The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring:" An Analysis of the Visual, the Embodied, and the Textual Rhetorics of the Karama Revolution

The Vernacular Discourse of the "Arab Spring" is a project that bridges the divide between the East and the West by offering new readings to Arab subjectivities. Through an analysis of the "Arab Spring" through the lens of vernacular discourse, it challenges the Euro-Americo-centric legacies of Orientalism in Western academia and the new wave of extremism in the Arab world by offering alternative representations of Arab bodies and subjectivities. To offer this new reading of the "Arab Spring," it explores the foundations of critical rhetoric as a theory and a practice and argues for a turn towards a critical vernacular discourse. The turn towards critical vernacular discourse is important as it urges the analyses of different artifacts produced by marginalized groups in order to understand their perspectives that have largely been foreclosed in traditional cultural studies research. Building on embodied/performative critical rhetoric, the vernacular discourses of the Arab revolutionary body examines other forms of knowledge productions that are not merely textual; more specifically, through data gathered in the Lhbib Bourguiba, Tunisia. This analysis of the political revolutionary body unveils the complexity underlining the discussion around issues of identity, agency and representation in the Middle East and North Africa, and calls for a critical study towards these issues in the region beyond the binary approach that has been practiced and applied by academics and media analysts. Hence, by analyzing vernacular discourse, this research locates a method of examining and theorizing the dialectic between agency, citizenry, and subjectivity through the study of how power structure is recreated and challenged through the use of the vernacular in revolutionary movements, as well as how marginalized groups construct their own subjectivities through the use of vernacular discourse. Therefore, highlighting the political prominence of evaluating the Arab Spring as a vernacular discourse is important in creating new ways of understanding communication in postcolonial/neocolonial settings.

Performing the personal within the organizational: Communicating professional identities through Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' personal narratives

This dissertation project explored professionalism and the performance of identities by examining Taiwanese commercial airline pilots' discursive practices in everyday life. The intentions for this project were to not only expand current knowledge of organizational communication from a critical rhetorical perspective, but to further explore the under-appreciated concept of professionalism of organizational members. Theoretically, I traced theoretical analysis in the sociology of professions and further investigated scholarship from identity research in organizational communication studies. This research agenda helped to advance communication-based understandings of the meanings and practices of professional identity as a complement to the sociological conception. I further merged a performance paradigm and critical rhetorical perspective to examine the discursive practices of organizational members and to challenge the bias of traditional textual approaches. Methodologically, I conducted ethnographic interviews with Taiwanese commercial airline pilots in order to understand how they construct their personal, social, and professional identities. Five narrative themes were identified and demonstrated in this project: (1) It takes a lot to become a commercial airline pilot, (2) Being a professional commercial airline pilot is to build up sufficient knowledge, beyond average skill, and correct attitude, (3) Pilots' resistance and dissent toward company management, (4) Popular (re)presentation influences professionalism, (5) Power and fear affect professionalism. Pilots' personal narratives were presented in performative writing and in poetic transcription to make word alive with sounds featuring their meanings. Their personal storytelling created a dialogic space to not only let pilots' voice to be heard but also revealed how identities are created within and against a larger organizational identity. Overall, this project demonstrated the interdisciplinary examination of the meanings, functions, and consequence of discursive practices in everyday professional life. It also critiqued relationships between power, domination, and resistance while reintroducing the roles of the body and materiality in the domain of professionalism, and provides ethical readings of larger and complex organizational cultures. Applying communication-oriented analysis to study professionalism indeed challenged the long time neglected phenomena regarding the power of the symbolic in sociological approaches and raised the awareness of structural, material, and bodily condition of work.

A Discursive Perspective on China's Global Politics of Climate Change, 1992-2013

This dissertation investigates China’s recent shift in its climate change policy with a refined discourse approach. Methodologically, by adopting a neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony, a generative definition of discourse and an ontological pluralist position, the study constructs a theoretical framework named “discursive hegemony” that identifies the “social forces” for enabling social change and focuses on the role of discursive mechanisms via which the forces operate and produce effects. The key empirical finding of this study was that it was a co-evolution of conditions that shaped the outcome as China’s climate policy shift. In examining the case, a before-after within-case comparison was designed to analyze the variations in the material, institutional, and ideational conditions, with methods including interviews, conventional narrative/text analysis and descriptive statistics. Specifically, changes in energy use, the structure of decision-making body, and the narratives about sustainable development reflected how the above three types of social force processed in China in the first few years of the 21st century, causing the economic development agenda to absorb the climate issue, and turning the policy frame for the latter from mainly a diplomatic matter to a potential opportunity for better-quality growth. With the discursive operation of the “Science-based development”, China’s energy policy has been a good example of the Chinese understanding of sustainability characterized by economic primacy, ecological viability and social green-engineering. This way of discursive evolution, however, is a double-edged sword that has pushed forward some fast, top-down mitigation measures on the one hand, but has also created and will likely continue creating social and ecological havoc on the other hand. The study makes two major contributions. First and on the empirical level, because China is an international actor that was not expected to cooperate on the climate issue according to major IR theories, this study would add one critical case to the studies on global (environmental) governance and the ideational approach in the IR discipline. Second and on the theory-building level, the model of discursive hegemony can be a causally deeper mode of explanation because it traces the process of co-evolution of social forces.