Research
My research is situated in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, and can be categorized further into digital rhetorics, rhetorical ethics, and technical communication. Currently, I have published two articles in top digital rhetorics journals (Computers and Composition and enculturation), a co-authored book chapter, and a co-edited a book. I have also given ten conference presentations and roundtable discussions at these fields’ top venues—the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Computers and Writing, and the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW)—and smaller specialized venues such as the University of Alabama English Department’s Digital Rhetoric/Digital Media in the Post-Truth Age Symposium. I also had additional acceptances, including conferences that were cancelled or rescheduled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a roundtable acceptance where we declined participation as part of a CCCC boycott, and a presentation acceptance I ultimately declined after a death in my family the week prior. I have also participated in four invited speaking engagements, including Northern Illinois University’s Stem Café series, a keynote for the University of Michigan LangRhet Conference, and two virtual events with the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition (CFSHRC) and the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women & Gender. My research has won awards at the institutional and national levels; most recently ISU’s English Department nominated me for the 2021 University Research Initiative Award, a competitive award for early career scholars at ISU.
Much of my work deals with various forms of digital aggression, which I use as a larger umbrella term for hostile acts—trolling, stalking, gatekeeping, and doxing, among many others—that constitute toxic spaces and behaviors. I take a critical feminist approach, examining the role gender plays in digital aggression and memes, with a specific focus on how power dynamics influence the experiences of women, including women of color, queer women (both cis and trans), and nonbinary folks. The impetus for much of this research stems from my dissertation, “Memes and 4chan and Haters, Oh My! Rhetoric, Identity, and Online Aggression,” which I completed at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 2017 and which has received the 2017-2018 Outstanding Dissertation Award from NIU—a competitive university-wide award that often favors the sciences over the humanities—and the 2017 Hugh Burns Dissertation Award from Computers and Composition—a highly competitive annual award open to all scholars in digital rhetorics who have defended their dissertation in the last year. In this dissertation, I examine rhetorical methods for ethically resisting aggression without amplifying it. In much of my work, I argue that this research is important because digital aggression consists of rhetorical acts that require rhetorical solutions; as such, it is imperative that our field should not only understand how and why people engage in hostile digital acts, but also research practical tactics for preventing, mitigating, and responding to it that can be adopted by everyday users and content creators.
While finishing my dissertation, Jessica Reyman (my dissertation director) and I built on some of the ethical obligations and priorities I identified in it. We co-edited Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression (Routledge, 2019), which won the 2019 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, a highly competitive annual award that recognizes book-length contributions to relevant conversations in digital rhetorics. Featuring work from twenty-five digital rhetorics scholars, it conceptualizes approaches to digital ethics from four perspectives: ethics of interfaces and platforms, academic labor in digital publics, cultural narratives in hostile discourses, and circulation and amplification. As Reyman and I argue in the introduction, calls for civility—which includes the oft-heard phrase “don’t feed the trolls”—fall short because “it flattens contexts, puts an emphasis on intentionality over effect, and can silence the targets of aggression, including already marginalized voices” (2019, p. 5). As such, Digital Ethics’ contribution to the field is that it develops an ecology of response to digital aggression that requires platform developers, community leaders, community members, and moderators to work proactively in concert. Reyman and I argue that this framework is key for understanding, preventing, and responding to digital aggression; because it is a multidimensional problem, we must understand how these interconnected factors facilitate or mitigate it.
My research has largely always been about how this ecology influences digital aggression, even in work I published before Reyman and I fully conceptualized it. “Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women’s Ethos in Wikipedia and Blogs” (chapter in Moe Folk and Shawn Apostel’s edited collection Establishing and Evaluating Digital Ethos and Online Credibility, 2016), which I co-authored with Alison Lukowski, is ostensibly about how women develop their epistemologies in digital spaces. But it is also about the ways in which Wikipedia gatekeeps women and their embodied knowledges because its platform occludes knowledge creation, while its community leaders (mainly white men) privilege their limited definitions of knowledge and fact, excluding many women from contributing to the site.
