RESEARCH INTERESTS
In my research, I hope to explore the duality of identity that comes with immigration. I am also interested in issues of celebrity, especially female, and in how the internet and other new media technologies have helped us transgress previous boundaries between the private and the public self. I hope to use my experiences as a documentary filmmaker in order to theorize about the way in which video and film affect our understanding of race, gender, sexuality and the self.
SELECTED ABSTRACTS
Group Work and Autonomy: Empowering the Working-Class Student
Open Words 2:2 (2008): 3-23. Print.This essay uses the findings in Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau’s study of the differences between social classes in the United States, to suggest that group work is a classroom strategy that benefits working-class students by capitalizing on their ease in relating to their peers as opposed to their teachers, who represent the sort of authority figures middle-class students feel more comfortable relating to. Based on the author’s experience as an adjunct composition instructor at The University of Akron, the essay analyzes the way in which her working-class students thrived in group-work assignments and valued the freedom to democratically select the topics on which they wrote their papers. Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo is invoked to elucidate the journey that working-class students must make to join the primarily middle-class institution that is academia, and how as composition instructors, who support our students through that crucial first year, we can help them overcome the transition without compromising their identity.