All that I do is motivated by a desire for social justice. My research interests, then, occupy a liminal space among writing pedagogy, rhetoric, discourse studies, postcolonial and feminist studies, sociolinguistics, higher ed administration, media studies, and community-based literacy education. 

Most of my current work focuses on the various forms of violence imparted upon learners by the English curricula in higher education. I am specifically concerned with how the non-ELL, adult learner residing in northern Appalachia experiences everything from grammar instruction to composition and literature sequencing. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to this population, but it’s understudied and may have implications for how we apply pedagogical theory to our instructional practice across writing studies, where we are or should be working dutifully to refocus our work to better address the lived experiences of marginalized learners.

Relative to this work, I’ve employed discourse analysis to explore the lexical and discursive strategies used by adult learners to help me unpack how learners report the emotional experience of contextualized grammar instruction via corrective written feedback. 

In my work on new media, I’ve explored how Wikipedia functions to reify dominant oppressive entities, though I am nevertheless theorizing a framework and interface to encourage more people to contribute to the site. I’m also exploring the role of the phatic in digital media relationship-building.

My digital humanities experimentation has led me to off-the-wall yet utterly generative things like using a 3D printer to represent artifacts that accompanied 19th c transatlantic epistolary correspondence, and manipulating microcontroller interfaces to help me prototype specific rhetorical, poetic, and ecological relationships.

Prior to these experiences that grew from my doctoral coursework, my concern for the power wielded by language and institutional structures was already well-established, as seen in materials from previous graduate coursework at both SUNY Buffalo State and Indiana University: