| Description |
This dissertation addresses the ways that students negotiate rhetorical constructions of subjectivity and agency, and how the logics of time work on subjectivity and agency within the context of a nontraditional high school. This work is necessary to elucidate a tension at the heart of not only mainstream high school education in the early 21st century, but also to lay bare a paradox of rhetorical theory: that the field has historically been premised upon the speaking subject, but that the subjects who may speak are not only bounded by race, gender, and class, as many other scholars have illustrated - but also by the material effects of time as a rhetorical phenomenon upon the speaker. Rhetoricians can address this gap in theory by examining subjectivity and agency through three rhetorical registers of time: language as time, learning as work/work as time, and developmental time. Using participatory critical rhetoric to examine live, in situ discourses, and critical rhetoric to investigate textual sources, this dissertation examines disparate discourses that construct studenthood, such as "official" discourses of education propagated by those in positions of power such as state school boards or school districts as well as students' own discourses. |
