CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE 2024 TBR PODCAST EMERGING SCHOLAR AWARD!
The Big Rhetorical Podcast is excited to announce its newest series, The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series. This unique series of podcast episodes is an inclusive space specifically designed to highlight the life and career work of graduate students and other academics who enjoy discussing the development of their scholarship, their pedagogy, and their service to the fields and disciplines of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication.
The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series offers participants the opportunity to contribute to ongoing conversations within our disciplines and beyond. This record of conversations eventually will be a vast catalog of dialogues, a digital archive with the potential to impact the knowledge-making in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication, as well as adjacent fields. Moreover, The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series serves as a glimpse into the variety of positionalities and personalities currently working in and defining these areas, as well as a way to track specific disciplinary themes as they manifest throughout time.
For scholars and practitioners, The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series offers the opportunity to gauge the future of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication by learning more about the research of graduate students and less-seasoned scholars. The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series core ideals are similar to a community-based writing project, with an emphasis on inclusivity, in localizing knowledge, and in strengthening relationships among peers.
Since The Big Rhetorical Podcast is a newer podcast, you might be hesitant to accept our invitation. Please feel free to check out our episodes wherever you get podcasts: https://anchor.fm/the-big-rhetorical.
If you would like to be featured on an episode of The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series, or if you have any questions about The Big Rhetorical Podcast, please submit a form at the bottom of this page or reach out to us via email: [email protected]. You can also find The Big Rhetorical Podcast on Twitter @thebigrhet, follow the podcast on Facebook, or visit www.thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com.
The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series offers participants the opportunity to contribute to ongoing conversations within our disciplines and beyond. This record of conversations eventually will be a vast catalog of dialogues, a digital archive with the potential to impact the knowledge-making in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication, as well as adjacent fields. Moreover, The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series serves as a glimpse into the variety of positionalities and personalities currently working in and defining these areas, as well as a way to track specific disciplinary themes as they manifest throughout time.
For scholars and practitioners, The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series offers the opportunity to gauge the future of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication by learning more about the research of graduate students and less-seasoned scholars. The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series core ideals are similar to a community-based writing project, with an emphasis on inclusivity, in localizing knowledge, and in strengthening relationships among peers.
Since The Big Rhetorical Podcast is a newer podcast, you might be hesitant to accept our invitation. Please feel free to check out our episodes wherever you get podcasts: https://anchor.fm/the-big-rhetorical.
If you would like to be featured on an episode of The Big Rhetorical Podcast: Emerging Scholar Series, or if you have any questions about The Big Rhetorical Podcast, please submit a form at the bottom of this page or reach out to us via email: [email protected]. You can also find The Big Rhetorical Podcast on Twitter @thebigrhet, follow the podcast on Facebook, or visit www.thebigrhetoricalpodcast.weebly.com.
Featured Episodes
Emily N. Smith is a PhD candidate in English at Penn State. Her research theorizes performance as a mode of rhetorical historiography. She primarily teaches first-year writing, and as a graduate assistant to the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, will help train new instructors this coming year. She has served as an officer of both the English Graduate Organization and the Arnold Ebbit Interdisciplinary Rhetoricians, as well as on the organizing committees of Camp Rhetoric and the Center for American Literary Studies symposium. She is also a committed participant in Penn State's Mentoring Program. She graduated from the University of Maryland in 2017 with her MA in English (Writing Studies and Rhetoric) and earned BAs in English and Theatre Arts from Denison University in 2015. When she's not teaching or writing, she listens to showtunes or hangs out with her partner and their two cats, Lily and Sweet Pea. Listen to Emily N. Smith's episode here: https://bit.ly/2P3sfkm.
Dr. Ben Harley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication Studies at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota where he researches the ways in which public discourse facilitates unexpected material transformations. Recently, his work has focused on sound’s materiality and the ways in which the intimacy of embodied sonic experiences connects seemingly disparate individuals in ways that both build communities, publics, and scenes and endanger those groups. He has published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Present Tense, and Hybrid Pedagogy. Listen to Dr. Ben Harley's episode here: https://bit.ly/2NijBvv.
