Browsing by Subject "Temporality"
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Item Exponential futures : Whig poetry and religious imagination, 1670-1745(2013-05) Stewart, Dustin Donahue; Bertelsen, Lance; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Moore, Lisa; Garrison, James; Haugen, Kristine; Smith, NigelMy dissertation argues that the eighteenth-century Whig writers Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Edward Young, and Mark Akenside remake poetic futurity as they repudiate materialism. Against materialist thinkers who held that souls don’t exist or are inseparable from bodies, the poetry of these English authors sings the freedom of the immortal soul. They far outstrip conventional apologetics, however, by imagining that the soul leaps out of the human body and into new angelic powers. The result is a claim about time: that the soul can separate from the body means for these poets that the future can break from the present. Yet they won’t be patient for newness to come. Reshaping the discourse of enthusiasm, with its promise of ready access to the divine, they also insist that the separated soul’s expansive potential can be claimed for present use. Their verse means to pull futurity’s changes to the present, making available endless possibilities in advance. These writers accordingly complicate familiar scholarly narratives that portray English poetry and theology of their era as oriented to the past. Rowe, Young, and Akenside instead propel souls forward and outward. Their heady visions reflect the Whig writers’ political leanings and their calls for a modern English literary canon that transcends neoclassical values. Although they name Milton as their model and take up his forms and images, they rebrand their hero to conform him to their agenda. The mortalist Milton holds that the souls of the dead can’t persist without bodies: they must wait for a miraculous resurrection to return to consciousness and then God. By refitting Milton’s poetic style to support an attack on materialism, his self-proclaimed successors rein in one aspect of his radical thought even as they amplify a different aspect. In their poems, inspired spirits needn’t stand by for the end of time to be divinized. They already launch into new worlds, communing with other angelic intelligences and exulting in otherworldly passions. The Whig writers offer a far-reaching but surprisingly understudied defense of the poetry they reinvent. They declare that modern religious verse can allow poets and readers to raid the riches of an angelic future.Item Government as work : temporal communication design through genres(2015-05) Ford, Emily Anne; Ballard, Dawna I.; Jarvis, Sharon EThis thesis describes the current research that has been done on governments in communication and opportunities within organizational communication, then offers an example of research that could expand this area of scholarship. The content analysis of U.S. Digital Services' forums on GitHub, a software development website used for open coding projects, investigates communication genres and genre systems through a codebook of genre norms (Im,Yates, & Orlikowski, 2005) to analyze the temporal aspects of communication design as a theoretical perspective and the practical implications of considering time scale in coordination, collaboration, and idea generation. Temporal landmarks led to four specific patterns in forum participation, and the temporal foci of proposed ideas were overwhelmingly in the present. Third, it calls for a new model of communication, one that does not use a process definition of communication.Item Moving in Choctaw time : baseball and the archive in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings : An Indian Baseball Story(2012-05) Lederman, Emily Ann 1985-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Cvetkovich, AnnLeAnne Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), brings together story, theory, performance, and document to create an archive that positions American Indians in the center and foundation of American culture, shifting the meaning of the “All-American Pastime” and reclaiming baseball’s American Indian history and pre-colonial existence. While a student at boarding school, Choctaw time theorist Ezol Day draws a picture of a tree with an eye at its base and six others floating around its seven branches, gazing in multiple directions. She refers to this tree as a part of herself that allows her to see patterns and develop theories of relativity based on Choctaw temporality. I read this image as indicating a particular depth of sight, representative of looking around, beyond, and through colonial archives and histories to form a Choctaw archive, an act that I argue is part of the project of Howe’s text. In this paper, I use the eye tree as a theoretical lens to examine how Choctaw storytelling and temporality can reframe colonial documents so that they tell a different history. Reading through colonial archives demonstrates their instability; in other words, using these documents to see American Indian histories renders clear the narrow construction of colonial narratives. The histories seen through this archive allow a reimagining of the past that impacts the present, as Howe’s novel suggests that engaging with these histories can strengthen a sense of Choctaw identity and nationhood. Miko Kings presents archiving as an active process of creation that has far-reaching implications across time and space.Item Time and technical impressions : exploring the relationships between temporal experience, communication practices, and impression management in the contemporary workplace(2012-08) Inman Ramgolam, Dina; Ballard, Dawna I.The primary goal of this study is to explore the impact of dominant cultural patterns associated with the contemporary workplace on organizational members' experience of time. First, in order to investigate such potential relationships, three temporal factors---varying levels