I am a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition @ Purdue University with secondary areas in professional writing, public rhetorics, and writing program administration. My dissertation examines rhetoric at the boundaries of the traditionally discrete categories of "culture" and "nature." That is, it explores rhetoric as the cultivation (both semiotic and material) of bodies and environments.
As a gradutate instructor in both professional and technical communication and first-year composition, I work to foster student engagement (with themselves, each other, and the world at large), to promote quality work by expecting the best work from each student, and to endorse rhetoric as vital to public and private life. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, I continually work to examine the ethical implications of my pedagogy, acknowledging that if education is more than objective knowledge-banking then it is certainly more personal, more participatory, and thus much more ethically precarious.
Site Info
This site contains my CV, dissertation summary, and teaching portfolio. Provided as well are links to courses I have taken, taught, and am currently teaching.
Recent Publications
"Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 38.3 (2008): 189-206.
Abstract: In this article the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author positions technical and professional communication not simply as transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.
Works in Progress
"Productive Strife: Clark’s Cognitive Science and Rhetorical Agonism." Co-authored with Jeremy Tirrell
Abstract: This article posits that Andy Clark’s model of distributed cognition (or the extended mind) manifests in the agonism of social activity, and that a rhetorical perspective permits an understanding of human conflict as a productive and necessary element in collective responses to situations rather than as problems to be solved or noise to be eliminated. To support this assertion, the article draws connections between Clark's project and rhetorical theory. First, between Clark’s argument that cognition responds to situated environmental conditions and the classical concept of kairos which implies that the identity of the rhetor emerges in response to situated environmental conditions. Second, between Clark’s assertion that "the role of language is to guide and shape our own behavior" (Being There 195), and long-held position in rhetoric that language is not merely expressive but constitutive. Last, the article presents a current, practical humanities project that complements its theoretical perspective with real-world praxis. The text explored is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is a manifestation (even in its controversial status) of much of what Clark and rhetorical theorists have to say about productive agonism and the litigious nature of identity and of shared cognition.