Apurba Chatterjee is a historian working on art and British Imperialism in India. She is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom where she studies visual rhetoric. Primarily, her work is focused at the intersection of Indian culture, British colonialism, power, and the body. In July 2018, Apurba held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Her article, titled, ‘Visual Arts and British Imperialism in India in the Eighteenth Century: A Colonial Society in the Making’ in Discover Society was published in March 2019: https://discoversociety.org/2019/03/06/visual-arts-and-british-imperialism-in-india-in-the-eighteenth-century-a-colonial-society-in-the-making/.
Trevor C. Meyer is beginning his second year as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Composition in the Department of Language, Literature, and Writing at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville (MO). He also serves as Internship Coordinator for the department, as well as faculty advisor for Scribblers, the undergraduate writing club. He teaches composition, rhetorical theory and history, and professional writing. His scholarship focuses broadly on rhetorical and composition theory, with special interest in the ancient and comparative rhetorical and pedagogical theory, as well as questions of conflict, violence, and death throughout many discourses. His dissertation examined martial arts as an approach to teaching writing, bringing ancient Greek sophistic rhetoric, and the ancient martial art, pankration, into conversation with more contemporary East Asian martial arts of kobudo, karate, and judo. His current project uses professional wrestling as a lens for engaging with Platonic dialogues.
Lacy Hope is a PhD candidate in English at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Broadly speaking, her research explores the intersections of digital rhetoric, public discourse, and capitalism, while her dissertation investigates how profit-driven personalizing algorithms influence a user’s likelihood to engage civilly on online public comment threads. As an instructor, she helps students develop critical strategies for using digital tools to promote public change. Currently, she teaches Digital Technology & Culture 101 at WSU, as well as an online writing course for Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. She’s also taught technical communication, basic writing, and FYC. Lacy currently serves as a Publicly Engaged Fellow at WSU and has also served as a graduate fellow for the Computers and Composition Digital Press. Her published works can be found in Res Rhetorica and Kairos. In her downtime, she enjoys watching basketball with her husband and playing with her pets Jazz and Rudy.
Lee Hibbard is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue University. His research interests include archive theory and practice, game studies and game design, new media texts, digital rhetorics, fandom communities, queer studies, and identity formation, and a lot of his interest intersects with his experiences as a queer transgender man. When he’s not in the classroom or playing video games, he can be found lurking in the darkest depths of the internet, where he’s usually ranting about fictional characters while playing tabletop RPGs and drinking too much coffee. Follow Lee on Twitter @theinsomniakid.
Jason Markins has recently joined Colgate University in Hamilton, NY where he will teach for the 2019-2020 year as a Visiting Instructor. He will commute to Hamilton from Syracuse where he is wrapping up his graduate work in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. His dissertation is titled “The Head and the Hand: A Comparative Rhetorical Analysis of Craft and Technology in The Craftsman (1901-1916) and Make: (2005-2019).” His dissertation chair is Dr. Krista Kennedy. Jason’s teaching specialties include composition and rhetoric, writing studies, digital humanities, and critical making. His research interests include looking at traditional craft practices, such as woodworking, crocheting, or ceramics, alongside high-tech innovations such as 3-D printing, computer coding, and robotics to see how various craftspersons discuss both how they learned their craft and the unique rhetorical ecologies surrounding what it means to be a craftsperson. He does this, in an effort to draw from these different communities to better understand what it means to be a writer-as-craftsperson at a time when technology is drastically affecting how our students compose texts. Hobbies/Interests: Hiking and backpacking in the Adirondacks, baking bread and brewing beer, and collecting and tinkering with older or historic pieces of technology.
Cody Jackson is currently a second-year PhD student in rhetoric-composition at Texas Christian University. His research and pedagogy are focused on the intersections between queerness, disability, and archival praxis. Cody explores the material implications and influences of anti-ableist composition, theories of time and composing, and queer composition studies. Cody is currently working on a larger project that addresses the ways that material conditions of graduate students and contingent faculty impact larger circulations of knowledge and disciplinarity.
