RESEARCH OVERVIEW
As a scholar, I'm concerned with multimedia production, especially film and video, and the ways in which it intersects with rhetoric, popular culture and our ability to question and deepen our notions of gender and race. Being a filmmaker, I explore how film and video can enrich rhetoric scholarship and pedagogy and bring scholarly ideas to publics outside university communities. In an effort to make classroom experiences relevant to the multiple ways in which our culture consumes information, I write and present on how to encourage students to think rhetorically about and produce multimedia texts such as short films and websites.
Through my work with agnès films, I seek to examine the ways in which filmmakers and academics benefit from having closer interactions with each other. With agnès films, I also aim to investigate the effectiveness of online communities at developing professional and creative bonds between people from different geographical locations and professions. My hope is to show that communities like agnès films can be used to forster and support the kind of work they champion—female-centered and feminist film and video production in this particular case.
I am also interested in how female-centered young adult fiction, film adaptations, celebrity culture and fandom come together in cultural phenomena like Harry Potter, the Twilight Saga and the Hunger Games and have a formative impact on young female audience members' views of themselves and society. As a scholar, I believe it is important to trace movements that mobilize millions of young adults and analyze not only what kind of influence they have, but how they manage to become so popular. Being interested in multimedia work, I find the way in which these phenomena develop through various platforms—what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture—to be an insightful way to study how cultural trends work in our digital society.
DISSERTATION
My dissertation seeks to create connections between film and video production, feminism and academia. Within academia, I target rhetoric specifically, since due to its interest in production and multimedia texts, the field is well suited to embrace the ideas I propose. Even though feminist theory has had an ambivalent relationship with film analysis, I argue that feminist film and video producers have developed countercultural aesthetics and ways of working with technology and distribution that provide a viable model for university instructors who seek to delve into production with their students and as part of their own scholarship. I discuss feminist filmmaking methods at length and suggest ways in which they can be adopted in academia.
I claim that looking at film and video from a hermeneutic/textual analysis perspective alone is an impoverished way to engage with the medium, since the means and process of production are instrumental in shaping the final product. With the current technological breakthroughs which make filming and editing equipment more available to non-professional filmmakers than ever before, I argue that it is crucial for film and video scholars to become familiar with production in order to deepen their understanding of film and video, whether or not they write about production itself.
Providing a theoretical and experiential account of my own work as a filmmaker and instructor whose students produce short documentaries and movie previews, I examine the value of film and video production to furthering students' ability to reach out to the community and compose in the genres they voluntarily visit. Besides my own experience, I support my claims by citing my students’ written reflections on their own video work, as well as interviews with fellow rhetoric scholars who practice and teach video production. Throughout this work, I examine the ways in which film and video interact with the internet, especially social networking, since online presence plays a vital role in distribution, connecting with crew members and editors, and finding communities where members support each other throughout the production and distribution processes.
PUBLICATION ABSTRACTS
Bridges, Nodes, and Bare Life: Race in the “Twilight” SagaForthcoming in Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the Twilight Series (Ashgate) edited by Anne Morey
This essay argues that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and its film adaptations not only prominently feature people of color but also address race directly. The novels and the films enrich our understanding of race by exploring notions of both metaphorical and literal race. Three metaphorical races—humans, vampires, and werewolves—inhabit the series, and the last two only relate to each other through deep racial prejudice. Using Heidegger, Agamben and Castells as my theoretical frameworks, I argue that through her use of metaphorical races, Meyer presents a complex and innovative questioning of racism, even while her treatment of literal race is less successful. Readers may perceive her treatment of other people of color such as Latina/os and the members of the Amazon and Egyptian covens as misrepresentation via a series of racial microaggressions, which are unconscious acts of racism that linger in our post civil-rights society. By addressing these microaggressions, I seek to complicate and enrich the saga’s and the films’ already multilayered treatment of race. I end by arguing that the success of the Twilight saga’s books and film adaptations in part results from Meyer’s willingness to deal with race’s ambiguities and complexity.
Review of 37 Stories about Leaving Home, dir. Shelly Silver, Between: Living in the Hyphen, dir. Anne Marie Nakagawa, and Same Same, but Different, dir. Rosylyn Rhee
Films for the Feminist Classroom, 2.1 (Spring 2010). Web.
This review creates connections between three documentary films, analyzing their discussion of immigration, race and feminism. I provide suggestions for prominent topics and themes presented by each film that may be explored by instructors wanting to use these works in their courses, as well as activities and readings that can lead students to examine the documentaries both from filmic and feminist perspectives.
Group Work and Autonomy: Empowering the Working-Class Student
Open Words: Access and English Studies 2:2 (Fall: 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 with. Based on my experience as an adjunct composition instructor at The University of Akron, the essay analyzes the way in which my working-class students thrived in group work assignments and valued the freedom to democratically select the topics on which they wrote their papers. I invoke Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo 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.