of synchronicity, temporal compression, and temporal expansion---are identified as contemporary dominant cultural patterns. Next, these dominant cultural patterns are isolated to reflect three growing communication practices: multicommunicating, virtual work practices, and primary work location. With a review of the literature, these communication practices are tested with seven dimensions of time (present time perspective, urgency, pace, flexibility, punctuality, separation, and linearity). A secondary goal is to also examine both organizational members' temporal experience and communication practices with the impression management strategy, exemplification. Taken together, each goal and subsequent findings helps to inform our understanding of contemporary communication phenomenon.Item Time out : organizational training for improvisation in lifesaving critial teams(2012-08) Ishak, Andrew Waguih, 1982-; Browning, Larry D.; Ballard, Dawna I.; Stephens, Keri K.; Maxwell, Madeline M.; Ziegler, Jennifer A.Exemplified by fire crews, SWAT teams, and emergency surgical units, critical teams are a subset of action teams whose work is marked by finality, pressure, and potentially fatal outcomes (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). Using communicative and temporal lenses, this study investigates how organizations prime and prepare their embedded critical teams to deal with improvisation. This study explicates how organizations both encourage and discourage improvisation for their embedded critical teams. Throughout the training process, organizations implement a structured yet flexible “roadmap”-type approach to critical team work, an approach that is encapsulated through three training goals. The first goal is to make events routine to members. The second goal is to help members deal with non-routine events. The third goal is to help members understand how to differentiate between what is routine and non-routine. The grounded theory analysis in this study also surfaced three tools that are used within the parameters of the roadmap approach: experience, communicative decision making, and sensemaking. Using Dewey’s (1939, 1958) theory of experience, I introduce a middle-range adapted theory of critical team experience. In this theory, experience and sensemaking are synthesized through communicative decision making to produce decisions, actions, and outcomes in time-limited, specialized, stressful environments. Critical teams have unique temporal patterns that must be considered in any study of their work. Partially based on the nested phase model (Ishak & Ballard, 2012), I also identify three phases of critical team process as critical-interactive, meaning that they are specific to action/critical teams, and they are engaged in by critical teams for the expressed purpose of interaction. These phases are simulation, adaptation, and debriefing. These tools and phases are then placed in the Critical-Action-Response Training Outcomes Grid (CARTOG) to create nine interactions that are useful in implementing a structured yet flexible approach to improvisation in the work of critical teams. Data collection consisted of field observations, semi-structured interviews, and impromptu interviews at work sites. In total, I engaged in 55 hours of field observations at 10 sites. I conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with members of wildland and urban fire crews; emergency medical teams; and tactical teams, including SWAT teams and a bomb squad. I also offer practical implications and future directions for research on the temporal and communicative aspects of critical teams, their parent organizations, and considerations of improvisation in their work.Item Where time & style collide: the Muslim in U.S. discourse(2016-08) Bahrainwala, Lamiyah Zulfiqar; Brummett, Barry, 1951-; Ballard, Dawna; Gunn, Joshua; Jensen, Robert; Shingavi, SnehalThis dissertation explores how the “Muslim problem” is constructed as uniquely urgent and hidden in the United States. The idea of impending Muslim attacks and the stealthy radicalization of Muslims are very real fears in the U.S. today. Sustaining these fears requires the exercise of considerable rhetorical ingenuity, and studying it requires looking beyond explicit anti-Muslim discourse to understand the momentum of this fear. I advocate the use of two new methods to understand this dual construction of “Muslim terrorism” as both urgent and concealed. I develop a temporal framework and a style-based lens to interrogate this construction. Scholarship acknowledges that counterterrorism discourse presents “Muslim terrorism” as urgent enough to justify preemptive measures. This language of urgency and preemption is deeply temporal, but there is little scholarship on the temporal component of anti-Muslim discourse. I apply my temporal framework to examine the coverage of the 2012 Sikh Temple Shooting to understand how temporal language can incite fear of Muslim in discourse completely unrelated to Muslims and Islam. Meanwhile, I apply a stylistic lens to explore the construction of the “moderate” Muslim, who acts as a foil to the hidden, non-American “Muslim terrorist.” The “moderate” Muslim discourse is produced by the status quo rather than U.S. Muslims themselves, and compels particular performances of citizenship from U.S. Muslims. Style mediates these performances of citizenship, and thus I apply my style-based lens to examine three examples of “moderate Muslims.” I examine the 2014 Miss America controversy; the stand-up comedy of Muslim comedian Azhar Usman; and the preaching style of Suhaib Webb, a renowned “moderate” American imam. By considering three case studies, I am able to present a rich analysis of the many performances of Muslim “moderation” and its role in bolstering American exceptionalism. Thus, taken together, my temporal and stylistic approaches explain the momentum of fear towards Muslims in the U.S. and their role in bolstering American national identity.