Kimberly Turner is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the RWL program. Her field of interest is writing program administration, with a special emphasis on graduate student writing. Before coming to the University of Tennessee, Kimberly taught composition courses at a Florence-Darlington Technical College, the University of North Carolina (Charlotte), and Francis Marion University. Although she has taught composition courses to a wide range of students, she particularly enjoys teaching first generation and non-traditional students, and she is especially thrilled to be able to share her love of writing with her students at UTK.
Dr. Erin Kathleen Bahl is an assistant professor of applied and professional writing at Kennesaw State University (Atlanta, Georgia). She graduated with my PhD (English, rhetoric & composition) from the Ohio State University in May 2018 with focuses in digital media, composition, and folklore. She is part of the Praxis & Topoi section editor collective for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, as well as design editor for Computers & Composition Online, and she publishes on webtexts, comics, multimodal design, and folklore. Here's a link to her online portfolio: http://erinkathleenbahl.com/
Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a neuroqueer femme poet and rhetorician from North Carolina, now based in NYC (unceded Lenape territory). Read her work in Visible Pedagogy, WUSSY, FIVE:2:ONE, among many others, and in her first collection of poetry, The Uninhabitable (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). Currently she works as a Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the OpenLab at City Tech and with the CUNY Humanities Alliance as a Web Development and Documentation Fellow.
Amber Lee is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of South Carolina and has an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from Emerson College in Boston. Her research focuses on rhetorical theory and memory, problematizing conventional conceptions of memory and its relationship to human oration, history, forgetting, and monumentalization. She teaches first-year English courses at the University of South Carolina, and her pedagogy often mixes rhetorical theory and scholarship with creative writing exercises. She is actively involved in the University of South Carolina’s RSA chapter, and enjoys running, baking, watching stand-up comedy, and entertaining her cat, Raja, in her spare time.
Megan J. Busch is a PhD Candidate in the University of South Carolina’s English Composition and Rhetoric program. Her research interests include rhetorical stylistics, rhetoric of the American South, and digital composition pedagogies. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the University of South Carolina’s First-Year Writing program and as the Editorial Assistant of Composition Studies.
Dr. Sarah Young is a LEaDing Fellows Postdoc (Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Programme) in the Media, Algorithms, Privacy & Surveillance (MAPS) group in the Media & Communications department at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She studies digital surveillance, predictive investigations, rhetoric, and technical communication.
Dr. Jonathan Osborne is originally from Louisiana, but moved to Maine after finishing his master’s degree at Tulane University to work in Multicultural Affairs at the University of New England. Currently, he is a newly minted Ph.D. in the English Department at Northeastern University and a Diversity Fellow in the Writing Department at Ithaca College. His dissertation, titled “Difference within Difference: A Study of Modern Black Conservative Rhetoric” argues that scholars of African American rhetoric(s) neglect conservative political perspectives latent within the larger African American rhetorical tradition. Through his research he contends that Black conservative rhetoric contains several rhetorical techniques generally reserved for more mainstream means of persuasion, thus questioning the status of Black conservatives residing on the fringes of social consciousness and Black communities.
Noah Wilson is a PhD candidate in Syracuse University's Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program where he serves as a Teaching Assistant. Noah's teaching focuses on composition and rhetoric, digital humanities, and surveillance in addition to popular culture and antiracist pedagogy; his teaching often incorporates popular culture and intertextuality. His research focuses on the intersections between rhetorical theory and technology, notably the connections between ethos and the algorithmic technologies that power social media platforms. His dissertation project, "Algorithmic Dwelling: The Consequences of Ethos on Social Media Platforms," examines how a critical posthuman conception of ethos can help us to understand how technologies shape our information processing and community formation. In his free time, Noah enjoys spending time with his family, visiting local coffee shops, and watching horror films.
Dr. Jessica Pauszek is Director of Writing and Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University – Commerce. She is from the small industrial city of Dunkirk, New York and a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan. Her research interests bring together working-class studies, local and transnational community literacy and community engagement, and archival methods. Since 2013, she has led a team of international scholars and community members in the curation of print (in London) and digital archives of transnational working-class writing by the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (1976-2007). She was awarded a 2018 CCCC Emergent Researcher Award and her dissertation received the 2018 Honorable Mention for the CCCC James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her current book project is entitled “Writing From ‘The Wrong Class’: Archiving Labor in the Context of Precarity.” Her work appears in CCC, Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, Labor History Today podcast, Reflections and more.
