Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Humanities

Advisor 1

Oren Abeles

Committee Member 1

Holly Hassel

Committee Member 2

Jennifer Nish

Committee Member 3

David Grant

Abstract

This project centers on engaging students in class lessons related to rhetorical agency. Typically understood as the capacity to act, within rhetoric, I define agency as the capacity to make meaning. In most traditional Western conceptions, agency is primarily located with the individual rhetor. However, these views were increasingly challenged throughout the later twentieth century as theorists from various traditions came to understand that discussing our agency as solely our own doing was insufficient. In contrast to an individualistic understanding of agency, theories that characterize rhetorical agency as more fragmented have evolved, where, instead of writing and rhetoric being within the control of the individual, multiple actors co-constitute a rhetorical event. These views are what I refer to as distributed agency. Distributed ways of theorizing agency present a challenge for writing instruction because pedagogical applications of rhetoric often depend on the characterization of agency as something that can be possessed by the individual writer. In light of these concerns, my project is an attempt to investigate how First-Year Writing (FYW) students conceptualize rhetorical agency and how they view the relationship between their understanding of agency and their writing processes. I introduced distributed agency to students in my FYW course through four lessons drawing on existing theories of rhetorical agency, centered on the key concepts of ecology, intersubjectivity, materiality, and indeterminacy. In this project, agency represents a way of thinking about writing processes through developing an understanding of what agents influence writing and how to account for those impacts. A classroom research project brings a particular kind of perspective to discussions of agency because while the literature emphasizes that distributed agency presents a problem for FYW, there has not yet been a thorough investigation into student perceptions of rhetorical agency. Through coding of students’ reflective writing, my results show that while most students came into my FYW course with a traditional understanding of agency as located with the individual writer, incorporating these lessons helped students better appreciate the concept of distributed agency over the course of the semester. However, students did not actively view rhetorical agency as something that impacts their writing process. While they increased their understanding of agency, they were not able to apply this knowledge to their writing choices. I offer some future directions, including possibilities to help students translate insights they develop in the lessons into writing process knowledge, and I examine the limitations of what reflection can reveal about student learning.

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