Research
Overview
My research examines the complex ways that emerging technologies and attendant metaphors and practices reshape public and institutional rhetorics. In particular, I draw from network theories of writing (e.g., Jones) and research on use and usefulness in professional writing and technical communication (e.g., Sullivan, Johnson, and Grabill) to reconsider community engagement as networked engagement.
This line of inquiry began in my dissertation, What Peer-to-Peer Networks Teach Us about Institutional Service. In it, I develop a rhetoric of service that embraces both technological innovation and ethical, humanistic practices by addressing where peer-to-peer network theories and design principles overlap with research on feminist care ethics. In the end, I provide a heuristic through which to consider the complex networks of human and nonhuman actors that undergird institutional service.
I have used this heuristic to shape other projects and have had success in publishing about them. For example “Locating Queer Rhetorics: Mapping as Inventional Method,” co-authored with Fernando Sanchez and published in Computers and Composition, uses digital mapping to reveal some of the hidden networks that support graduate-student research in queer rhetorics. Additionally, my chapter “Considering Global Communication and Usability as Networked Engagement: Lessons from 4C4Equality,” will be published in the collection Thinking Globally, Composing Locally: Rethinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet in January 2018. The chapter presents networked engagement as an ethical way to pursue local issues when one is not local. Finally, I self-published a zine that I distributed at the Feminisms & Rhetorics Conference and the Conference on Community Writing in fall 2017. A web version of the zine has been placed with Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space and will be published in spring 2018. This zine and subsequent webtext, titled Writing Networks for Social Justice, provide a networked approach to defining what activism looks like in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies. The zine/webtext includes a number of interviews with scholars in Technical Communication, Rhetoric & Composition, and adjacent fields as well as contributions from over a dozen teacher-scholars. I co-authored both the chapter and zine/webtext with Liz Lane from the University of Memphis.
Ideas from my dissertation also inform my current work as Faculty Fellow for Community-Engaged Teaching & Learning with St. Edward's University's Center for Teaching Excellence. In this position, I am developing a university-wide network for community engagement. In order to create such a network, I have used surveys and interviews with faculty from all five of the university’s Schools and with administrative staff in various offices to develop an operational definition for community engagement and an institutional framework for community-engaged teaching & learning that includes curricular and co-curricular activities. Furthermore, this framework serves to inform administrative decisions regarding how to document and assess such work; how to allocate university resources in order to help it grow; and how to recognize and compensate community partners, faculty, staff, and students for their efforts. Much of my recent conference scholarship details the challenges and successes of establishing this network. My research also serves as the bedrock to the university’s Carnegie Community-Engaged Campus Classification application, which will be submitted in 2019.
As I continue my research, I take up two interrelated issues: the impact that network technologies and metaphors have on how we conceive of publics and the role service plays in this shift.
This line of inquiry began in my dissertation, What Peer-to-Peer Networks Teach Us about Institutional Service. In it, I develop a rhetoric of service that embraces both technological innovation and ethical, humanistic practices by addressing where peer-to-peer network theories and design principles overlap with research on feminist care ethics. In the end, I provide a heuristic through which to consider the complex networks of human and nonhuman actors that undergird institutional service.
I have used this heuristic to shape other projects and have had success in publishing about them. For example “Locating Queer Rhetorics: Mapping as Inventional Method,” co-authored with Fernando Sanchez and published in Computers and Composition, uses digital mapping to reveal some of the hidden networks that support graduate-student research in queer rhetorics. Additionally, my chapter “Considering Global Communication and Usability as Networked Engagement: Lessons from 4C4Equality,” will be published in the collection Thinking Globally, Composing Locally: Rethinking Online Writing in the Age of the Global Internet in January 2018. The chapter presents networked engagement as an ethical way to pursue local issues when one is not local. Finally, I self-published a zine that I distributed at the Feminisms & Rhetorics Conference and the Conference on Community Writing in fall 2017. A web version of the zine has been placed with Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space and will be published in spring 2018. This zine and subsequent webtext, titled Writing Networks for Social Justice, provide a networked approach to defining what activism looks like in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies. The zine/webtext includes a number of interviews with scholars in Technical Communication, Rhetoric & Composition, and adjacent fields as well as contributions from over a dozen teacher-scholars. I co-authored both the chapter and zine/webtext with Liz Lane from the University of Memphis.
