Tag: Rhetoric Theory and Culture

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric, Theory and Culture program in the Department of Humanities. I previously earned a Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing from St. Cloud State University, as well as undergraduate degrees in English literature and creative writing.

The Finishing Fellowship will allow me to continue my research on the rhetoric of conspiracy culture. My dissertation examines how conspiracy theories and anti-conspiracy discourses both draw from and shape public understandings of science and technology. I am especially interested in the rhetorical struggle for epistemic supremacy between conspiracy theorists and their detractors, as well as the emulation of scientific disciplinary practices by users of online conspiracy forums. My project seeks to better understand how terms like “conspiracy theorist,” “truther,” “debunker,” and “skeptic,” operate rhetorically to reify and mediate the boundaries between outlandish ideas and legitimated knowledge.

My time at Michigan Tech has allowed me to pursue interests in digital rhetoric and public understanding of science, to develop a critical and transdisciplinary pedagogy, and to refine my interests in writing program administration and writing center studies. I am grateful for the support of the Department of Humanities and the Graduate School. I am particularly thankful for my advisory committee—Dr. Abraham Romney, Dr. Marika Seigel, and Dr. Carlos Amador—whose mentorship and encouragement has been invaluable.

I am currently a PhD candidate on the interdisciplinary Rhetoric, Theory and Culture program in the Department of Humanities. Previously I obtained a Master of Philosophy degree in English Linguistics and Language Acquisition from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, and a BA in English and Linguistics from the University of Ghana. My current research interests are located at the intersections of Technical Communication, Critical Discourse Studies, and Rhetoric. My dissertation contributes to international technical communication and technologies through analyzing how a locally developed geo-spatial technology was created to organize a digital addressing system in a Global South context. I demonstrate the consequences of such technological innovations and policies for developing countries. My work has been well received with at least seven awards for its importance in centering and theorizing technologies emerging from the complex transnational context. Additionally, I work within medical rhetoric, researching the rhetorical ethics of medical discourse, especially transnational Coronavirus vaccine trials, and how multinational pharmaceutical writing could be more audience-focused. I have developed a Multimodal Critical Discourse Pedagogy that emphasizes critical-rhetorical micro disciplinary and macro social contexts that address real-world exigencies and audiences beyond students’ familiar geographies. This Finishing Fellowship will help me totally concentrate on writing and revising my dissertation, defending it, and graduating as scheduled. I am grateful to the Michigan Tech Graduate School and the Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel for this fellowship. I am also grateful to my advisor, Dr. Victoria L. Bergvall, for her guidance and support and to the Department of Humanities for supporting my graduate studies.

I am a fourth year PhD Candidate on the program of Rhetoric, Theory and Culture in Humanities Department. My research focuses on the rhetoric of healthcare and medicine and technical communication, particularly in the Chinese context. To be specific, I study the relationship between the healthcare and medicine rhetoric and Chinese culture and how they shape each other with the advancement of communication technologies. In my doctoral dissertation, by rhetorical analysis, I examine the expression of rhetorical agency in the 2017/2018 No. 1 childbirth and pregnancy commercial app named Babytree to see to what extent the app spreads the information and knowledge of pregnancy and mothering to empower its users (Chinese women); how the users write their embodied experience of pregnancy into the online narratives and stories to respond to China’s dominant and hegemonic healthcare and medical discourse and practice; how the users who, having been excluded from labor markets or having limited choices in labor markets due to getting pregnant, use technological affordances of social media to enter those markets, become professional communicators, and achieve their rhetorical agency economically. My study expands our understanding of the rhetoric of health and medicine in an international context and extends the field’s conceptions of rhetorical agency by exploring how rhetorical agency can be asserted economically in a non-capitalist, non-Western context. To put it another way, my study on rhetorical agency is considered on a more global scale than previous studies. At last, I am extremely grateful to the graduate school for this generous financial support. I also would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Dr. Marika Seigel and my committee members Dr. Robert Johnson and Dr. Sarah Bell for their enlightening and intellectual guidance.