I'm also a PhD student at Berkeley in Rhetoric. Here's two papers I've written. Each is about 20 pages long. I've included pictures to prevent you from falling asleep.
You don't need to have gone to college to read the one called "Residential Responsibility." In it, I go back to the town where Bill Owens made his famous 1973 photo book Suburbia, and I take
somebody who grew up there with me. The essay's about trying to document the cultural landscape of the suburbs. It's got a lot of my own pictures in it as part of its scholarship. I wrote it in the
Spring of 2005 for Prof. Bill Littmann.
"The Perceptual Ideology of Capitalism and the End of Physical Space" is about what happened to the pedestrian mode of perception following the ubiquity of the American automobile landscape.
In it I analyze the photography of Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, and Stephen Shore, as well as the scholarship of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Louis Althusser, and
Siegfried Kracauer. It's also about the suburbs too, but it's a bit harder, and it's not up yet anyway. I wrote it in the Fall of 2004 for Prof. Kristen Whissel.
and the End of Physical Space