Dr. Gregory Bruno is an Assistant Professor in English at Kingsborough Community College in the City University of New York where he serves as a specialist in first year writing studies. He designs and teaches co-enrolled exchange program courses at correctional facilities in the greater New York City area. His current research emphasizes a dialogical approach to pedagogy in prison, both as a means of establishing a classroom approach rooted in meaningful exchange as well as a way of reconceptualizing the manner in which we discuss such programs’ impact or effectiveness. He earned his doctorate in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2019. Outside of the profession, Greg enjoys weight-training, running, and playing guitar. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Florianne "Bo" Jimenez is a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is currently Assistant Director of the UMass Writing Center. Her research interests lie in postcolonial theory, multilingual writing, literacy history, and Filipino studies, and she is writing her dissertation on resistance in Filipino student writing in the American colonial classroom at the turn of the 20th century. She was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. When she’s not writing her dissertation, Bo loves working out, reading, testing new recipes in the kitchen, and spending time with her husband and their two cats.
Dr. Amanda Sladek is an Assistant Professor of English and Composition Coordinator (her University’s term for WPA) at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. Her research focuses on language diversity and multiliteracies in introductory composition and Basic Writing. She teaches Basic Writing, First-Year Writing, and graduate and undergraduate courses in World Englishes, literacy studies, and composition pedagogy. She is Chair of the CCCC Untenured and Alternative-Academic WPA Standing Group, which advocates for the needs of WPAs who operate without the protection of tenure, including pre-tenure faculty, academic support staff, and graduate students. When not teaching, writing, or administrating, she enjoys yoga, online advice columns, and watching Netflix with her 10-year-old cocker spaniel, Scout.
Dr. Gavin P. Johnson (he/his) is a teacher-scholar specializing in multimodal composition, queer rhetorics, writing assessment, and digital activism. He currently works as an assistant professor at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN, where he teaches courses in cultural rhetorics, professional communications, and writing. He completed his PhD at The Ohio State University (2020) where he served as co-associate director of the international Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC). He earned his MA from North Carolina State University (2015) and BA from Nicholls State University (2013). His research and service receive national recognition, including the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award from CCCC in 2017 and the Kairos Service Award in 2019 as part of the nextGEN listserv start-up team. His research is published or forthcoming in College Literacy and Learning, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Constellations, Peitho, Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Teacher-Scholar-Activist, and various edited collections. Dr. Johnson is a proud first-generation college graduate from southeast Louisiana.
Deb Dimond Young teaches first-year integrated communication and writing at the University of Northern Iowa and is currently working on a PhD in rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, community-engaged writing, and feminist rhetoric. Deb also has a nerdy interest in the pedagogical possibilities of fandom podcasts and an abiding love of really old cookbooks. You can follow her on Twitter @debdimondyoung.
Alexander Williams is currently a Master’s candidate in Literature and a member of the Engaged Arts and Humanities Scholars cohort at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His poetry and scholarship is heavily rooted in hauntology and as a musician he explores the persona created by the Black male rapper in the United States. Because the persona created by the Black male rapper in the United States is, for all intents and purposes, a social experiment, Alexander’s work becomes the ultimate case study for his scholarly pursuits as poet, persona, and critic. In addition to deepening his creative canon, Alexander also conducts community projects and wellness workshops designed for students of color.
Dr. Mohamed Yacoub is an assistant teaching professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program in the English Department at Florida International University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Composition and Applied Linguistics from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in May 2020. His dissertation explores the narratives of multilingual Muslim students in undergraduate required composition courses and investigates how writing program structures that implement integration or separation practices affect the identity of multilingual Muslim students. Dr. Yacoub has published in different scholarly journals such as The Journal of Language, Identity & Education; Studies In Contrastive Grammar; International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research; and The Qualitative Report. Dr. Yacoub has English teaching experience in Dalian, China; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo, Egypt; Missouri, USA; Pennsylvania, USA, and now in Miami, FL.
