Date of Award
8-1-2026
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Daniel, Joshua
Abstract
This thesis examines Southern Illinois University’s (SIU) plagiarism-policy archive as an institutional apparatus that produces understandings of writing, authorship, and responsibility. Using archival-institutional rhetorical analysis, I examine an archive that includes committee reports, policy guides, Writing Center materials, faculty guidance, conduct procedures, administrative policies, and research-misconduct policies, reading these documents as an interconnected policy ecology rather than as a unified institutional voice. Drawing on posthuman and new materialist theories of subjectivity and apparatus, the study asks how human and nonhuman relations—including sources, memory, citation conventions, technologies, genres, teachers, and institutional procedures—shape student authorship. The analysis finds that plagiarism-policy genres distribute authorship unevenly: some open toward developmental, contextual, and relational accounts of student writing by recognizing unintentional and developmental plagiarism, disciplinary common knowledge, source engagement, and education, while student-facing and conduct-oriented genres often narrow these accounts by reconstituting the student writer as an individually responsible moral and procedural subject. Thus, I argue that plagiarism policy operates as an institutional theory of writing: writing is distributed, even as accountability is often individualized. The thesis concludes with implications for source-use pedagogy, policy design, and AI-assisted writing.
Access
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