Gitte Frandsen, ’23 PhD in Public Rhetorics and Community Engagement

My research focuses on building spaces in higher education that welcome and validate the linguistic, cultural, and knowledge-making practices of traditionally marginalized and underrepresented students. My starting point is the acknowledgement that higher education, broadly, and English programs, specifically, engage in exclusionary practices that uphold barriers for many undergraduate and graduate students. These practices include the centering of rhetorical styles and knowledge systems of white, middle- and upper-class students, and norms and expectations for academic writing which privilege the writing and linguistic resources of white, middle- and upper-class students. 

One set of research questions I explore is how writing programs and writing pedagogy can leverage the resources of linguistically and culturally diverse undergraduate students. Recognizing that access to multiple languages and language varieties is an asset for students rather than a hindrance for their learning of academic writing and research, I ask how writing classrooms can make space for difference from narrowly-defined norms of academic language and writing. Further, I ask how writing classrooms can learn from multilingual and multidialectal students’ communication practices to enhance the rhetorical dexterity and multiliteracies of all writing students.  

Another related set of questions I explore focuses on the experiences of graduate students as they navigate through academic spaces. A study by the research team I am part of shows that many graduate students at 51ÁÔĆć are deeply anxious about not belonging in graduate school, feeling that they lack the cultural capital and language skills that are expected of them. I ask how graduate programs can become more inclusive of non-traditional students such as those who identify as non-white, working-class, first-generation, and transnational students. For example, graduate students who are also GTAs experience that the linguistically and culturally just pedagogies they have adopted are not present in their graduate classes. How can graduate programs include the diverse knowledges, experiences, and language practices that graduate students bring to their programs rather than expect the students to assimilate to a set of narrowly-defined norms? 

My research engages with communities at multiple levels: it seeks to sustain communities of undergraduate and graduate students on campus by visibilizing and validating the community knowledges and literacies these students bring to higher education. I believe this move will enrich our classrooms; create more just pedagogies and assessment practices; and more inclusive research. Further, I want my research to engage not only teacher scholars but also other stakeholders and publics in order to widen the scope of the conversation about what social justice in higher education can be. 

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Joni Hayward, ’23 PhD in Media, Cinema and Digital Studies

Update: Joni is coordinator of the Writing Center and leads the Writing Fellows program at .

My field is cinema and media studies, and my work is dedicated to the rigorous exploration of our understanding of the environment, natural resources, energy, and the politics enmeshed in their mediations. My scholarship focuses in part on pedagogical, or “useful,” cinema: this distinct, albeit loose category includes documentary film, a variety of entertainment media, television programs with science-based or environmentally-geared messages, as well as advertisement, propaganda, and even industry films. For example, I have worked on 1) a historiography of environmental documentary film since 2001, 2) a study of the intersection of environmental film and activism, and 3) an exploration of the limits of experiences of nature in creating environmental awareness. I not only study the representation of environmental issues, but also the media infrastructures, data, and material outcomes of environmental media.

Most recently, I have researched two disparate, but not unrelated areas: the historical and social function of gas industry films in interwar Britain, and the present-day use of drones to aid in conservation efforts. Between World War I and World War II, the British gas industry aimed to communicate the efficiency and safety of gas as a fuel source in the home. I view these early industry films as pedagogical in nature and as reflective of a burgeoning environmental sensibility surrounding the need for efficiency and economical energy. Though vastly different in their purpose, drones are part of the desire for control and efficiency as well, being used to monitor, surveil and sense environments. While pedagogical media can be seen as a harnessing tool to convince us that we have control over the environment, my work interrogates where agency settles and how it shifts.

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Yasmine Lamloum, ’22 PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory

Update: Yasmine is a lecturer in 51ÁÔĆć’s English Language Academy working with international students and students who are not native English speakers.

In 1999, the Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor put forth the concept of survivance, which has been incredibly influential for the understanding of the lives, histories and creative literatures of Native American peoples. Vizenor acknowledges that survivance is related to“survival,” but it also means more than that, as the term is imbued with empowering andagential traits. In other words, survivance is a portmanteau for survival and active resistance against genocidal violence and the assimilation of Native Americans. Despite the widespread use of this term for interpreting Native American Literature, survivance has not been used so much for comprehending other world literature, and thus in my work I want to explore the value and the relevance of this concept to understanding other literatures, specifically contemporary transnational fiction.

