The map, the mill, and the memorial: A rhetorical study of the visual and material

This dissertation contributes to the growing subdisciplines of visual and material rhetorics by using three illustrative case studies to examine how visual and material artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, can help shape our understanding of unique cultural moments in both historic and contemporary settings. Grounding all three cases in a theoretical approach that combines Foucault's theory of heterotopias with Carole Blair's theory of material rhetoric, I first examine the narrative accounts of the Lowell Mill Girls who labored in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the early 1800s. I conduct a material rhetorical analysis of these narratives in order to show how the spaces of the mills acted on the bodies of the Mill Girls, and how their narratives functioned as subtle attempts to resist the mill owners' control on their bodies. Next, I analyze public commemorative artifacts such as maps and sculptures, at what is today the Lowell Mills National Historic Park. I analyze the park's brochure map, sculptures, and green spaces to consider how these representations and spaces engage visitors' bodies in ways that invoke and commemorate the lives of the Mill Girls. Lastly, I take a more in-depth look at maps as visual and material artifacts, with specific regard to their involvement in a federal court case between the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Here, I demonstrate the impact of visual and material texts not just on human bodies, but also on non-human bodies, in the context of a contemporary debate about environmental policy. This study shows how seemingly disparate case examples can work to address the question of how it is that conceiving of visual and material artifacts as rhetorical may help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the particular moments, events, and debates---and the consequences of each---which these artifacts set out to represent.