Abstract:
This thesis argues that we should adopt a theory of social movement that is
based in rhetorical principles—one that accepts social movement as changes to a
set of meanings, or ideology. Instead of focusing primarily or exclusively on the
resources and leadership of organizations, this thesis argues that we should
study the discourse of counterpublics—the entities involved in social movement
activities. By critiquing and expanding upon DeLuca’s work on image events,
this thesis argues that we should examine the entire process that counterpublic
discourse goes through—production, dissemination, and circulation—from a
multimodal perspective. This thesis identifies Occupy Wall Street and WikiLeaks
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as counterpublics and examines each discourse from three perspectives—
traditional, image event, and multimodal—in order to demonstrate the strengths
of a multimodal theoretical framework.