Ideas from my dissertation also inform my current work as Faculty Fellow for Community-Engaged Teaching & Learning with St. Edward's University's Center for Teaching Excellence. In this position, I am developing a university-wide network for community engagement. In order to create such a network, I have used surveys and interviews with faculty from all five of the university’s Schools and with administrative staff in various offices to develop an operational definition for community engagement and an institutional framework for community-engaged teaching & learning that includes curricular and co-curricular activities. Furthermore, this framework serves to inform administrative decisions regarding how to document and assess such work; how to allocate university resources in order to help it grow; and how to recognize and compensate community partners, faculty, staff, and students for their efforts. Much of my recent conference scholarship details the challenges and successes of establishing this network. My research also serves as the bedrock to the university’s Carnegie Community-Engaged Campus Classification application, which will be submitted in 2019.
As I continue my research, I take up two interrelated issues: the impact that network technologies and metaphors have on how we conceive of publics and the role service plays in this shift.
Project Details
The Mapping Queer Rhetorics Project
An iteration of this project was presented in fall 2012 at the University of Louisville's Watson Conference.
As of July 2014, Computers and Composition (print) has accepted a manuscript addressing this project. I co-authored the article with Fernando Sanchez. It will be printed some time in mid-2016 and made available online sometime before then. The abstract is reprinted below.
As of July 2014, Computers and Composition (print) has accepted a manuscript addressing this project. I co-authored the article with Fernando Sanchez. It will be printed some time in mid-2016 and made available online sometime before then. The abstract is reprinted below.
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Locating Queer Rhetorics: Mapping as Inventional Method
Because of the sheer abundance of scholarship employing spatial metaphors to trace Rhetoric and Composition’s development, it feels disingenuous to argue that mapping has recently emerged as an important method for shaping and reshaping the field. However, much of this scholarship challenges the lay of the land by describing the discipline as a map (e.g., Glen’s “Remapping Rhetorical Territory,” 1995). In so doing, this work glosses the complexities involved in making and reading maps. More recently, Sullivan and Graban (2010), Tirrell (2012), and others have delved into these complexities by employing mapping technologies to visualize aspects of the field that get overlooked. We draw inspiration from both bodies of work in order to locate queer rhetorics in two maps: one visualizes published work, and the other marks where, when, and from whom dissertations emerged. In one sense, our maps conceptualize queer rhetorics as a landscape in order to complicate how published works define this area of inquiry. In another sense, discussing our processes for creating and reading these maps points toward the limited way we are able to extend this conversation and complete our project. Put simply, we argue that mapping is an inventional method, and maps not an end in themselves. In order to raise questions for future research, we address how our maps locate (and dislocate) what they attempt to visualize.
Because of the sheer abundance of scholarship employing spatial metaphors to trace Rhetoric and Composition’s development, it feels disingenuous to argue that mapping has recently emerged as an important method for shaping and reshaping the field. However, much of this scholarship challenges the lay of the land by describing the discipline as a map (e.g., Glen’s “Remapping Rhetorical Territory,” 1995). In so doing, this work glosses the complexities involved in making and reading maps. More recently, Sullivan and Graban (2010), Tirrell (2012), and others have delved into these complexities by employing mapping technologies to visualize aspects of the field that get overlooked. We draw inspiration from both bodies of work in order to locate queer rhetorics in two maps: one visualizes published work, and the other marks where, when, and from whom dissertations emerged. In one sense, our maps conceptualize queer rhetorics as a landscape in order to complicate how published works define this area of inquiry. In another sense, discussing our processes for creating and reading these maps points toward the limited way we are able to extend this conversation and complete our project. Put simply, we argue that mapping is an inventional method, and maps not an end in themselves. In order to raise questions for future research, we address how our maps locate (and dislocate) what they attempt to visualize.
The 4C4Equality Initiative
Writing Networks for Social Justice
UPDATE March 2017: We've begun circulating a call for papers that questions what role writing plays in activist work and local organizing.