“Digital Social Media and Aggression: Memetic Rhetoric in 4chan’s Collective Identity” (Computers and Composition, 2017)—developed from a presentation at CCCC that received the competitive 2016 Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award—more explicitly shows how several aspects of this ecology—anonymous platform design, lack of community leaders, and scarcity of moderators—have led 4chan’s community members to use the space as a free-for-all that is often hostile toward a variety of marginalized identities, especially trans women. Another contribution of this piece is that I identify how memetic rhetoric shapes digital aggression. That is, how certain rhetorical techniques are uncritical recapitulations of what other people have said in similar situations that have come to define a collective identity. I argue that once we identify these memetic rhetorics, it may be possible to rupture collectives and open inclusive spaces. This article has consistently appeared in the “Most Downloaded” section of the Computers and Composition website since its publication, and it has been cited 24 times since 2019.
My next publication, “Reading Mean Comments to Subvert Gendered Hate on YouTube: Toward a Spectrum of Digital Aggression Response” (enculturation, 2021), intentionally builds on the ecological framework Reyman and I identified. I highlight how the reading mean comments tactic grew as a response to YouTube’s platform and interface failing to protect and defend content creators—who act as both community leaders and moderators—as well as how this technique solidifies relationships with fans by establishing rules and boundaries for comments on their content while also mobilizing them to help respond to hostile comments by downvoting or reporting them. Another contribution of this article is the spectrum of digital response, which categorizes responses from direct to indirect. My hope is that this spectrum will help us be able to more accurately and precisely categorize the effectiveness of various techniques users have adopted in the face of platform failure while also recognizing the ways in which power differentials related to gender, race, and sexuality affect how well a particular technique may work.
In addition to this published work, I also have research that is accepted, under review, and in process. “Toward a Feminist Ethic of Self-Care and Protection When Researching Digital Aggression” (forthcoming) has been accepted for inclusion in Crystal VanKooten and Victor Del Hierro’s edited collection Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric (WAC Clearinghouse), which is currently under final review. This chapter uses my experiences researching digital aggression, as well as narratives from other researchers in the field, to show the risk of this kind of research while also positing ethical ways to build intentional methodologies that will preserve our mental health and to protect ourselves post-publication. “Meming misogyny at the political divide” (under review), an invited submission for a special issue of enculturation that will include work from the Digital Rhetoric/Digital Media in the Post-Truth Age Symposium, examines how misogyny is enacted through memes against woman political figures. These pieces build off my previous work with aggression and memes to advance ethical ways of doing research and further unpack the implications of hostile digital discourses.
The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the production of three ongoing publications about risk and crisis communication. “Tactical Risk Communication: Observations from Teaching and Learning About Crisis Communication During COVID-19” (co-authored with Tiffany Bishop, Emily Capan, Brittany Larsen, Raven Preston, graduate students who took a crisis communications course I offered in Spring 2020) has been accepted to Technical Communication Quarterly. This article coins the term “tactical risk communication” to describe the ways in which communities have formed to communicate outside of institutions, particularly during a global health crisis that has affected the most marginalized members of our society. We offer brief perspectives on the roles tactical risk communication played (or should/could have played) during a pandemic and a glimpse at what they can afford users during a pandemic. Co-authored with Courtney Cox, “Toward an Audience-Centered Approach: Rhetorical Analysis of University Crisis Communication Emails,” has been accepted for inclusion in Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge’s edited collection Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication: Problems and Solutions Toward Social Sustainability (ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication, and imprint of Routledge) and is currently under the second round of review. In this textbook chapter, Cox and I focus on teaching students how to be conscious and critical crisis communicators, offering concrete solutions and assignment sheets. Cox and I have also co-authored another piece, “Investigating Disembodied Risk in University Crisis Communications during COVID-19,” in which we examine an email from former ISU president Larry Dietz to show the ways in which the communication was damaging, rendering the entire campus a disembodied monolithic unit. We presented concrete take-aways for how crisis communication theorists and practitioners can better represent and account for diverse bodies in university crisis messaging. This article is currently under review with Communication Design Quarterly. These three pieces respond directly to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and offer practical guidelines for crisis and risk communication.
