As a scholar of Rhetoric and Composition, I understand that design is never accidental. The study of rhetoric allows me to analyze and consider how language, objects, and institutional structures produce, reinforce, and maintain power. This is how I approach all my classes and all my research regardless of topic. Whether this is a video games seminar or a recovery project about home economics, I do not believe we can ever talk about the composition of anything if we don’t agree that systems of power shape our world and that we are given the choice to become complicit in these systems or resist, reimagine, and reinvent these systems.

 

I find that storytelling allows me to both detangle those systems of power to better understand them and create new narratives to counter that system. While I come to the academy as a working-class, first-gen student—I recognize that as a white, cis-gendered, middle-class passing woman that my body affords me privileges. I consider my role as a teacher-scholar to be making the academy and everyday writing spaces more comfortable, welcoming, and accessible for all bodies. 

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I came to Texas Christian University so that I could gain specialization in New Media and Women and Gender Studies. Most of my current research is about food, which I approach from a few viewpoints:

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• Anti-racist Possibilities: I teach and research whiteness within food writing and how teacher-scholars can use food as a way to approach topics within composition classrooms such as: colonization, appropriation, relationality, othering/exclusion, cultural flattening, and representation.

• Embodiment: Using feminist and disability studies, fat studies, and material rhetorics I explore food's connection to the body, spaces, and groups. 

• Popular Culture: I’m interested both in topics of “every day” people, places, and things and in how popular culture has represented stories and objects through new media.

 

I’ve learned that food provides an approachable topic which can often help us consider how people form communities or exclude others. While eating is part of daily life, food media is a very established part of literature. It is one form of women’s writing and making, but digital platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook has become increasingly a part of daily life for most people. My current research projects look at food in multiple sites: social media, cooking literature, advertisements, and instructionals. In order to understanding these items as sites of powers, we have to look not just to the writing, but the historical context of that food as a material object and the bodies of those who produce and circulate the media. Food is the type of object that really tends to be perceived as neutral, so I feel that if I can demonstrate how much food produces and maintains systems of power I can do the work necessary to reveal larger issues. Additionally, food (like language/AS a language) can work both ways—it can be used to produce and maintain whiteness, classism or sexism—BUT they can also be used to create community, include others, and tell stories.