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Reprinted below you'll find a draft proposal for a chapter that will be included in an edited collection tentatively titled Communicating Globally: Applications for International Communication Exchange. Rich Rice of Texas Tech University and Kirk St. Amant of East Carolina University serve as editors. I co-authored the chapter with Elizabeth Lane, a fellow coordinator of the initiative.
UPDATE: The collection (and chapter) will be published in fall 2017.
For more information about the 4C4Equality Initiative, check out our website.
UPDATE March 2017: We've begun circulating a call for papers that questions what role writing plays in activist work and local organizing.
* * *
Reprinted below you'll find a draft proposal for a chapter that will be included in an edited collection tentatively titled Communicating Globally: Applications for International Communication Exchange. Rich Rice of Texas Tech University and Kirk St. Amant of East Carolina University serve as editors. I co-authored the chapter with Elizabeth Lane, a fellow coordinator of the initiative.
UPDATE: The collection (and chapter) will be published in fall 2017.
For more information about the 4C4Equality Initiative, check out our website.
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Considering Global Communication and Usability as Networked Engagement: Lessons from 4C4Equality
Existing work in both computers and writing, and Technical Communication address service-learning and community engagement as an avenue of coursework superior to case pedagogy because such service "force[s] students to consider needs and expectations of real world audiences...and to deal with real-world issues in real-world research" (Ding, 2007; paraphrasing Grabill, 2004). While we empathize with such arguments, we question the problems that arise from defining service as crafting deliverables with, for, or about a local partner (Deans). For example, such work offers a rather narrow conception of real-world audiences, issues, and research. Our concerns stem from an acknowledgement that contemporary writing technologies might be leveraged to help students understand the ways in which global and local issues impact and shape one another. We note here that global is often conflated with web-based, that is to say something globally accessible, whether or not it’s universally engaged; conversely, local concerns are often characterized as needs related to those communities in or in proximity to our universities.
These concerns over how the interplay of global and local sensibilities shapes service and engagement informed the development of the 4C4Equaltity initiative (4C4E). 4C4E emerged in part as a response to an email listserv discussion in fall 2013. This discussion weighed the merits of boycotting the 2014 Conference on College Composition & Communication (4C14) due to Indiana legislation proposing a constitutional amendment that would outlaw same sex marriage (HJR-3). At 4C14, we provided a number of ways for conference goers to demonstrate support for marriage equality and to intersect with local people in order to learn more about the provincial dynamics of the issue. These tactics encouraged conference attendees to consider how they might use their presence as well as their social and economic power as a form service and engagement. Beyond the work at 4C14, 4C4E seeks to foster conversations about how academics might bring together local issues evident at conference sites and concerns important to the memberships of our national organizations.
Our experience teaching technical and business communication informed how we engaged with conference attendees and how we approached deliverables, both of which reflect an open source ethos. Drawing from Huiling Ding's (2007) open documentation project and IDEO's (2009) Human-Centered Design Toolkit, we enacted this ethos through digital and local outreach, rapid prototyping, and usability testing; we published FAQs, suggested activities for online and onsite participation, crafted instructions for contributors and volunteers, and collected feedback from participants through anonymous surveys in order to asses our efforts. In this manuscript, we explore how these tactics and documents can be retooled and repurposed for a variety of academic disciplines and conference sites. We assert that an open source ethos demonstrates concern for global and local audiences, issues, and research. Additionally, it complicates oversimplified definitions of “real.” We believe answering these questions will help computers and writing scholars, and technical communicators reimagine service as networked engagement.
Existing work in both computers and writing, and Technical Communication address service-learning and community engagement as an avenue of coursework superior to case pedagogy because such service "force[s] students to consider needs and expectations of real world audiences...and to deal with real-world issues in real-world research" (Ding, 2007; paraphrasing Grabill, 2004). While we empathize with such arguments, we question the problems that arise from defining service as crafting deliverables with, for, or about a local partner (Deans). For example, such work offers a rather narrow conception of real-world audiences, issues, and research. Our concerns stem from an acknowledgement that contemporary writing technologies might be leveraged to help students understand the ways in which global and local issues impact and shape one another. We note here that global is often conflated with web-based, that is to say something globally accessible, whether or not it’s universally engaged; conversely, local concerns are often characterized as needs related to those communities in or in proximity to our universities.