My final work in progress is a book length manuscript, currently under advanced contract with the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Press and undergoing the first round of peer review. Memetic Rhetorics: Building a Rhetorical Toolkit for Ethical Meming identifies several rhetorical techniques that make memes effective while also arguing that it is important to meme ethically. Chapters examine memetic privacy, how memetic screens (like Burke’s terministic screens, but with memes) shape our digital interactions, and how countermeming can be an effective tool against digital aggression. I examine Facebook tag groups, Tiktoks, image macro memes, YouTube videos, memetic behaviors, and meme trends to highlight how memes rhetorically shape our worlds. While there has been a rise in books and other scholarship about memes from a rhetorical perspective, this will be the first book that analyzes memes both on a micro level while also examining how to meme ethically. I estimate that it will be published in the latter half of 2022. I am already planning another article-length publication, “A Memetic Pandemic,” which will build on the work in this book to examine the ethics of pandemic meming during COVID-19; I have currently amassed over 4,000 memes and will begin to categorize and code them once Memetic Rhetorics is complete.
My research has impacted some key service to the discipline as well. During a packed roundtable session at Computers and Writing (CWCon) with Sam Blackmon, Kris Blair, Katherine DeLuca, Rachael Sullivan, and Stephanie Weaver, I noted that it might be useful to start a working group for digital aggression researchers. Blackmon, Sullivan, and I crafted a proposal and received permission from the 7Cs to form the Digital Aggression Working Group, which will meet annually at CWCon. We had a productive meeting in 2019, but with the cancellation of CWCon until 2022 as well as general pandemic fatigue, we have hit a temporary stasis. Our goals are to share resources, collaborate, commiserate, and ask for help. My experience with digital aggression research has also led to another service opportunity during the pandemic. Many conferences and events have moved to digital platforms, and I have talked with CFSHRC and Watson organizers on best practices for preparing for and moderating against aggression. I also regularly review articles on digital rhetorics and/or rhetorical ethics for Rhetoric Review and Computers and Composition, as well as proposals for ATTW and Computers and Writing.
This research statement has contextualized my work in digital rhetorics, rhetorical ethics, and technical communication since 2016, showing how this research has contributed to conversations in the larger fields.
Much of my work deals with various forms of digital aggression, which I use as a larger umbrella term for hostile acts—trolling, stalking, gatekeeping, and doxing, among many others—that constitute toxic spaces and behaviors. I take a critical feminist approach, examining the role gender plays in digital aggression and memes, with a specific focus on how power dynamics influence the experiences of women, including women of color, queer women (both cis and trans), and nonbinary folks. The impetus for much of this research stems from my dissertation, “Memes and 4chan and Haters, Oh My! Rhetoric, Identity, and Online Aggression,” which I completed at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 2017 and which has received the 2017-2018 Outstanding Dissertation Award from NIU—a competitive university-wide award that often favors the sciences over the humanities—and the 2017 Hugh Burns Dissertation Award from Computers and Composition—a highly competitive annual award open to all scholars in digital rhetorics who have defended their dissertation in the last year. In this dissertation, I examine rhetorical methods for ethically resisting aggression without amplifying it. In much of my work, I argue that this research is important because digital aggression consists of rhetorical acts that require rhetorical solutions; as such, it is imperative that our field should not only understand how and why people engage in hostile digital acts, but also research practical tactics for preventing, mitigating, and responding to it that can be adopted by everyday users and content creators.
