Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Tyler S Rife
Text & Performance Quarterly, 2024
Relaying an especially traumatic encounter with heteronormative violence in the form of a non-con... more Relaying an especially traumatic encounter with heteronormative violence in the form of a non-consensual conversion, our performance theorizes and stages collaboration as a means of communicating trauma beyond the individuated capacities of a sole performer. We figure our collaborative effort an (autoethno)graphic performance to capture its dual embrace of graphic approaches to storytelling and performative approaches to autoethnographic inquiry, wherein one performer’s written narrative coalesces with another performer’s illustrations to critically re-story the past. In queering author/illustrator relational dynamics, our processual discovery of performance through collaboration conjures a mode of queer worldmaking while offering a temporary reprieve from heteronormative trauma.
Review of Communication, 2024
Amidst the Anthropocene, the contentious term given to our planetary epoch defined by human domin... more Amidst the Anthropocene, the contentious term given to our planetary epoch defined by human domination over earth systems, this essay will offer a series of explorations that illustrate the potentialities between critical communication theorizing and ecological thought. To help articulate this convergence, I organize my essay around the thematic figuration of "threads" to constellate an ongoing effort by scholars in and beyond the communication discipline who seek to conjure the theoretical tools necessary to register the complexity of power's contemporary mode of expression. I navigate this threaded figuration in three ways. First, I demonstrate how the ecosophical model outlined in Félix Guattari's political manifesto The Three Ecologies offers ground for contextualizing mutations of power in the Anthropocene while warranting a theoretical collaboration between ecosophy and critical communication in the present. Second, I apply Guattari's ecosophical model to critical rhetoric, advancing a theoretical heuristic resonant with border rhetorics that may help critical communication scholars ontopolitically figure the power formations of our time. Third, I attempt to synthesize three "problematic threads" organizing contemporary discourses of critical and ecological theorizing.
Popular Communication, 2024
This article maps the surveillance imaginary of a unique public aware
ness initiative by the New ... more This article maps the surveillance imaginary of a unique public aware
ness initiative by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and Godfrey
Reggio’s Institute for Regional Education in 1974 that consisted of two
parts: a situationist-inspired campaign using and surrealistically sub
verting popular media to raise awareness of surveillance, paired with
a newspaper supplement documenting detailed intrusions on the
privacy and liberty of citizens on a number of fronts, representing an
encroaching society of social control. Taken as a whole, the surveil
lance imaginary of the campaign combined images of eyes, compu
ters, and rats in mazes with detailed discussions of databases,
militarized policing, and direct behavioral control justified by stories
of rising violence in society to critique both state surveillance and the
growing corporatization of the public sphere.
Text and performance quarterly, Feb 14, 2024
Text and Performance Quarterly
Critical Studies in Media Communication
Storytelling, Self, Society, 2021
Abstract:Stories offer time and space for connection. This has been particularly true during soci... more Abstract:Stories offer time and space for connection. This has been particularly true during social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this collective autoethnographic story, we explore how generative energies of storytelling and storylistening emerge within communities via virtual storytelling. With COVID-19 being a catalyst for change, we share our adaptation of the Storyscope Project story circles to facilitate connection through a virtual space. Our stories within this work reflect our experience of virtual Storyscope in the roles of host, facilitator, participant, and educator. Additionally, the collaborative process of our writing mirrors the unfolding of virtual Storyscope story circles. In other words, the practices of virtual storytelling and storylistening guided our inquiry and evolving discussion of a similarly evolving practice.
Critical Studies in Media Communication
ABSTRACT Airing 25 years after its initial run, Twin Peaks’ television revival complexified nosta... more ABSTRACT Airing 25 years after its initial run, Twin Peaks’ television revival complexified nostalgic fulfillment through its subversive treatment of narrative, character, and temporality. Nowhere was nostalgic attachment challenged more than in The Return’s treatment of original series protagonist Special Agent Dale Cooper and his two doppelgangers. Through an analysis of the three representations of Cooper in The Return, we argue that the series’ resistant treatment of nostalgia demonstrates a critical mode of theorizing nostalgia as containing inherent multiplicity and duplicitousness. Thus, we argue for a theorizing of nostalgia itself as doppelganger.
Computers in Human Behavior
This study examined uses and gratifications of text-messaging focusing on its media attributes am... more This study examined uses and gratifications of text-messaging focusing on its media attributes among college students who have grown up with communication technology. It also investigated if technology-driven gratifications sought is related to perceived richness of the channel as well as perceived competence in text communication. First, six technology-driven gratifications sought through text-messaging were identified, and using this scale, data from a total of 329 college students in the U.S. and in Japan via online surveys were analyzed. The results reveal that those who seek technology-driven gratifications are more likely to perceive the channel as rich. In addition, technology-driven gratifications sought is positively related to satisfaction with text-messaging as well as competence in text-messaging in terms of effectiveness across the groups. We also discuss similarities and differences in the use of text-messaging and its outcomes between college students in the U.S. and Japan. College students seek six technology-driven gratifications through text-messaging.Those who seek technology-driven gratifications perceive text-messaging as rich.Technology-driven gratifications sought leads to greater satisfaction.Technology-driven gratifications sought leads to greater communication effectiveness.Some differences in text-messaging use between college students in the U.S. and Japan.
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2020
In this essay, I demonstrate how the ecological concept of “scaling” carries potential to animate... more In this essay, I demonstrate how the ecological concept of “scaling” carries potential to animate critical logics in the Anthropocene. I argue that scaling can expose unexpected linkages across space and time that help to denaturalize particular ecological formations as entangled, rather than separate. I demonstrate the critical ecological potential of scaling by performing it rhizomatically, weaving across scales of space and time while juxtaposing theoretical concepts with my experiences of life as a resident in the urban desert landscape of Phoenix, AZ. This ecology ultimately reveals how climate change acts as a complex necropolitic of the Anthropocene.
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2021
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2021
This poem imagines the mass metanoic shift required to incite revolution as dispersing through a ... more This poem imagines the mass metanoic shift required to incite revolution as dispersing through a form of critical consciousness. As the “idea” spreads, ontologies largely sculpted by interlocking structures of oppression, such as whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism, shift into more liberatory and ecological ontologies. Partially inspired by my own ongoing processes of (un)learning through engagement with critical thought and non-normative epistemologies, this writing speculates about the dismantling of systems of control while implicating the privileges that long prevented me from questioning them.
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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Tyler S Rife
ness initiative by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and Godfrey
Reggio’s Institute for Regional Education in 1974 that consisted of two
parts: a situationist-inspired campaign using and surrealistically sub
verting popular media to raise awareness of surveillance, paired with
a newspaper supplement documenting detailed intrusions on the
privacy and liberty of citizens on a number of fronts, representing an
encroaching society of social control. Taken as a whole, the surveil
lance imaginary of the campaign combined images of eyes, compu
ters, and rats in mazes with detailed discussions of databases,
militarized policing, and direct behavioral control justified by stories
of rising violence in society to critique both state surveillance and the
growing corporatization of the public sphere.
ness initiative by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and Godfrey
Reggio’s Institute for Regional Education in 1974 that consisted of two
parts: a situationist-inspired campaign using and surrealistically sub
verting popular media to raise awareness of surveillance, paired with
a newspaper supplement documenting detailed intrusions on the
privacy and liberty of citizens on a number of fronts, representing an
encroaching society of social control. Taken as a whole, the surveil
lance imaginary of the campaign combined images of eyes, compu
ters, and rats in mazes with detailed discussions of databases,
militarized policing, and direct behavioral control justified by stories
of rising violence in society to critique both state surveillance and the
growing corporatization of the public sphere.