These concerns over how the interplay of global and local sensibilities shapes service and engagement informed the development of the 4C4Equaltity initiative (4C4E). 4C4E emerged in part as a response to an email listserv discussion in fall 2013. This discussion weighed the merits of boycotting the 2014 Conference on College Composition & Communication (4C14) due to Indiana legislation proposing a constitutional amendment that would outlaw same sex marriage (HJR-3). At 4C14, we provided a number of ways for conference goers to demonstrate support for marriage equality and to intersect with local people in order to learn more about the provincial dynamics of the issue. These tactics encouraged conference attendees to consider how they might use their presence as well as their social and economic power as a form service and engagement. Beyond the work at 4C14, 4C4E seeks to foster conversations about how academics might bring together local issues evident at conference sites and concerns important to the memberships of our national organizations.
Our experience teaching technical and business communication informed how we engaged with conference attendees and how we approached deliverables, both of which reflect an open source ethos. Drawing from Huiling Ding's (2007) open documentation project and IDEO's (2009) Human-Centered Design Toolkit, we enacted this ethos through digital and local outreach, rapid prototyping, and usability testing; we published FAQs, suggested activities for online and onsite participation, crafted instructions for contributors and volunteers, and collected feedback from participants through anonymous surveys in order to asses our efforts. In this manuscript, we explore how these tactics and documents can be retooled and repurposed for a variety of academic disciplines and conference sites. We assert that an open source ethos demonstrates concern for global and local audiences, issues, and research. Additionally, it complicates oversimplified definitions of “real.” We believe answering these questions will help computers and writing scholars, and technical communicators reimagine service as networked engagement.
The Berlin Project
Work stemming from this project was presented in spring, summer, and fall 2014 at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis, Indiana; Computers & Writing's Graduate Research Network at Washington State University; the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference at Illinois State University; and the Cultural Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University.
Two manuscripts are being submitted about this project in winter 2017/2018.
Each publication was co-written by some combination of the following researchers: Don Unger, Patricia Sullivan, Kyle Vealey, Jon Wallin, Amelia Chesley, Jeff Gerding, Sherri Craig, Dan Liddle, and Nick Marino.
For more information about the project, please check out our website. Many of the pages on the site are password protected because we have not yet obtained permission from Purdue University to make archival materials publicly available.
Two manuscripts are being submitted about this project in winter 2017/2018.
Each publication was co-written by some combination of the following researchers: Don Unger, Patricia Sullivan, Kyle Vealey, Jon Wallin, Amelia Chesley, Jeff Gerding, Sherri Craig, Dan Liddle, and Nick Marino.
For more information about the project, please check out our website. Many of the pages on the site are password protected because we have not yet obtained permission from Purdue University to make archival materials publicly available.
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To commemorate his work on the twentieth anniversary of his death, eight teaching-assistant/researchers from Purdue University reconstructed James Berlin's cultural studies and composition approach to writing instruction. This reconstruction involved sifting through publications, his teaching materials housed in the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections of Purdue University's Libraries, and interviewing some of his teaching mentees, e.g., Nancy DeJoy, Lisa Langstraat, and Libby Miles, among others. This reconstruction provided a robust narrative that guided work for the second phase of the project, a reenactment. This reenactment involved adapting his assignments and including a different assignment in eight sections of first-year writing over spring 2014. The reenactment involved two focus-group interviews with TA/researchers and a survey of fyw students.
The project addresses two central questions: (1) (how) have elements of Berlin's approach been taken up by Rhetoric and Composition over the past twenty years, and (2) how would his pedagogy have changed with access to the Internet and emerging writing technologies?
The project addresses two central questions: (1) (how) have elements of Berlin's approach been taken up by Rhetoric and Composition over the past twenty years, and (2) how would his pedagogy have changed with access to the Internet and emerging writing technologies?