While finishing my dissertation, Jessica Reyman (my dissertation director) and I built on some of the ethical obligations and priorities I identified in it. We co-edited Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression (Routledge, 2019), which won the 2019 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award, a highly competitive annual award that recognizes book-length contributions to relevant conversations in digital rhetorics. Featuring work from twenty-five digital rhetorics scholars, it conceptualizes approaches to digital ethics from four perspectives: ethics of interfaces and platforms, academic labor in digital publics, cultural narratives in hostile discourses, and circulation and amplification. As Reyman and I argue in the introduction, calls for civility—which includes the oft-heard phrase “don’t feed the trolls”—fall short because “it flattens contexts, puts an emphasis on intentionality over effect, and can silence the targets of aggression, including already marginalized voices” (2019, p. 5). As such, Digital Ethics’ contribution to the field is that it develops an ecology of response to digital aggression that requires platform developers, community leaders, community members, and moderators to work proactively in concert. Reyman and I argue that this framework is key for understanding, preventing, and responding to digital aggression; because it is a multidimensional problem, we must understand how these interconnected factors facilitate or mitigate it.
My research has largely always been about how this ecology influences digital aggression, even in work I published before Reyman and I fully conceptualized it. “Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women’s Ethos in Wikipedia and Blogs” (chapter in Moe Folk and Shawn Apostel’s edited collection Establishing and Evaluating Digital Ethos and Online Credibility, 2016), which I co-authored with Alison Lukowski, is ostensibly about how women develop their epistemologies in digital spaces. But it is also about the ways in which Wikipedia gatekeeps women and their embodied knowledges because its platform occludes knowledge creation, while its community leaders (mainly white men) privilege their limited definitions of knowledge and fact, excluding many women from contributing to the site.
“Digital Social Media and Aggression: Memetic Rhetoric in 4chan’s Collective Identity” (Computers and Composition, 2017)—developed from a presentation at CCCC that received the competitive 2016 Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award—more explicitly shows how several aspects of this ecology—anonymous platform design, lack of community leaders, and scarcity of moderators—have led 4chan’s community members to use the space as a free-for-all that is often hostile toward a variety of marginalized identities, especially trans women. Another contribution of this piece is that I identify how memetic rhetoric shapes digital aggression. That is, how certain rhetorical techniques are uncritical recapitulations of what other people have said in similar situations that have come to define a collective identity. I argue that once we identify these memetic rhetorics, it may be possible to rupture collectives and open inclusive spaces. This article has consistently appeared in the “Most Downloaded” section of the Computers and Composition website since its publication, and it has been cited 24 times since 2019.
My next publication, “Reading Mean Comments to Subvert Gendered Hate on YouTube: Toward a Spectrum of Digital Aggression Response” (enculturation, 2021), intentionally builds on the ecological framework Reyman and I identified. I highlight how the reading mean comments tactic grew as a response to YouTube’s platform and interface failing to protect and defend content creators—who act as both community leaders and moderators—as well as how this technique solidifies relationships with fans by establishing rules and boundaries for comments on their content while also mobilizing them to help respond to hostile comments by downvoting or reporting them. Another contribution of this article is the spectrum of digital response, which categorizes responses from direct to indirect. My hope is that this spectrum will help us be able to more accurately and precisely categorize the effectiveness of various techniques users have adopted in the face of platform failure while also recognizing the ways in which power differentials related to gender, race, and sexuality affect how well a particular technique may work.
In addition to this published work, I also have research that is accepted, under review, and in process. “Toward a Feminist Ethic of Self-Care and Protection When Researching Digital Aggression” (forthcoming) has been accepted for inclusion in Crystal VanKooten and Victor Del Hierro’s edited collection Methods and Methodologies for Research in Digital Writing and Rhetoric (WAC Clearinghouse), which is currently under final review. This chapter uses my experiences researching digital aggression, as well as narratives from other researchers in the field, to show the risk of this kind of research while also positing ethical ways to build intentional methodologies that will preserve our mental health and to protect ourselves post-publication. “Meming misogyny at the political divide” (under review), an invited submission for a special issue of enculturation that will include work from the Digital Rhetoric/Digital Media in the Post-Truth Age Symposium, examines how misogyny is enacted through memes against woman political figures. These pieces build off my previous work with aggression and memes to advance ethical ways of doing research and further unpack the implications of hostile digital discourses.
