Browsing by Author "Amidon, Timothy, committee member"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Open Access
Constructing stability: IPPC's climate discourse and the challenge of fixity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Martinez, David, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Gallo-Cajiao, Eduardo, committee member
As climate science circulates across scientific, policy, and public domains, its terminology must strike a delicate balance: stable enough to retain authority, yet flexible enough to be understood and acted upon in diverse contexts. This thesis examines how that tension plays out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)—a consensus document that synthesizes complex knowledge and makes it communicable across discourse spheres. Using Bruno Latour's concept of immutable mobiles, I analyze how the terms risk, vulnerability, and adaptation are circulated and framed across three AR6 enactments. Through qualitative coding and critical discourse analysis, I trace how these terms shift rhetorically across different sections and uses. The findings show that even when definitions are fixed institutionally, key terms shift in response to political and rhetorical demands. This study calls for a reconfiguration of the tools we use to stabilize knowledge: immutable mobiles should be more narrowly defined, and glossaries must evolve into dynamic, source-linked frameworks that account for context and audience. By identifying where stability fractures and proposing new models for definitional accountability, this research offers a revised understanding of how terminology operates in scientific consensus reports—moving beyond the illusion of immutability toward a more adaptive and transparent model of climate communication.
Open Access
Digitization, innovation, and participation: digital conviviality of the Google Cultural Institute
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Stone, Leah, author; Champ, Joseph, advisor; Seel, Pete, committee member; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Guzik, Keith, committee member; Switzer, Jamie, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
Open Access
Investigating the relationship between horizontal forest structure and fire behavior using a physics-based fire model
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Burke, Conamara S., author; Hoffman, Chad, advisor; Mell, William, committee member; Amidon, Timothy, committee member
Silvicultural treatments are increasingly being implemented across the Western US in fire-prone forests as a way to simultaneously reduce fire hazard while also increasing horizontal structural heterogeneity (tree spatial patterns). However, it is poorly understood how fire behavior is impacted by treatment designs that incorporate tree clumping spatial configurations that mimic patterns found within the historic structural ranges of forests frequented by low to mixed severity fire. The Wildland Urban-Interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS), a physics-based fire behavior model, was used to better understand the effect that heterogeneous horizontal forest structure has on fire behavior. Fire behavior across seven treated ponderosa pine forests with different spatial patterns were simulated and compared to each other, and to an untreated scenario. All forest simulations were also burned under three different wind speeds and two surface fuel loading levels to better evaluate fuel treatment effectiveness across a range of conditions. Results indicate that the removal of surface fuels in treated stands was the most effective method for reducing the percent of canopy consumption and rates of fire spread, especially under high wind velocity conditions. This study found that variations in horizontal forest structure between treated forest scenarios had a minimal effect on driving differences in fire behavior, thus forest managers should be more concerned with increasing horizontal structural heterogeneity for ecological objectives rather than implementing such treatments to reduce the potential for hazardous fire behavior. Future research should focus on determining how vertical structural complexity interacts with horizontal structure to influence fire behavior.
Open Access
Of buildings and belonging: re-storying the student veteran's historical impact on place and program
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Anderson, Sheri McQuiston, author; Doe, Sue, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Greene, David, committee member
This research explores the student veteran's material effect upon the land grant university, particularly on the campus of Colorado State University, as seen in the development of both places and programs. The signing of the Morrill Act in 1862, while creating America's land grant universities, also established the connection of the land grant university to military training, a thread which can be traced from CSU's founding in 1870 until today. Using a theory of the rhetorical meaning of physical place, as well as an acknowledgement of the power of collective memory surrounding these spaces, this study restories the narrative of the student veteran's physical impact upon Colorado State University's campus during wartime and post-wartime, from World War I until today. Using rhetorical methodology for archival research, this study explores the physical and programmatic changes upon the CSU campus in order to demonstrate the generative power of the student veteran upon the university, both historically and at present. By analyzing archived texts, the impact of student veterans, through both their agentive force and the government funding their GI Bills contribute to the university budget, is shown to have produced a material impact that has gradually shifted over time. This material impact has shown increasing focus, as developments have evolved from places to programs, from groups to individuals. Re-storying the forgotten narrative of the history of the student veteran upon the land grant university campus suggests the material agency of the student veteran, and provides a frame through which to view their effect on curricular programs/offerings and physical plant improvement.
