Scholarship

As a scholar, my research interests lie in feminist and digital rhetorics and their influence on video games, writing transfer and research, writing center pedagogy, and research methods.

One of the core tenets that shapes my research agenda is an awareness of and ability to implement diverse research methods. Recognizing there are no fixed methods to every research problem, my primary focus is in mixed-methods, blending quantitative numerical data gathering with qualitative approaches in survey, observations, and close reading analysis. Ethnography, a method in which I’ve published on in various rhetorical fields, such as design making, social media studies, fan studies, and queer and feminist studies, enables the unique rhetorical context and discourse community to guide how the methods function.

Rhetorical applications to popular culture are the foundations of many research projects. I often adopt diverse rhetorical theories to apply to a spectrum of popular culture, primarily analyzing the queer and feminist rhetorics behind the text in question, especially in regards to video games.

I’ve published in Alphaville: A Journal of Film and Screen on how a history of queer archival methodologies shaped the archives of queer characters in popular video games. My Masters’ thesis utilized domestic rhetoric, as created by Jordynn Jack, to explore how two decades of a video game franchise relied on the position that women belong in the home and should be murdered when they deviate from domestic roles. Rhetorical silence of female criminals as a means of survival and escape have been published, with a piece on arguing the rhetorical founding mother, Aspasia, remains the same from her first ancient adaptations to the modern video game version. Finally, my dissertation argues social media and online fan communities enable unique rhetorical harassment campaigns, specifically ones founded by women and/or queer folk to create a purity culture and chase away dissenters.

I also have interest in teacher and writing tutoring research, having collaborated on projects to gauge how tutors feel in multimodal tutoring sessions or a presentation, currently under review, how communities are formed in Learning Commons where many tutors work exclusively online. Writing transfer, in regards to how media and prior interest influence it, are also among my projects, with preliminary research performed during a video game based course I designed, and finalized, IRB approved data collection planned in Fall 2020 in hopes of presenting and publishing on the findings.