Browsing by Author "McGee, Alexis"
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Item Black Feminist Rhetorical Praxis: The Agency of Holistic Black Women in Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Contemporary Works(2019) McGee, Alexis; Love, Bettina; Waters, Billye Sankofa; Evans-Winters, Venus; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis chapter critiques Lauryn Hill's debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, through a Black feminist and rhetorical lens. I argue that looking at Hill's album as a body of work provides a blueprint for acknowledging Black women as holistic agents of change.Item Book Review of Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy(2016) McGee, Alexis; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis book review of Other People's English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy provides an outline of this edited collection. Here, I summarize the contemporary discussions surrounding African American Language, code-switching, and code-meshing as factors impacting the classroom.Item The Language of Lemonade: The Sociolinguistic and Rhetorical Strategies of Beyoncé’s Lemonade(2019) McGee, Alexis; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis chapter, originally published in The Lemonade Reader, argues that Beyoncé's use of language in her second visual album, Lemonade, is a rhetorical technique aligned with Black feminist rhetorics.Item Looking back, looking forward: a dialogue on "The imperative of racial rhetorical criticism"(Routledge, 2018-11-28) McGee, Alexis; Cisneros, J. David; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignItem Pregnancy and Black and Trans* Worldbuilding on Instagram(University of Alabama Libraries, 2025) Whitver, Sara Maurice; Buck, Amber MThis dissertation project proposes worldbuilding as a rhetorical theory and uses Instagram as a platform to present three case studies as examples. I apply qualitative coding for themes to public Instagram posts of marginalized pregnant people, specifically transgender men and Black women, to assert that they are positioning themselves as what Rosemary Garland-Thomson calls "strategic starees," individuals who purposely position themselves in the mainstream gaze, altering the reality of the viewer by introducing them to another way of seeing the world. In the final case study, I also present data from an IRB approved study that collected interview responses from active doulas serving marginalized pregnant people in combination with a collection of posts from those doulas to extend the theory of worldbuilding to birthworkers who contribute to creating space for pregnant people who are often ignored and erased by traditional obstetrics practices. I present these as telling cases, cases that do not provide monolithic or generalizable standards, but rather cases that provide insight into a way of performing this rhetorical work of worldbuilding. At the end of the project, I provide an in-depth discussion of the practice of worldbuilding and its implications on the field of rhetoric.Item Speculative Sankofarration: Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction(2017) Brooks, Kinitra D.; McGee, Alexis; Schoellman, Stephanie; University of Alabama TuscaloosaThis co-edited article, originally published in Obsidian, details the literary work by Black women's horror and fiction. This piece is meant to set “methodological direction” for a racially gendered horror discourse. Here, we aim to displace and challenge the discursive subjectivities and praxis of Black women in contemporary horror fiction.Item Straight from the Source: a Candid Illustration of Four Secondary English Teachers' Beliefs, Experiences, and Tensions with Teaching High School Writing(University of Alabama Libraries, 2022) Billingsley, Khadeidra; Dayton, Amy; University of Alabama TuscaloosaRecent scholarship estimates that approximately 50% of incoming students are unprepared for college-level writing. (Sanoff 2006; Achieve, Inc. 2007; Complete College America 2012; Hechinger Report 2016). For the past 150 years, high school teachers have been blamed for the inadequate writing skills of college-bound students. Their biggest critics are college professors who frequently complain that many of their college freshmen cannot compose effective and rhetorically-sound texts. For some, this added labor could lead to a perpetuation of tension and finger pointing between the two groups of educators. However, in many of these rounds of this ongoing ‘blame game’, there is a side that seems to be missing and a voice that seems to be muted: that of the high school teachers. This paper illustrates high school teachers’ definitions and perceptions of and about academic writing. Through the facilitation of focus groups and semi-structured interviews, as well as the analysis of course materials, the researcher provides a comprehensive and candid narrative of the beliefs, experiences, and tensions that high school writing teachers negotiate as they integrate writing instruction into their existing English/Language Arts curriculum. In prioritizing the voices of high school teachers, this research will be a necessary first step to inciting more high school-college conversations and future collaborations. This text outlines implications for several groups influenced by secondary writing instruction including teachers, students, administrators, and teacher educators. This research will not only have grand implications for English educators, both at the secondary and postsecondary level, but student writers as well as we continue to work towards making the transition from high school to college writing easier for our college-bound students.Item Where We Gather Now: Bridging the Rhetorical Gap Between the Black Church and Contemporary Social Activism(University of Alabama Libraries, 2025) Eubanks, James; Daytom, AmyThe Black Church has functioned as a moral touchstone for the community for all of America's history. As with most aspects of Black culture, its rhetorical functions are mirrored in the classical African American rhetorical tradition and thus are deeply ingrained in a cultural sense. And is widely known for its work in the Civil Rights movements of the 60s and 70s in America. This work considers why modern activist movements and Black churches, so often aligned in their desire for Black liberation, are not more cooperative in terms of working towards social change and looks to the rhetorical approaches of each for answers. Two case studies based in Atlanta, Georgia, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and its pastor, Reverend Jamal Bryant, as well as the Stop Cop City movement provide the basis for this examination. Bryant is a particularly savvy user of social media in addition to having a background of grassroots activism, while the Stop Cop City movement is the epitome of a modern activist movement in terms of much of its organization and information campaigns taking place in online spaces. This work looks to the digital footprint of each, the ways physical space and action and examine the way in which they dovetail and are at odds, to ultimately plot a path of increased collaboration.