putting my thesis online

I’m finally getting around to putting my thesis online. If you’re interesting in browsing it or reading it, here is the link: Traversing the City of Blogs: Pedagogy, Performance, and Public Spheres (pdf, 1.8 MB).

My abstract:

In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of blogs in order to understand their potential use in the composition classroom with the goals of students writing for a public audience and developing their rhetorical and civic agency. I do so by exploring the potential for the blogosphere as a public sphere and by arguing that it would be productive to view the blogosphere as an ideal city. I argue that the ideal city, as described by theorist Iris Marion Young, provides a potential model for inclusive democratic discourse and for our movement online that can guide the ways we use, design, and engage blogs. While prior studies have viewed blogs as diaristic, I argue it is productive to understand the blog as a genealogical descendent of the zine (amateur, independently produced magazine). By focusing on a study of Fag Rag, a 1970s radical queer zine, I show that blogs can be understood as having a counterpublic readership, challenging traditional notions of authorship, circulating in the public, having multimodal content, and being indeterminate and palimpsest in form. From this analysis, I draw implications for public student writing in the composition classroom in relation to design, editorship, multimodality, and exigence for student writing. I conclude by outlining some possible material practices for the composition classroom, critiquing some potential limitations of my study, and raising questions for future research.

If you’re interested in my table of contents (as a preview of the thesis):

• Chapter 1: Introduction (p. 1)
• Interchapter 1: A Sisyphean Task: A Self Technology and Literacy Narrative (p. 33)
• Chapter 2: The Blogosphere as an Ideal City: The Pedagogical Value of a Normative Description of Blogs (p. 43)
• Interchapter 2: The Rhetoric of Walking in the City: Affect, Remixing, and Eroticism (p. 80)
• Chapter 3: What’s in a Zine? The Pedagogical Imports of a Public Ancestry to Blogs (p. 86)
• Interchapter 3: Feministing, Performativity, and Public Intellectuals: A [Long] Blog Post, of Sorts (p. 133)
• Chapter 4: Conclusion (p. 144)
• Notes (p. 174)
• Works Cited (p. 176)

If you just want to review my works cited, you can click on the link under Pages for “Works Cited in My Thesis.” Or click here.