Open Access
Opening the Black box of the 2015 Baltimore riots: an actor-network theory contribution to composition
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Koban, John Edward, author; Langstraat, Lisa, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Champ, Joseph, committee member
The purpose of this project is to experiment with new ways of supplementing the "social turn" in composition by using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a methodology. In demonstrating the ways ANT could support composition, I conduct a study of the 2015 Baltimore riots in the wake of the fatal injury of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police. In understanding the events the focus is not on the riots themselves but the place where the riots occurred, Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, also the home of Freddie Gray and his family. The social focus of this study is to demonstrate how ANT could support an anti-racist composition theory and practice. Herein I argue that ANT has much to offer anti-racist composition theory, arguing that when the methodology is deployed that researchers can arrive at robust findings that supports writing that produces action. In making this argument I identify four general areas that ANT contributes to composition theory: the first area is that the theory behind the method is non-critical in nature. This simply means that instead of relying on critique as means to achieve social justice and critical thinking that we also spend more time describing and assembling and composing--drawing a picture of the social--before beginning the work of critical analysis. The second area ANT adds to composition theory is that in drawing the non-critical pictures of the social that we pay close attention to all agents in the site, and this means that we pay attention to the agency of the nonhumans in addition to the humans. We do this because humans do not exist and act without the agency of nonhumans. The idea here is that any kind of rhetorical work we do will be more robust when we pay more attention to all parts of context and rhetorical situations. The third area ANT contributes is that can cultivate an attunement between and among researchers and the ambient environment or site of study. In other words, in doing the slow work that ANT requires, the researcher has greater opportunity to cultivate an affective engagement with the other agents in the site of study, and when this happens then there is greater opportunity for researchers and students to engage with exigent sites of concern, in both material and affective ways. The fourth way ANT supports composition theory is in that it promotes an ethic of amateurism that allows researchers to tinker with texts and sites and studies in playful and amateurish ways. ANT is a relativistic and objective approach that seeks as its goal consensus through description and slow analysis and work with others and as such this method is a friendlier and less dogmatic form of empiricism. Because of the relativism, the researcher needs to be comfortable with uncertainty, but this uncertainty is beneficial because it allows the researcher to constantly inquire until a consensus and plan of action is reached. After conducting my study of Sandtown-Winchester, I found that the problem of something akin to racism is distributed across the material and discursive space of the neighborhood, arguing that if we only pay attention to the racist discourse in or about the neighborhood that we miss out on half of the picture (the material side of the picture), and that the kinds of actions that could support the neighborhood may be overlooked with only a focus on language and discourse.
Open Access
Reconfiguring discourse to attend to interrelation: a rhetorical analysis of kelp agency in scientific texts
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Anderson, Jennifer, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Hall, Ed, committee member
The purpose of this thesis is to consider how thinking-with kelp ecologies in knowledge-making practices opens opportunities for attending to the co-becoming of species through interrelations. In this thesis, I consider how scientific discourse practices constitute relations with kelp forests and how constitutions can change to think-with kelp forests as actors in knowledge-building. I argue this reconstitution is important for changing asymmetries in power over and cognitive distance from kelp ecosystems. Using critical discourse analysis, this thesis considers how scientific discourse practices constitute power hierarchies between kelp ecosystems and humans. Then, this thesis reads the power hierarchies through an ecological approach to rhetoric to trace how kelp forests produce relations through interactions with environmental processes and a diverse range of species actors. Through the rhetorical analysis, this thesis considers how thinking-with kelp forests can open opportunities for research and discourse practices to attend to co-constituting webs of interrelations. Finally, this thesis considers how embodied experiences with kelp forests open opportunities for researchers to notice and to respond to—to think-with—what matters for a kelp forest. This thesis responds to the modernist bifurcation of language and materiality, subject and object, mind and body. It considers how communication and knowledge-building can make-with the world today by attending to how all planetary actors are of the world through interrelationships with it.
Open Access
The story behind the decision: the influence of narrative in gatekeeping by trade media editors
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Lattimore, George Walker, author; Hallahan, Kirk, advisor; Long, Marilee, committee member; Amidon, Timothy, committee member
This study conducted in-depth interviews to understand how 10 trade media editors in the renewable energy industry select articles for publication, how they conceptualize and use narrative as an article form, and the extent to which their conception of narrative affects their decision-making. Four research questions were explored as the focus of the investigation. While narrative was an important component of trade media offerings, editors did not conceptualize narratives in detail, and the role of narrative varied by publication. Subjective perception, or an editor's gut feeling, was stated as the predominant method for selection among articles and topics; however, participants said their subjective perception was informed by market research and ideas of how the audience will react. Furthermore, the gatekeeping decisions made in the selection and the development stages of the article generation process were highly influenced by the sources of input and mediums of output. Therefore, the gatekeeping decision-making process was described as nonlinear; and a model is presented that reflects the process' complexity. Most of the editors viewed narrative as being a longer article than other article forms, and therefore, the use of narrative was deemed more appropriate for articles in print where the reader could expect a longer form, such as case studies, company profiles, new market features, and new application or innovation features. The majority of participants expressed narrative was more valuable than other forms, but not necessarily more engaging, due to diverse readership and reader preferences. Value was attributed to narrative as a form for being more rare than other article types, building reader loyalty, providing variety of article types for the reader to choose between, and ensuring exclusivity of the story from being recreated by other publications. Narrative was not necessarily preferred over article forms, such as summary news reports, for publication, because they may require more work without the guarantee of higher reader interaction or engagement. Findings from these interviews were used to suggest five best practices for publishing narratives in trade media: 1. Establish standards for using narrative by medium and be consistent 2. Incentivize content providers to be aware of the publication's audience and to pitch articles using story types. 3. Encourage readers to share their own narratives to increase engagement and generate exclusive, community-driven content. 4. Look for writers who can balance style and structure with industry information. 5. Use multiple mediums (print and web) to generate complimentary forms of content around a particular theme.