Research

My academic research focuses on intersections of rhetoric, technology, culture and writing. The function of social media in writing studies and the implications of new media for student writing is central to my research project. Specifically, my recent research has concentrated on social media such as blogs, last.fm, Vox, and Facebook My dissertation examines user interfaces of social media, exploring how participants (authors and users) and viewers (readers) create meaning through interface tools like widgets, customizable templates, and user profiles. To investigate such use I designed a section of an upper-level writing course which utilized blogs as the main form of communication. Through critical analysis of students’ texts (both formal and informal blog posts) as well as analysis of available scholarship on blogging in the writing classroom and principles of usability and design, my pedagogy chapter centers on the ways in which students create and resist specific classroom and writer identities. Perhaps more significantly, this chapter discusses how students talked about the specific tools they employed to create and resist the identities expected of them and played out through their blogs. Drawing on usability theories from Donald Norman, Steve Krug, Ben Shneiderman, Nicholas Negroponte,  Jakob Nielsen, etc., the work of  information architects such as Jesse James Garrett, Peter Morville, Sarah Horton and Patrick Lynch, architectural philosophies from Frank Gehry, Winifred Gallagher, Alain de Boton, and geography theories focusing on space and place theory from Yi-Fu Tuan, Akiko Bush, and Tim Cresswell,  my dissertation looks at the ways in which the architectures of social media shape user roles, experiences, expectations and identities. t

I am also interested in what has been termed "steam punk" texts, early science-fiction texts such as Frankenstein and The Time Machine where scientific and technological explorations enhance and increase surveillance of the body as it relates to social class and cultural norms. .