The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the production of three ongoing publications about risk and crisis communication. “Tactical Risk Communication: Observations from Teaching and Learning About Crisis Communication During COVID-19” (co-authored with Tiffany Bishop, Emily Capan, Brittany Larsen, Raven Preston, graduate students who took a crisis communications course I offered in Spring 2020) has been accepted to Technical Communication Quarterly. This article coins the term “tactical risk communication” to describe the ways in which communities have formed to communicate outside of institutions, particularly during a global health crisis that has affected the most marginalized members of our society. We offer brief perspectives on the roles tactical risk communication played (or should/could have played) during a pandemic and a glimpse at what they can afford users during a pandemic. Co-authored with Courtney Cox, “Toward an Audience-Centered Approach: Rhetorical Analysis of University Crisis Communication Emails,” has been accepted for inclusion in Samuel Stinson and Mary Le Rouge’s edited collection Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication: Problems and Solutions Toward Social Sustainability (ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication, and imprint of Routledge) and is currently under the second round of review. In this textbook chapter, Cox and I focus on teaching students how to be conscious and critical crisis communicators, offering concrete solutions and assignment sheets. Cox and I have also co-authored another piece, “Investigating Disembodied Risk in University Crisis Communications during COVID-19,” in which we examine an email from former ISU president Larry Dietz to show the ways in which the communication was damaging, rendering the entire campus a disembodied monolithic unit. We presented concrete take-aways for how crisis communication theorists and practitioners can better represent and account for diverse bodies in university crisis messaging. This article is currently under review with Communication Design Quarterly. These three pieces respond directly to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and offer practical guidelines for crisis and risk communication.
My final work in progress is a book length manuscript, currently under advanced contract with the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Press and undergoing the first round of peer review. Memetic Rhetorics: Building a Rhetorical Toolkit for Ethical Meming identifies several rhetorical techniques that make memes effective while also arguing that it is important to meme ethically. Chapters examine memetic privacy, how memetic screens (like Burke’s terministic screens, but with memes) shape our digital interactions, and how countermeming can be an effective tool against digital aggression. I examine Facebook tag groups, Tiktoks, image macro memes, YouTube videos, memetic behaviors, and meme trends to highlight how memes rhetorically shape our worlds. While there has been a rise in books and other scholarship about memes from a rhetorical perspective, this will be the first book that analyzes memes both on a micro level while also examining how to meme ethically. I estimate that it will be published in the latter half of 2022. I am already planning another article-length publication, “A Memetic Pandemic,” which will build on the work in this book to examine the ethics of pandemic meming during COVID-19; I have currently amassed over 4,000 memes and will begin to categorize and code them once Memetic Rhetorics is complete.
My research has impacted some key service to the discipline as well. During a packed roundtable session at Computers and Writing (CWCon) with Sam Blackmon, Kris Blair, Katherine DeLuca, Rachael Sullivan, and Stephanie Weaver, I noted that it might be useful to start a working group for digital aggression researchers. Blackmon, Sullivan, and I crafted a proposal and received permission from the 7Cs to form the Digital Aggression Working Group, which will meet annually at CWCon. We had a productive meeting in 2019, but with the cancellation of CWCon until 2022 as well as general pandemic fatigue, we have hit a temporary stasis. Our goals are to share resources, collaborate, commiserate, and ask for help. My experience with digital aggression research has also led to another service opportunity during the pandemic. Many conferences and events have moved to digital platforms, and I have talked with CFSHRC and Watson organizers on best practices for preparing for and moderating against aggression. I also regularly review articles on digital rhetorics and/or rhetorical ethics for Rhetoric Review and Computers and Composition, as well as proposals for ATTW and Computers and Writing.
This research statement has contextualized my work in digital rhetorics, rhetorical ethics, and technical communication since 2016, showing how this research has contributed to conversations in the larger fields.
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