific affordances for member feedback. This research advances theories of community governance, content moderation, and institutional change by illustrating the dynamic relationship between leadership decisions, member participation, and the materiality of online community software. Finally, it concludes with implications for designing adaptive sociotechnical systems that support sustainable practices for volunteer-led governance.
Social and Technical Sources of Risk in Sustaining Digital Infrastructure
(2024-10-16) Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako
Significant risks to our shared digital infrastructure---communication systems, servers, and applications---can be identified by examining the social and technical conditions of the communities which produce that infrastructure. Exploration of these production communities reveals the deeply contingent processes of collective action that sustain them---processes that are innovative and powerful but sometimes fragile. As this shared body of digital infrastructure has grown, some crucial pieces have become neglected, leading to <i>underproduction</i>: the phenomenon of highly important, low-quality software packages. Underproduction is a form of what I will call a <i>social production failure</i>, and a substantial source of risk to digital infrastructure that today is used by billions of people. This dissertation is framed around a series of methodological and empirical projects. The first proposes a method for measuring underproduction risk in cross-section and demonstrates the application of that method to the Debian GNU/Linux community. Next, I examine the social and technical conditions of the Debian community and test hypotheses about how these conditions are associated with underproduction. I then develop a method to measure underproduction longitudinally, and apply this method to projects in Debian written using the Python programming language. I close by synthesizing these results with respect to my proposed theory of social production failures, and offer propositions and proposals for future work.
The Political Aesthetics of Black Girl Magic: Self-Representation in Alternative Media
(2024-10-16) Sturgis, Meshell Lea; Joseph, Ralina L.
This dissertation investigates the political potential conjured when Black women represent themselves using alternative media such as comic books, self-made digital productions, and artist books using a method I call “auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphy.” By investigating “Black Girl Magic” (BGM), a popular phrase that describes the scintillating aesthetics of making oneself as a liberatory act, this project emulates the term as an intervention in media studies that approaches theories of communication and the politics of cultural difference by actively centering the experiences of Black women, beginning and ending with the author. I argue that narrative theorizing through alternative visual arts employ transaesthetics that allow Black women to politically represent themselves outside the stereotypes that continue to dominate mainstream media. Drawing on the multi-modal, I utilize textual analysis, curatorial and creative production, as well as (auto)ethnography and community engaged scholarship to reveal how the magic of BGM is often portrayed through a smoke and mirrors metaphor whereby resistance is hegemonically articulated through politics of the visual. In contrast, I propose and this disprove understanding the magic of BGM through the metaphor of witchcraft to dismantle epistemological hierarchies thereby expanding the aesthetics and subsequent political arena of identity representation. Looking beyond appearances, this dissertation asks what politics of resistance sound like, smell like, and feel like. After attempting to describe BGM as flight, or moments of departure, brew, or the materiality of poiesis, and brood as collective actions, affects, and events, I then delve into case studies to further explicate the magic of auto-ethno-bio-mytho-graphic projects. Part one begins with an auteur study of the young actress Amandla Stenberg comparing the constraints of her blockbuster films with the affordances of her independent YouTube videos. The following chapter is a character study of the plus-sized Penny Rolle in the comic Bitch Planet (2015) as cosplayed by two women at a comic convention. Together, these chapters explain moments in which Stenberg and the two cosplayers defy constraints placed on Black women’s subjectivity through a dominance of the visual enacting a politics of self-determination. Part two of the dissertation departs from traditional media studies analysis by presenting my own version of self-representation in an iterative project entitled Which Witch and through a digital curation of my many alternative books, zines, and comics entitled Bookend(ed). In total, I provide analysis of BGM as well as demonstrate the outcomes of embodied BGM through case studies and art making.
When Experts Deny Science: The Rhetorical Performance of Malexpertise
(2024-10-16) Shew, Abbie; Ceccarelli, Leah
Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have been relied upon to offer public health information and guidance to members of the public. Most of these experts speak as representatives of science, and work hard to communicate verified health information, including promoting COVID-19 vaccination as a safe and effective method of disease prevention. However, some so-called experts use their status to deny these same recommendations. When experts deny science, when they make dangerous recommendations including avoiding COVID-19 vaccination, they become a new type of rhetorical figure: the malexpert. Malexperts are experts gone wrong. In this dissertation, I establish a framework for differentiating true expertise from malexpertise by analyzing the anti-COVID-vaccination rhetorics of a group of twelve individuals known as the Disinformation Dozen. By engaging in the method of close reading and rhetorical criticism, my ultimate argument is that the identification and subsequent calling-out of malexperts is key to mitigating the effects of COVID-vaccine-related disinformation.