William Repetto is a PhD student in English at the University of Delaware. He is interested in developing a historicist lens that recovers broad economic historical movements from the minutiae of exchange in novels. He is also interested in the overlap of English literature and entrepreneurship, particularly the application of literary methods to understanding business leadership. His recent coursework has covered digital intimacy, Post-Civil-War literary history, and literary theory. He has just submitted a brief chapter to Threshold Conscripts, a book project seeking to capture the pandemic-era observations of early-career intellectuals – which will be available in Spring 2021.
Dr. Whitney Jordan Adams is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. She is a 2020 PhD graduate from Clemson University’s interdisciplinary Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design program. Her dissertation, “A Rhetoric of Resentment: Dismantling White Supremacy Through Definition, Scholarship, and Action,” examines the role of resentment in white supremacy, and how this rhetoric can be dismantled not only through scholarship, but also through positive pedagogical disturbance, rhetorical listening, and action in the classroom and community.
Alex Hanson (she/her/hers) is a currently a PhD candidate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University. Her research interests include composition pedagogy, WPA, institutional rhetoric, language politics, and feminist rhetorics. Her dissertation project, “Not Appropriate for Children: A Look at the Composition Practices and Rhetorical Strategies of Single Moms in Academia” explores how single moms’ parental identities shape their composition work, as well as how they navigate academia.
Anna Zeemont is a PhD candidate in English at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center concentrating in Composition-Rhetoric and American Studies. She’s currently a Dissertation Fellow at the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, a fellow with CUNY’s New Media Lab, and a consultant at Baruch College’s Writing Center. Anna’s research draws on queer-feminist decolonial and abolitionist frameworks to interrogate the politics and movement of literacy across educational institutions and urban geographies. Other interests include multimodal pedagogies and rhetorics “critical university studies” archival methodologies and science and technology studies.
Dr. Cara Marta Messina recently received her PhD from Northeastern University English Department focusing on Writing & Rhetoric. Her digital dissertation, "The Critical Fan Toolkit: Fanfiction Genres, Ideologies, and Pedagogies," (http://www.criticalfantoolkit.org/) explores critical fanfiction writing practices, critical fan authors' processes, and their pedagogical values inside and outside traditional classrooms. She received the 2019 Kairos Graduate Student Teaching Award. Starting in Fall 2021, Cara will be an Assistant Professor of English, in Professional Writing, at Jacksonville State University.
Abbie DeCamp is a PhD candidate in English, focusing on Writing and Rhetoric, at Northeastern University. She commits to justice, feminism, antiracism, and queerness in every aspect of her work. Her dissertation, “Queer Memes: Forms, Communities, Genres” traces queer memes as community-making practices that centralize humor, joy, and identity exploration. Her mixed-methods approach—which prioritizes community members’ voices through interviews—builds off her Computers and Composition article, “XM<LGBT/>: A Schema for Encoding Queer Identities in Qualitative Research.” Her teaching philosophy centers students as community writers to help them develop and transfer skills in new and meaningful ways, seamlessly weaving deep engagements with memes and other genres.
Morgan Banville (she/her) is a native of Dartmouth, MA, and is a 2018 and 2019 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In 2018, she graduated as a Massachusetts Commonwealth Scholar and summa cum laude with her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Criticism, and Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication. She immediately pursued her Master of Arts in Teaching, graduating in 2019 with her license to teach secondary education (grades 5-12). As a third-year PhD student, her research interests include the intersection of technical communication and privacy/surveillance studies, often informed by feminist methodologies. She is currently the Graduate Co-Editor of The Peer Review journal, and recently published in the proceedings of the 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’21).
Ashley M. Beardsley holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics with a concentration in poetry from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University) and a certificate in publishing from the Denver Publishing Institute (University of Denver). She is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma where her research focuses on food and cookbooks as multimodal, collaboratively written community texts; digital and community literacy; the rhetoric of food; and feminist rhetoric. She also works as the Assistant Director of Technical Writing and Communication, teaches technical writing, and is an assistant editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.
