Browsing by Author "Szymanski, Erika, advisor"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
A more-than-human life: rethinking the good life
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wich, Manda, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Palmquist, Mike, committee member; Schmidt, Jenne, committee member
Recently, within disabled discourses, there have been conversations surrounding who is considered worthy of participating in society and who is not. Additionally, those conversations have included how exhausting it can be to fight for the ability to participate in society. Lauren Berlant's concept of the good life acts as a way to understand why this feeling of exhaustion emerges in these conversations. However, it may not account for all ways of being and participating in the world. Therefore, in this thesis, I examine how a posthuman lens can help us rethink not only the broader normative ways of living a good life, but also the concept of the good life. I do this through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the subreddit r/disability. Additionally, I examine if the discourse of the subreddit employs good life ideals or if cripistemologies emerge in the discourse. In analyzing the subreddit, I find that that while some of the conversations reflects good life ideals and normative ways of being, other conversations challenge normative ways of being and express alternate ways of being in the world. These alternate ways of being align with the posthuman lens I employ in this thesis and allow for ways of rethinking the good life through proposing pluralistic, interdependent ways of being in the world. From the findings of this CDA of r/disability, I aim to bring attention to pluralistic, interdependent, crip ways of knowing/being that can provide alternate ways of being for both disabled and non-disabled people alike, blur the boundaries between disabled/non-disabled, and challenge those normative ways of being.
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
Re-phrasing turf-human relations: opening space to imagine more polite practices with turfgrasses
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Egret, Cookie, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Amidon, Tim, committee member; Koski, Tony, committee member
This thesis aims to induce wonder and cooperation towards enacting turfgrass formations and discourses in more reciprocal ways. I amplify Kenneth Burke's take on rhetoric as the art of inducing cooperation, but extend this definition to everyday multispecies relations. In the midst of increasingly unpredictable and unstable climatic conditions, it's imperative to collaborate creatively across disciplines, but also with the biotic relations we co-create worlds with. As a scholar in rhetoric and composition, I perform a discursive analysis on an aspect or slice of the myriad discourses enabling and constraining turfgrass practices. I use rhetorical and social studies methods to analyze thirteen scientific articles on turf from the International Turfgrass Society Research Journal. My qualitative research is undergirded by interdisciplinary theories that emphasize material relations and historical conditions. My findings let me theorize that turf is a complex assemblage, currently governed and enacted according to anthropocentric aesthetic principles of aboveground turf canopy quality, uniformity and performance. From this grounded theory, I hope to open space towards cultivating other ways of knowing and attending to turfgrass assemblages that might sustain diverse relations and lifeways. Our interconnected futures depend on a shared ability to respond and become response-able with multispecies others.
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.