I examine survivance in refugee novels, as well as post-colonial and historical narratives.The texts I look at are from countries such as Pakistan, Morocco, and Lebanon where their protagonists share experiences of dislocation, resettlement, and hope. For example, I apply survivance to novels such as Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Moroccan novelist Laila Lalami. Using survivance as an analytic tool in transnational literature proves valuable for articulating how scholars, writers, and artists from different regions counteract and redress the consequences of structural violence and the destruction of their economy and habitat. Enriched by questions about gendering and power, the concept of survivance foils the construction of the marginalized “other” as a victim by dominant discourses.

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Zach Finch, ’17 PhD in Media, Cinema and Digital Studies

Update: Zach is on the teaching faculty here at UW-Milwaukee in the Film Studies program where he also provides advising to film studies majors and minors.

My dissertation tells the story of Scottish national cinema through Scotland’s short fiction films from 1930 to the present. As a small nation within the United Kingdom, Scotland’s film culture has played a subordinate role in relation to England’s and has struggled for decades to create its own thriving film industry. However, in the mid-1990s, critics and scholars began to talk of a uniquely Scottish national cinema, rather than the traditional and all-encompassing “British cinema,” because of the success of films like Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996). In spite of some key successes, the sustainable production of feature films has eluded Scotland, and as a result, many have doubted the existence of a true Scottish national cinema. I propose that instead of defining Scotland’s film culture exclusively by its feature-length productions, we should define it in a way that includes its rich short fiction film tradition.

Short fiction films are often overlooked within the discipline of Film Studies because of the commercial and cultural dominance of the feature. The short’s relative obscurity and its limited accessibility impede analysis, as scholars must work harder simply to view the films. Nonetheless, short films are vital to national cinemas because they incubate film movements, allow filmmakers to take risks, and provide opportunities for marginalized people to make films. For example, Lynne Ramsay’s “Small Deaths” is a clear forerunner of independent Scottish films of the 1990s. “Chick’s Day” by Enrico Cocozza deals with issues like juvenile crime and poverty. Additionally, Margaret Tait’s numerous short films explore the subjectivities of Scottish women during the mid-twentieth century. Many others reveal the diversity and richness of Scottish film culture.

In addition to a chapter on the specific functions of the short film in the context and creation of national cinemas, my dissertation contains chapters on periods of short filmmaking within Scotland. By studying fourteen short films from 1933 to 2013, I reveal the range and importance of short filmmaking in Scotland. Given that these films represent the nation, they often contest dominant representations of Scots and Scotland in mainstream film history. The final chapter contains interviews with active filmmakers as they speak about their experiences and the practical difficulties of making films.

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Shanae Aurora Martinez, ’19 PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory

Dissertation: Guides and Guidance: Subverting Tourist Narratives in Trans-Indigenous Time and Space

Update: Shanae is an assistant professor in the Department of English at .

My dissertation argues that Indigenous American literatures are acts of worldmaking with radical possibilities for achieving a just society.

Indigenous literatures demonstrate how academic spaces are constructed around institutionalized authority at the expense of Indigenous American worldviews. However, Indigenous texts also disrupt institutionalized power dynamics and model cooperative relationships based on mutual respect and reciprocity, rather than competition. As Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson have written, “the academy is worth Indigenizing because something productive will happen as a consequence” (5). As a method for the dual process of indigenizing and decolonizing knowledge production, I use Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s definition of intervening, which seeks to change institutions, rather than “changing indigenous peoples to fit the structures” of institutions (147).

The chapters of my dissertation examine historical retellings of settler colonial–indigenous American relationships, such as those found in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America and Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. I also study novels that feature fictionalized interventions, such as Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. In that novel, a tour guide offers an accurate account of the Cherokee Trail of Tears on a virtual reality ride, rather than a history that is simply entertaining for the visitor. By studying the conflation of memorialization with tourism, I unpack some of the ethical and political problems that intrude on popular forms of knowledge production. While I base my arguments on literary works, such as Gerald Vizenor’s screenplay, Harold of Orange, I also draw on fieldwork at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Both of those museums circulate problematic settler colonial narratives about Indigenous people.

