Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Bollig Dissertation Final Draft.pdf (854.95 KB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

“People Like Us”: Recognition, Identification, and the Production of Rhetorical Subjects in Enrollment Outreach

Bollig, Chase Anthony
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1434105730

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of programs that target first-generation college students, often low-income or minority students, for recruitment to college or that aim to improve campus participation and retention among these populations. Such programs simultaneously address themselves toward academic performance and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of first-generation college rhetorical subjectivity that allows these students to be integrated into the social fabric of the university. Through a rhetorical analysis of program promotional and administrative practices and interviews with program staff and current and former first-generation college students, I discern the constitutive rhetorical phenomena that attend participation in three enrollment outreach programs: the Future Leaders Program, the Stadium Housing Scholarships, and the Women’s Scholarship Dorms. My analysis reveals that rhetorical practices aimed at cultivating collective identification with the programs or the university, fostering belonging or attempting to counter limiting subject positions by promoting particular rhetorical and literate subjectivities. In the process of investigating the production of rhetorical subjects by enrollment outreach programs, I apply and also revise a constitutive rhetorical framework. This framework initially describes the inauguration of rhetorical subjects, but the original framework lacks a productive vocabulary for the processes of socialization attending program rhetorics or for the processes by which individuals constitute themselves as subjects. Toward this end, I propose the term “rhetorical infrastructure” to characterize the ways that enrollment outreach programs craft contexts to encourage recognition of program participants as members of a social formation through rhetorical practices of identification, the development of communicative pathways, and the use of personal relationships that allow participants to leverage a form of borrowed cultural capital. Likewise, in light of interviews with first-generation college students, I demonstrate the limits of constitutive rhetorical theory’s ability to account for constitution within a constellation of relationships, arguing that this shortcoming derives from a model of rhetorical subjectivity that lacks explanatory power. Ultimately, I find that enrollment outreach programs are defined by the tension between their regulatory function – concerning the production of rhetorical subjects oriented toward particular forms of action – and their function empowering first-generation college interests. This same tension is evident in the “first-generation college” marker of difference. This marker serves important bureaucratic functions, allowing universities to promote neoliberal education rhetoric that mitigates historical marginalization through the use of an aspirational term. At the same time, the first-generation college marker facilitates collectivization of marginalized student populations.
Beverly Moss (Committee Chair)
Wendy Hesford (Committee Member)
Jonathan Buehl (Committee Member)
224 p.
Composition; Rhetoric

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bollig, C. A. (2015). “People Like Us”: Recognition, Identification, and the Production of Rhetorical Subjects in Enrollment Outreach [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1434105730

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bollig, Chase. “People Like Us”: Recognition, Identification, and the Production of Rhetorical Subjects in Enrollment Outreach. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1434105730.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bollig, Chase. "“People Like Us”: Recognition, Identification, and the Production of Rhetorical Subjects in Enrollment Outreach." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1434105730

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1434105730
174
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.