Future Talk: Imagining and (Mis)Using Artificial Intelligence in Human Communication
(2024-10-16) Rich, Kate; Ceccarelli, Leah
This project explores how the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence envisions human communication practices as benefitting from emergent AI technologies. As part of a larger sociotechnical imaginary, individual users, tech companies, and public thinkers produce texts making claims or speculating about the potential of AI that is supposed to enhance or participate in human communication. This dissertation traces these discourses across three case studies involving recent developments in artificial intelligence designed for communication. An AI-powered public speaking app, a robot that teaches emotional communication skills to children, and public responses to the rise of generative AI are put forth as specific instances that offer a glimpse into how AI is increasingly imagined as suitable for communication labor. Through a rhetorical analysis, I investigate how these recent technologies are imagined as intelligent communicators and distinctly machinic entities, rather than mere mimicries of human beings. In the process, I argue, these ideas of what AI could do for human communication also shape societal ideals of useful communication. The assertion that some communication is useful also implies that some forms of communication are useless. While AI may be a relatively new invention, this project examines how these underlying values of usefulness and attitudes towards communication labor rearticulate a long history of normative communication ideals.
The Mistranslation of Rhētorikē: Rereading 462b to 466a of Plato's Gorgias
(2024-09-09) Losoya, Joshua David; Harold, Christine
This dissertation presents a close re-reading of Plato’s Gorgias, 462b to 466a. Contrary to popular belief, the ancient Greeks never spoke of “rhetoric (n.).” In the ancient world, rhētorikos (i.e., “rhetoric”) functioned as an “-ic” suffixed adjective. The ancients described things and people as being “rhetoric (adj.)” in the way we call things “rhetorical,” but they had no concept of “rhetoric (n.)” as an object unto itself. Translators often assume that rhētorikē was always a noun like it is today. This habit generally results in only a minor loss of meaning. Yet in one key passage—462b to 466a—this assumption is of paradigm-shifting significance. Generations of scholars have been told that, from 462b to 466a, the character Socrates calls “rhetoric” a knack-based species of flattery. Yet a close reading of the Greek text demonstrates that translators have been misreading Plato’s nuanced use of the word rhētorikē. The dissertation proposes a revised reading of this passage, in alignment with a forgotten historical precedent. The classical world appears to have read a version of the Gorgias rather different from the translations we have today. This study aims to show how this happened and why it matters. The dissertation argues that a crucial instance of Plato’s wordplay has been overlooked from 462b to 466a. Where English translators place the noun “rhetoric (n.)” there is truly wordplay occurring with the substantive use of the adjectival phrase hē rhētorikē (i.e., “the rhetorical”). Implicit to this phrase’s usage within this passage is a dissociation between two nouns which this phrase might imply: hē rhētorikē (technē) vs. hē rhētorikē (empeiria). Or, in English, “rhetorical (art)” vs. “rhetorical (practice).” Far beyond an interesting nuance added to our understanding of the Gorgias, this dissociation between a “rhetorical art” and a “rhetorical practice” allows us to see a consistent rhetorical theory developed between the Gorgias and the Phaedrus where before scholars often imagined a contradiction. The dissertation begins by considering the adjectival origin of the word “rhetoric” through the ancient Greek signifier rhētorikos. From here it presents evidence of the above wordplay and its significance before outlining the survey of readers throughout antiquity who observed this dissociation between hē rhētorikē technē and hē rhētorikē empeiria. The dissertation closes by considering a revised picture of Plato’s place in the rhetorical tradition afforded by this more nuanced reading of 462b to 466a of the Gorgias.
Unintended Politics: The Prevalence of Partisan Opinion Expression in Incidental Political Discussions
(2024-09-09) Fan, Yibin; Hill, Benjamin Mako B. M.
Political discussion happening in non-political contexts, referred to as incidental political discussion, is abundant in the everyday lives of ordinary people. However, the characteristics of incidental political discussion are still understudied. Analysis of nearly three thousand comments on mass shootings and gun control across both political and non-political communities on Reddit showed that incidental political discussions are more likely to contain partisan opinion expression on the same issue than purposive political discussions. In addition, the level of incivility did not differ between the two kinds of discussions. This study implies that non-political spaces may become more partisan than political ones in reaction to specific news events, and contributes to the scholarship on political discussion and ideological polarization, highlighting the dynamic nature of political discourse in various contexts.

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