Social change through rhetorical action: case studies of two Tennessee women in the archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In conversations about social change and activism, the American South is rarely represented as a place where such change occurs. However, this analysis will focus on two unlikely activists who used their writing and voices to advocate for change on a local scale in their individual communities. These activists are Emma Bell Miles, an artist, naturalist, and creative writer from Chattanooga, Tennessee who wrote a persuasive column in the Chattanooga News on feminism and naturalism, and Mary Cunningham, a local librarian and mother from McMinnville, Tennessee who created the Magness Library and Community House. This thesis argues that Miles and Cunningham were both capable and intelligent rhetors who understood that their voices alone were not sufficiently persuasive within their patriarchal, religious communities. Therefore, they both chose to situate their voices as extensions of the Christian God and Christianity to validate their opinions and achieve their goals. This strategic rhetorical choice to use God as a form of ethos, or a persuasive tool, is a performance of metis (briefly defined as embodied rhetorical cunning) because both Cunningham and Miles realized that their bodies made their rhetoric less credible. These women’s rhetoric and persuasive skills helped make their communities better places for people in their time, and created space for future generations of marginalized people, especially women, to speak out for their beliefs and continue that legacy of community change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".