School of Communication and Multimedia Studies

Jason Parsley is the executive editor of the South Florida Gay News. He was born in Louisville Kentucky and currently lives Boynton Beach with his partner Aydin Koymen.

F. Jouseph Sliba was born in Colombia on July 9, 1979. He grew up in Long Island and New York City, NY and moved to several cities around the country before settling down in Fort Lauderdale, FL in 2009. Mr. Sliba graduated with a BA in Fashion Merchandising in May 2005 and worked for 10 years in the fashion retail industry. Now he is perusing a Masters in College Student Affairs and works in higher education helping college students with financial aid and administrative issues. Mr. Sliba also volunteers at a few LGBTQ non-profit organizations that enrich the lives and culture of the LGBTQ youth in South Florida. Mr. Sliba is passionate about working out at Crossfit, eating healthy and creating a balanced lifestyle.

Jason Parsley is the executive editor of the South Florida Gay News. He was born in Louisville Kentucky and currently lives Boynton Beach with his partner Aydin Koymen.

F. Jouseph Sliba was born in Colombia on July 9, 1979. He grew up in Long Island and New York City, NY and moved to several cities around the country before settling down in Fort Lauderdale, FL in 2009. Mr. Sliba graduated with a BA in Fashion Merchandising in May 2005 and worked for 10 years in the fashion retail industry. Now he is perusing a Masters in College Student Affairs and works in higher education helping college students with financial aid and administrative issues. Mr. Sliba also volunteers at a few LGBTQ non-profit organizations that enrich the lives and culture of the LGBTQ youth in South Florida. Mr. Sliba is passionate about working out at Crossfit, eating healthy and creating a balanced lifestyle.

This thesis enters a journey of inquiry to investigate how self-help leadership
manuals are subject to patriarchal influences. Specifically, I analyze two self-help
leadership biographies in this thesis, Wooden On Leadership by John Wooden and Steve
Jamison and Reach For The Summit: The Definite Dozen System For Succeeding At
Whatever You Do by Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins. Both leadership manuals implicate
cultural conceptions of gender. Wooden’s text exemplifies ways in which traditional
masculine gender roles can infiltrate leadership manuals and Summitt’s text portrays
masculine and feminine gender negotiations as a prerequisite for success. This project
also contains a survey of literature on leadership studies as a whole as well as gender
studies and applications of both gender and various leadership styles. This analysis of
these two biographical accounts of leadership is initiated through feminist rhetorical
criticism and narrative criticism.

Wiccan witchcraft, a contemporary religion, frequently suffers from misunderstandings; the worst of which, arguably, being that it thrives in a postfeminist society. Although it remains unclear why witches, despite their specific traditions, would not immediately embrace feminism, this study claims that whether practitioners agree or disagree, they are performing feminism. In this study, I argue that Wiccan rhetoric (both discursive and non-discursive) functions epistemically to encourage feminist values. The thesis analyzes three typical forms of Wiccan rhetoric using Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s approach of invitational rhetoric and the values of equality, immanent value, and self-determination.

This study analyzes various forms of visual and textual rhetoric found in popular
black-owned print media from 1900-1970, including: beauty product advertisements,
magazine cover photography and feature articles in order to contribute to a rhetorical
history of color bias within the African-American community. The imagery included here
validated and encouraged the transformation and lightening of African-American bodies
through what I call embodied mimicry in order to achieve dominance within the racial
group and a semblance of acceptance outside of it. Mimicry of white societal standards
by African-Americans including: formatting of print media, circulation of beauty ads and
physical embodiment of white physical features ultimately re-inscribed the tenets of
racism into the black public sphere in the form of colorism. The intention of this research
is to analyze the rhetorical history of colorism in order to better understand the current
state of colorism in American society.

Within the past thirty years, privacy concerns among American citizens are rising
with counter-terrorist surveillance going beyond targeting people of interest. These
concerns are reflected in American cinema where many contemporary films have
explored surveillance in society. The textual analyses presented in the thesis will focus on
three such films, Strange Days (1995), Southland Tales (2005), and Nightcrawler (2014).
Throughout this thesis, I examine how each of these films offers a unique, reflexive take
on surveillance, adhering to generative mechanisms that evoke differing attitudes about
surveillance through their form. My analysis draws on Laura Mulvey and Patricia Pisters’
theories on the gaze to understand the politics of looking in contemporary surveillance
cinema and highlight how cinematic scopophilia evolved into a networked perspective.
My analysis suggests that the politics of surveillance cinema is reflected in these films as
their differences mirror the changing perception of surveillance and the gaze over time.

This dissertation tests an original hybrid methodology to explore the rapid spread
of the idea of human-made climate change that began in the 1950s after the idea had lain
dormant for half a century. It describes the 1950s rhetorical events that triggered the
idea’s diffusion, then traces how its rhetorical uses gradually gave root to the end-of-thecentury
political impasse over how to respond to the societal implications of the idea.
The research methodology rests on the simple logic that an idea can only spread
by being used in human discourses. It combines traditions of rhetorical historiography
with a philosophical view of intellectual history as the cumulative effect of a “natural
selection” of ideas and their spread by human individuals over time and geography. It
calls for sampling and analyzing rhetorical artifacts in light of the rhetorical situations in
which they originate, focusing on how the idea of human-made climate change is used
rhetorically in scientific and other discourses. The analyses form the basis of a narrative giving emphasis both to rhetorical continuities and to conversation-changing rhetorical
events. They also show how these rhetorical dynamics involve interactions of human
communities using or attacking the idea for their communal purposes.
The results challenge science-focused understandings of the history of the idea
itself and also suggest that the methodology may be more broadly useful.
As to the history, the analyses highlight how changes in the rhetorical uses of the
idea made possible its 1950s breakout in climate science, then led to uses that spread it
into other sciences and into environmentalism in the 1960s, attached it to apocalyptic
environmentalism in the 1970s, injected it into partisan politics in 1980s and shaped the
political impasse during the 1990s.
The data show that the methodology reveals elements of the discourses missed in
histories emphasizing the “power of ideas,” suggesting that a focus on the usefulness of
ideas may be more fruitful. A focus on rhetorical uses of ideas grounds the causation of
intellectual change in human motivation and agency, expressed in material acts that
multiply and disperse naturally through communities and populations.

Foam fighting is a form of Live Action Role Playing (LARP) that focuses on mock
combat and recreational battle, with role-playing aspects taking a less prominent role. It is
sometimes referred to as a “poor man’s martial art”.While there does not appear to be any
clear documentation concerning the origins, research on foam fighting suggests the sport
began in Maryland in the 1970’s and slowly spread throughout the United States.
This research will illustrate how the sport of foam fighting demands a level of
critical thinking that takes both the participant and audience beyond the sight of a
swinging stick. I plan to show how this sport provides an outlet for high levels of
creativity, social interaction and strategic planning skills. It is a hobby that has had a
great impact on the daily lives of many of its participants and continues to grow and
evolve.