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Research
Areas of Expertise
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Rhetoric and Sexual Violence
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Activism, Protest, and Social Justice Rhetoric
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Rhetorical History, Criticism, and Feminism
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Critical Rhetoric and Organizational Communication
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Communication, Culture, Identity, and Intersectionality
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Interviewing and Focus Group Methods
Projects
Weaponizing Apologia in Response to Me Too: Organizational Silencing in CBS Coverage of Charlie Rose
At the height of the Me Too movement, CBS News fired its top correspondent, Charlie Rose, for sexual misconduct—a scandal that subjected CBS to public scrutiny. My article investigates CBS’s reporting on the Charlie Rose case to explore how the organization used the apologia strategies of corrective action, blame shifting, and bolstering in efforts to repair its reputation and answer the Me Too movement’s call for change. In contrast to most apologia scholarship, which understands image repair as a defensive discourse, my article shows how CBS weaponized apologia as an offensive rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that CBS’s apologia contributes to broader discourses of rape culture by externalizing silencing tactics characteristic of internal organizational communication, individualizing narratives of sexual violence, and concealing survivors’ experiences from its rhetoric. Ultimately, this study offers insight about apologia’s ability to recuperate hegemonic discourses surrounding sexual violence and to institutionalize organizational rhetorics of rape culture.
Mainstream cultural rhetorics rarely depict sexual violence survivors as fat bodies—a problem due, in part, to desirability discourses that deem fat people “unrapeable.” In this essay, however, I give visibility to narratives beyond desirability that more subtly contribute to erasure of fat survivors’ experiences. In theorizing the notion of “rhetorical mirroring,” which occurs when common scripts in two different discursive communities deploy parallel argumentative forms, I suggest that narratives of victim-blaming, medicalization, and villainization surface in both anti-fat and rape culture rhetoric in ways that prime fat sexual violence survivors as “unworthy” victims. By analyzing a variety of anti-fat texts and revealing how they discursively participate in rape logic, I argue that the mirroring of anti-fat and hegemonic sexual violence rhetorics glues together a cultural articulation in which fatness and victimhood emerge as mutually exclusive characteristics. This study ultimately highlights the intersectional, theoretical potential of rhetorical mirroring and the necessity of recognizing the interconnectedness of anti-fatness and rape culture in a post-Me Too era.
What is "So Severe, Pervasive, and Objectively Offensive?": Defining Sexual Harassment, Investigating Reporting Requirements, and Supporting Disclosures with Feminist Role-Playing
While college campuses require sexual violence prevention trainings for students and staff, they are rarely sufficient, given that they seldom offer clear definitions of sexual violence, reflect on relationships between identity and victimhood, or explore broader constraints of academic institutions that inhibit sexual violence victims from healing. Nevertheless, my co-author (Kylie J. Johnson) and I argue that a communication-centered approach to combatting sexual violence—or, in essence, a pedagogical orientation that emphasizes how language functions as a tool of productive intervention—poses novel possibilities for transforming students’ understandings of sexual violence. Two survivor advocacy organizations that we volunteer for use role-playing activities to teach communities about sexual violence, both centering the productive role that communication skills play in challenging rape culture. As such, we have used communicative role-playing practices in our classrooms to enhance students’ communication skills in ways that challenge sexual harassment—a discursive phenomenon that lays the building blocks for material violence on college campuses. This original activity article—one unique in its privileging of communication as a vital resource for stopping sexual harassment—spotlights our role-playing approach.
In 1991, Anita Hill shifted societal understandings of sexual violence when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Twenty-seven years later, Hill reemerged in public discourse when Christine Blasey Ford also testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about how Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. This article analyzes widely-circulated editorial and non-editorial news coverage of the Ford/Kavanaugh hearings to assess public memories of Anita Hill during the 2018 confirmation hearings. I argue that despite the news outlets’ support for Ford, the 2018 coverage conveniently constructs memories of Anita Hill to prop up white supremacy. Specifically, through rhetorics of similarity, women-centric discourse, and progress narratives, news outlets render Hill’s Blackness absent, engaging in a rhetoric that promotes hierarchical understanding of sexual victimization by missing opportunities to challenge archetypal notions of white “worthy victimhood.” This analysis offers insight about the promise of using public memory scholarship to study survivors’ experiences and the necessity of centering race in our discourses about sexual violence.
"We Must Stick by Our Guns": A Rhetorical History of Organized Violence in the U.S. Radium Corporation's Archives
Beginning in 1917, dozens of women acquired employment as watch painters for the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), an organization that would eventually kill them. While the USRC knew that the watch paint could cause its employees radium poisoning, the organization kept its workers unaware of radium’s potential for harm and caused the deaths of numerous female employees who would infamously become known as the “Radium Girls.” Historical scholarship has evaluated the Radium Girls tragedy, praising the women’s persistent litigation tactics that resulted in multiple pieces of groundbreaking workplace safety legislation. However, less is known about how the USRC discursively responded to backlash regarding its handling of the Radium Girls—a gap in literature that, if addressed, would provide key insight about communication surrounding one of the most infamous instances of organizational negligence in U.S. history. This essay, therefore, analyzes hundreds of archived letters that USRC officials wrote to one another between the 1920s and 1940s. In doing so, I argue that the USRC’s rhetoric about the Radium Girls organizes violence through three discursive strategies: hierarchizing evidence, deploying narratives of organizational injury, and establishing spectered notions of victimhood. This essay expands scholarship on organizational violence by pointing to specific communicative strategies that encourage material harm. Additionally, this paper makes a methodological contribution to the field of organizational communication by treating archival texts as legitimate sources of knowledge production. I ultimately call upon organizational communication scholars to use archival methods as means for writing rhetorical organizational histories.
Nonprofit organizations faced a high demand for their services during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet they experienced unique constraints due to their distinct financial model amidst a global economic crisis. Given the extraordinary circumstances that nonprofits confronted during the pandemic, the purpose of this study is to understand nonprofit workers’ experiences navigating COVID-19, how they coped with COVIDrelated constraints, how they generated agency amidst restrictions, and built resilience. Through 25 semi-structured interviews with workers employed in a variety of nonprofit sectors, the findings indicate that despite numerous COVID-19 constraints, nonprofit workers used communicative resilience to generate new rules and resources within their organization and cope with volatile pandemic challenges. While this enactment of resilience provided for positive experiences during the pandemic, the new structures may not be sustainable long-term for the organization. In addition, my co-authors (Autumn Buzzetta, Elizabeth A. Williams, and Cari Whittenburg) and I offer theoretical implications surrounding communicative resilience as a mechanism for rewriting organizational rules and practical implications for nonprofits as they confront future crises.
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