Public History and Social Archives: Toward a New Materialist Rhetoric of Murder

This dissertation follows the many rhetorical (or persuasive) agents and relations in the act or event of murder. I ask readers to postpone blame in order to listen to the other rhetorical agents involved. I follow 4 case studies or instances of murder that happened in Pittsburgh, tracing who and what was influential or persuasive in the final act. Using new materialist theory and rhetoric, I argue that murder happens within a network--not necessarily only an online network, but a network of influential actors and agents—things like: Facebook, twitter, language, affect, programming languages, trauma--and that we must understand this rhetorical network of agents for an efficacious intervention and understanding of murder and violence. The dissertation is both practical and theoretical. It is both pubic and private. It is both about real people who lived and have lived down the street and philosophical ideas that live largely in print. Building on contemporary art movements and recent work in the digital humanities, we must attend to the production of the archive-as-method—a newly emergent practice that raises complex ethical questions about the relationality between language, networks, affects, and bodies in digital social contexts. This dissertation practices an inquiry that is not criminological or pathological but networked and new materialist