UC San Diego

In this dissertation, I analyze an early twentieth century scrapbook called The Ideal Scrap Book to show how scrapbooking might help makers negotiate text that is overwhelming, exclusive, or oppressive, and offer scrapbooking as a potential feminist method of disrupting and remaking dominant narratives and a practice which can lead to more formal discourse production that enacts needed social change. I organize the dissertation into three chapters: “Chapter 1: Cutting and Pasting: The Rhetorical Promise of Scrapbooking as Feminist Inventiveness and Agency from the Margins,” “Chapter 2: Mixed Race Struggle and Influence in the Late-Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Centuries: The Non-Discursive Rhetoric of Scrapbooking as Inventive and Empowering,” and “Chapter 3: Scrapbooking as Material Agency: The Promise of Juxtaposition as Meaningful Invention in the Community College Composition Classroom.” The Ideal Scrap Book is an assembling of clippings from newspapers circulating circa 1905. Because it was likely made by an African American woman in a period marked by tense and heated debate about the role of African Americans in the United States, I analyze it as discourse from the margins, applying its rhetorical and inventive efficacy to students struggling in community college composition courses and academic discourse more generally. Scrapbooking offers makers meaning-making that is embodied, engaging a full range of sensory, emotional, and cognitive processing that may generate more civically-oriented rhetorical work later. Multimodal genres that emphasize crafting, such as scrapbooking, not conventionally employed in the inventive stages of writing and reading in first-year composition courses, might empower students to explore and forge relationships between seemingly disparate texts and to position themselves more meaningfully in relation to them, the world, and other people, spurring a better understanding of positionality within various systems of oppression, while also fostering a will-to-create and fuller sense of agency.