My goal is to challenge the authority of these settler colonial sites of knowledge production using the methods found in indigenous literatures. By changing the stories that we tell about ourselves and each other, we can reconfigure the personal, communal, institutional, national, transnational, and global spaces in which they exist. Because universities across the Americas are on Indigenous lands, implementing social justice practices at the sites of knowledge production is a crucial step toward decolonization, peaceful coexistence, and the rightful return of Indigenous lands to achieve liberation for all.

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Kristin Prins, ’15 PhD in Rhetoric and Composition

Dissertation: Materiality, Craft, Identity, and Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing

Update: Kristin is an associate professor in the Department of English & Modern Languages at .

As a graduate student in Rhetoric and Composition, I study multimodal writing—how people compose with words, images, sounds, videos, textures, gestures, etc.—and I’m interested in connections between crafting (or making things) and writing (or composing things).

Traditional and digital crafts have enjoyed huge popularity in the past fifteen years, and groups like Stitch ’n Bitch and Sparrow Collective, activist organizations like Cast Off, websites like Craftster and Ravelry, and places like the 51ÁÔĆć Studio Arts & Craft Centre and Milwaukee Makerspace are all parts of that movement. It has become common in our society for regular people to make digital and physical objects to meet their needs, shape other people’s thinking, circulate information, and amuse their friends. And there’s a lot of excitement and pleasure that comes from that kind of work.

Crafters have a lot to teach us about building better writing practices and better communities. I want to leverage the excitement and pleasure of craft work in ways that help writers get better at, and feel better about, actually writing. My dissertation digs into craft and do-it-yourself (DIY) histories and practices to help writers pay attention to the range of choices they can make as they compose multimodal texts and, of course, to help them choose better. My goal is to get students excited about what their writing can do, such as engaging readers or helping readers see things from a new perspective. I also want students to see exactly how they can accomplish those things, by writing really smart sentences or by combining images and sounds in more compelling ways.

Beyond my dissertation, I’m interested in researching the work that craft and DIY do as productive social practices that touch many areas of our lives. How do multimodal projects shape public discussions? How have yarnbombers redefined urban spaces and the ways people use them? How have digital crafters made political arguments by Photoshopping images on social media? How have acts of self-provisioning like urban gardening changed national conversations about production and consumption? Craft and DIY are complex rhetorical activities, and my research is trying to understand how that work works.

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Molly Kessler, ’17 PhD in Professional and Technical Writing

Dissertation: Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Rhetorical Enactments of Self

Update: Molly is an Associate Professor in the Writing Studies program at the and the program’s director of graduate studies.

My work explores the ways in which women with chronic illnesses discuss their diseases, bodies, and minds. Focusing specifically on Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), my research examines how patients justify, negotiate, and cope with their disease. Given IBD’s elusive, sometimes embarrassing, symptoms, IBD patients often find themselves in one moment struggling to convince healthcare providers their disease exists, and in the next moment, attempting to hide their disease from everyone else.

Patients with IBD commonly spend years assessing their symptoms, everyday experiences, medical test results, and physician examinations in order to reach an eventual diagnosis. And, when and if an official diagnosis is reached, how to treat IBD—physically, mentally, and emotionally—often remains an amorphous task. Even more, because IBD’s symptoms typically are invisible, patients must confront the difficulty of revealing or concealing their disease to family members, spouses, friends, coworkers, etc. Communicating about IBD, however, isn’t always confined to language. In fact, in many cases, patients rely on visual cues, such as displaying an ostomy bag or revealing abdominal scars, to express aspects of IBD.

Every different audience and context presents a new rhetorical dilemma in which sufferers of IBD must establish and maintain a different disease identity. They must persuade outsiders that their invisible disease is both real and valid, in addition to communicating any necessary accommodations. For instance, posting a picture of abdominal scars on Twitter requires different rhetorical finesse than justifying an unusual number of trips to the bathroom to your new boss.

My dissertation first traces the medical and social histories of IBD, examining the root of the stigmas surrounding IBD and analyzing the demand for visual evidence, particularly with chronic illnesses, in order for diseases to be deemed real. My chapters then turn to interview and observational data to further examine how IBD patients navigate life with IBD, from work to body image to sexual activity, and how patients with IBD selectively reveal and conceal their disease to specific audiences.

I hope my work sheds new light on the communication challenges IBD patients face and the rhetorical adaptations they have to develop to navigate their lives.