Eric Korankye earned his Master's degree in English (Technical Writing and Rhetoric) at Illinois State University after completing his Bachelor's degree at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. He advocates the design of writing pedagogies shaped by globalization and culture, where students' diverse linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical traditions are valued as resources instead of problems. Eric's Master's thesis was an autoethnographic study of his experiences as a teacher and student in first-year composition in Ghana. In this research work, he sought to acknowledge the pluralistic nature and relevance of writing traditions worldwide; thus, the need for culturally-responsive pedagogies and a new paradigm shift for inclusionary rhetoric and citizenship in the classroom. He is currently an online teacher of English and a Sub-Editor in the Hansard Department of the Parliament of Ghana.
Noor Ghazal Aswad is a doctoral candidate at the University of Memphis. Her research explores the forms of persuasion that mediate and situate broader ideological discourses surrounding refugees and immigrants and vulnerable others. Her dissertation, “Syria as a litmus test: Towards a telos of solidarity,” puts forth the Syrian revolution as a liberatory moment where revolutionaries rose from under an authoritarian regime’s historic eclipse. Noor is motivated by the conviction that we must centralize the voices of Syrians themselves as a source of epistemological agency and not just as “refugee figures” confined to undesirable humanitarian subjects or apolitical & “third persons” in search of a homeland.
Michael J. Benjamin is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. He earned an M.A. in English at St. John’s University, where he served as a graduate assistant in the University Writing Center. He has also taught English in Slovakia as a Fulbright Fellow and taught first-year composition at multiple universities across New York. His current research interests include writing center studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, and literacy. Michael is the 2021-2022 The Big Rhetorical Podcast Fellow.
Walter Lucken IV is Assistant Director of Composition at Wayne State University, where he is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric and Writing. His research focuses on abolitionist histories and historiographies of literacy and rhetorical education in the Americas, especially in the fields of basic writing and community literacy. In addition to his work at Wayne State, he co-facilitates the Writer’s Block writing workshop at the Macomb Men’s Correctional Facility, and recently co-edited Absent but Present: Voices from the Writer’s Block, a collection of poetry from writers incarcerated at Macomb CF. He lives in Detroit.
Dr. Jessica Jorgenson Borchert is an Associate Professor and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Pittsburg State University. She teaches classes on technical and professional communication. Her recent research has focused on concerns of academic motherhood and has appeared in journals like the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and Survive and Thrive: A Journal of the Medical Humanities. Her current research is focused on how academic mothers use online communities to learn about their children’s health, along with how academic mothers use these spaces for social and emotional support. She is a proud mom of twins and a first-generation PhD.
Andrew Yim is currently a Ph.D. student in the Composition and Applied Linguistics (CAL) program at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He serves as the assistant director of the IUP Jones White Writing Center, the graduate co-editor of the Peer Review, and president of the Composition and TESOL Association that serves graduate students in the CAL program. In addition, he works as an English instructor at Huaqiao University in Quanzhou, China, and serves as an intern for the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Wikipedia Initiative Cohort.
Elena Kalodner-Martin is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her research is at the intersection of technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and feminist studies. Her dissertation theorizes patient narratives on social media as a form of technical and technological expertise. Her latest work appears in Intercom and Programmatic Perspectives and is forthcoming from the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and the 2022 IEEE ProComm proceedings. Elena currently teaches writing in the disciplines courses in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass and works as a research writer at Untold Content, an innovation storytelling firm.
