Research

A sense of place: I am drawn to study the different ways that people make sense of place rhetorically. As such, I am interested in how maps are created, how planners and urban designers conceptualize spaces, and how everyday citizens use spaces in ways that give them a sense of place.  My work explores the connection between rhetoric and place in order to provide us with a greater understanding of how spaces are made and experienced — from both the perspectives of experts and users.

Digital Stewardship: Whether exploring GIS, Google SketchUp, or social media platforms, I see it important to learn about the affordances of digital technologies in professional and technical settings. My work looks at how digital tools can be deployed communally –whether that be in coordination with other classes, with other administrators, or with other users– in hopes of creating artifacts that carry more participatory weight that those constructed from a top-down perspective.

Professional Communication: I am also interested in the needs of students in STEM fields learning to become professional communicators.   My research takes into account the institutional structures that need to be created and maintained to provide students with such experiences, as well as the friction that can arise from asking students to become “more professional.”

Diverse Publics: It is important to understand how minority populations are negatively impacted by work across all of the areas above. For example, how maps occlude the existence of racial minorities or how technologies negatively impact individuals with disabilities. This cultural work is vital to understanding issues of access and inclusivity across our rhetorical scholarship.

This project built on place-based studies in composition and rhetoric that have highlighted how inequities resulting from planning and design policies disconnect individuals from their communities (Ackerman, Fleming) and how urban development has created a crisis in how individuals relate to each other (Rice). Building off of this work, I explored how urban designers compose space as they draft plans for redesigning a particular area, paying particular attention to which constituents are allowed to influence a design and which remain on the periphery. Moreover, I sought to determine how publics are construed in this process and the engagement that takes place between communities and experts through the visual/material media that designers deploy.

Because much of the work in rhetoric and composition often casts place-making professions in a monolithic light, I suggest in this long project that we can learn more about the ways that spaces impact communities by turning to recent research in Technical and Professional Communication on network theories and workplace studies which may help shed light on the various actors that help bring about multimodal communicative artifacts to the public. In this way, we can have a better sense of the complicated web within spaces are designed and determine which arguments and values might correspond with which particular stakeholders in these scenarios. Thus, my project extends work on place-based rhetorics by turning a critical lens toward urban design classrooms and workplaces in which students and experts assemble their visual artistic and inartistic proofs in the composition of spaces.

As I highlight, there may be numerous experts within place-making fields which may share our concerns for usable and socially responsible designs with whom we can align in order to convey the discursive concerns of the public on issues of space. Despite the allies that we may have in place-making fields, as recent publications have noted, there is still much that these experts can learn from professional and technical communication and rhetoric studies as well.

This research project then, is a response to such calls by opening conversations with urban designers about community engagement, usability, and ideology. At the same time, we can benefit from these conversations by learning more about visual communication and design from fields that default to these forms of communication. Indeed, while many studies have been produced on visual communication and multimodal design in professional writing and technical communication, this research has usually treated multimodality as an add-on to alphabetic text which helps only in the transmission of technical ideas. My project asks us to examine fields where the visual is the primary means of discourse and where text is secondary to the message. In this way, our students may think more broadly about digital design—beyond document design software to engaging with design technologies.

As Digital Humanities scholarship has made clear, students, researchers, and instructors can learn more about technological communication practices by engaging with platforms directly—creating, iterating, and disseminating these digital work. Such practices however will involve collaborating with other experts outside our field, breaking down academic and professional silos. Throughout this project, I highlight ways that we can become more active in discussions with STEM and design professions implicated in place-making and teach students in our classes to consider developing a broader awareness of design implications.

Many studies in professional writing have engaged with a broad range of issues in design. Those that investigate spatial design (via architecture and landscape design projects) have studied the implications of effectively communicating design to others after a design has been created. My project shifts the focus of analysis, asking us to interrogate the rhetorical choices that are made not only during the communication of a design but those that are assembled together in the moment when experts design. In this way, I hope to open conversations about the importance of discourse and equity, which the field of urban design is currently needing.