The post Uncovering the rhetoric of an invisible and unspeakable disease appeared first on English.

Louise Zamparutti, ’18 PhD in Professional and Technical Writing

Update: Louise is an Assistant Professor of English at the .

The Basovizza Monument in northeast Italy was inaugurated as a national memorial in 2007. The monument commemorates victims of a so-called “Italian genocide” instigated by Yugoslavians at the end of World War II, a claim that is not substantiated through physical evidence. The designation of the site as a place of national memory and the narrative that it produces were initially very controversial and the monument was widely regarded as the brainchild of Italy’s far-right political parties. Today, however, the monument is a popular site for tourists from all over Italy and for classroom visits, and its popularity is enhanced through its evocative website and social media presence. It is no longer controversial or political.

My dissertation investigates how this monument transformed a politically divisive issue into a publicly accepted national narrative. I show how the monument combines claims of objectivity and fact with evocative, emotionally charged imagery in order to produce a new version of Italy’s World War II history. The motive and intent behind the monument’s narrative is invisible due to a form that invokes credibility and legitimacy.

I collected multiple forms of data, including photographs, interviews, and texts and media in support of the monument’s construction. I tracked recurring themes and motifs expressed in the monument and the supporting discourse. I identified specific argumentation strategies and showed how those strategies, by reinforcing established discourse, legitimize the narrative presented by the monument.

My research allows us to analyze how controversial issues become legitimized discourse, and invites inquiry into how the reverse might occur; that is, how non-controversial issues, discourses, and artifacts (such as monuments) might become controversial. Ultimately I hope to identify the incremental steps by which extreme viewpoints and actions manage to achieve normalization and public acceptance.

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Kevin McColley, ’20 PhD in Creative Writing

I am currently writing a novel (entitled Man of God) that explores the early settlement of the uppermost of the upper-midwestern United States and the clash of the Ojibway, Lakota, and European-American cultures that occurred there as the American frontier pushed west, culminating in the 1862 Lakota Uprising in southern Minnesota that resulted in the deaths of as many as three thousand European-American settlers. Writing historical fiction is a research challenge: ferreting accounts that can be trusted, and, for those that can’t be, understanding why they were written as they were written. For Man of God, I was fortunate to find memoirs of the first missionaries to the region in the 1840s, as well as eye-witness accounts of the uprising from both Lakota and European-American perspectives. My job now is to meld all that information into an engaging, yet accurate, account. At a deeper level, Man of God explores the nature of historical fiction in contemporary America—a “western,” in a time and place where the assumptions and mores of the traditional western novel are, thankfully, either seriously challenged or already overthrown.

I have published six novels, the last two of which were nominated by their publisher, Simon and Schuster, for the National Book Award. I am a military veteran, and a thread that runs through all my published work (as well as Man of God) is the theme of war and especially war trauma, how those who suffer from war deal with that suffering, and how American society accepts or refuses to accept the war-wounded who have returned to it.

The post Novelist wrestles with history appeared first on English.

Jeremy Carnes, ’20 PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory

Update: Jeremy is on the graduate faculty of the English, Rhetoric & Composition program at the Univeristy Of Central Florida.

We usually arrange American literature in historical categories from realism to modernism to postmodernism and beyond. To think around the continually overstretched reach of this historical schema, I look to a type of literature that has, for many years, existed and flourished outside the realm of academia: comics. As Jared Gardener puts it, “almost never being respectable, comics has been left to develop its own language and its own unique relationship with readers, often for long periods.” Because of its independent development, comics require not only different historical categories but different assumptions about the relationship between literature and history.

My dissertation begins by focusing on Art Spiegelman’s 2004 collection In the Shadow of No Towers, which chronicles his experiences during and after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Through his consistent mixing of the past with the present, Spiegelman practices what I call transhistoric reading, where texts exist simultaneously within and beyond their historic moment. Reading in this way allows these texts to complicate our relationships with events, stories, and cultural productions across histories and periods. Transhistoric reading opens new pathways for studying literatures of minoritized groups, and reading across history also starts the process of bringing equity to comics studies. My latter chapters focus on Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men, Black Panther, and the Indigenous comics collection Moonshot to argue that such a broadening of historical understanding pushes literary studies to rethink how we approach history, especially as it is tied to various identity categories including gender, sexuality, race, and indigeneity.

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