Dr. Abir Ward was born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia to Lebanese Druze parents, and lived on three continents before the age of 20. As a multinational and a multilingual, Dr. Ward describes herself as “multi-local,” to borrow Taiye Selasi’s words. She taught 1st year composition, English for international business, and technical writing for engineering at the American University of Beirut. There, she led the editorial work of Pages Apart, a 700-page homegrown academic reader used for teaching English, and she founded 2Rāth, a social justice initiative engaged in the politics of representation. 2Rāth helped create articles on Wikipedia about notable Arab women, and its work has so far garnered over 20 million views. In the fall semester of 2021, she will be joining Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program where she will work on social, linguistic, and environmental justice initiatives
Dr. Ja'La Wourman is an assistant professor at James Madison University where she teaches classes in rhetoric and technical communication. Her research interests include Writing for businesses and nonprofits, Multimodal Rhetoric, Black Women's Entrepreneurship, Black Feminist Theory, and Black Popular Culture. In 2020, she co-authored the “CCCC Black Technical and Professional Communication Statement and Resource Guide” and co-edited a Special Issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on Black Technical and Professional Communication in 2022.
Kristie Ellison a PhD Candidate in English, Rhetoric and Composition at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she earned Post-Bac Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. She holds a JD from UNC School of Law (Chapel Hill) and practiced law before earning an MA in Literature from NC State. She focuses on how legal rhetorics, narrative texts, and public writing contribute to and constrain social construction and societal power dynamics. Her dissertation, “It Is So Ordered: Storytelling Power of the US Supreme Court,” argues that the Court uses its narrative choices to expand its judicial power and impact individual rights in ways that are often unrecognized thus failing to prompt a public response. She also enjoys teaching first-year writing at Elon University.
Brandon Ying is a fourth-year professional writing student at York University in Toronto, Canada. His disciplines are book publishing and digital authoring. His fields of interest include film history and filmmaking, fiction writing, podcasting, punk rock, popular music history, and urban planning. He is expected to graduate in September of 2023, and is excited to enter the world and use what he's learned. Brandon resides in Vaughan, Canada with his dog, Opie.
Hamza Ahmad is a PhD student in the University of Washington's English department. Hamza is currently working on two different projects: a language ecology of a Brooklyn Walgreens—specifically the intersection of raciolinguistics and translingualism in that space—and Afro-Asian solidarities in the works of the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. On a rainy Seattle day, Hamza loves rewatching his favorite films. On a sunny day, you will find him taking in the fresh air on his bike to the beach.
Emily Gresbrink is a PH.D. Candidate in Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota (UMN). Their work reflects a passion and commitment to technical communication and how that clicks with
user voice, social justice, and digital media. They have published in Programmatic Perspectives, The 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, UX as Innovative Academic Practice, and IEEE ProComm (Forthcoming). These works have covered a range of topics, including technical communication mentorship, COVID- 19 and digital risk communication, graduate student precarity and advocacy, social justice pedagogy, and professional writing.
user voice, social justice, and digital media. They have published in Programmatic Perspectives, The 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, UX as Innovative Academic Practice, and IEEE ProComm (Forthcoming). These works have covered a range of topics, including technical communication mentorship, COVID- 19 and digital risk communication, graduate student precarity and advocacy, social justice pedagogy, and professional writing.
Dr. Jennifer Burke Reifman, Loren Torres, and Mik Penarroyo are Student Assessment Researchers (StARs) at the University of California Davis. The StARs program believes that student voices should be included in conversations about assessment of student learning at UC Davis. Undergraduate students have the opportunity to share their experiences, perspectives, and expertise of their academic journey through the Curious Aggies project. The Curious Aggies research inquiry is a dynamic and collaborative effort with a strong emphasis on humanizing research through the partnerships created by our student researchers
Anuj Gupta is a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona. In the past, he has helped build one of India’s first college level writing programs at Ashoka University as a WPA. A winner of Kairos’ Graduate Student Research Award, CCCC’s Scholars for the Dream Award, & the AACU’s K. Patricia Cross’ Future Leaders Award, Anuj’s research has appeared in Open Praxis, Composition Studies, and in edited collections like TextGenEd. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation studying the impact of Generative AI chatbots on academic and technical communication by analyzing ChatGPT prompts as an emerging genre of writing.
Selena Loureiro is a fourth-year undergraduate student focusing on digital writing and publishing at York University in Toronto, Canada. Selena served as a The Big Rhetorical Podcast Intern in Spring 2024 as part of her digital authoring course, which included producing Episode 152 of the podcast, and featured an interview with Dr. Brandee Easter.
