RTC PhD candidate, Tolu Odebunmi recently received a IGALA 10 USA-based Scholar Travel Grant of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in June 2018 with academic support from Dr. Victoria Bergvall. The grant was to assist her to present at the International Gender and Language (IGALA) conference at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana. The conference theme was “Gender, Language and Sexuality in Multicultural Contexts.” Odebunmi’s paper was titled “A Critical Discourse Study of ‘Sex trash talk’ in Liberian protests.” The grant was administered through the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA), and was aimed at graduate students whose abstracts have been accepted by the IGALA conference scientific committee.
RTC Master student, Nancy Achiaa Frimpong presented a paper on August 11, 2018 at the Comics Studies Society conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference theme was “Mind the Gaps! The Futures of the Field”. Frimpong presented on the topic “Ebola Virus Disease as Colored: The Case of American Online News Dissemination of Comics.” Her presentation received financial support from the Graduate Students Government Travel Grant, and the Humanities Department Travel Grant; and academic mentorship from communication and culture professor, Dr. Sue Collins.
RTC graduate, Joel Beatty, and professor Stefka Hristova have co-authored a chapter in the book, Surveillance, Race, Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Their chapter is titled “Articulating Race: Reading Skin Color as Taxonomy and as Numerical Data”. According to Dr. Hristova, the chapter “explores the transformation of race into biodata at the turn of the 20th century”. The book is edited by Susan Flynn, University of the Arts, London; and Antonia Mackay, Oxford Brookes University.
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory and Culture, has published the article, The Missing Subject in Schizophrenia, for the Neuroethics Blog at Emory University.
Silke Feltz, a PhD candidate in Humanities, has published a book review of “The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics,” by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson and Tyler Doggett (Editors) in Metapsychology Online Reviews.
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory and Culture, has a book review of “Phenomenology of Illness” published at Metapsychology Online Reviews.
In addition, Swartz published the article, “Are You Really Trans?”: The Problem with Trans Brain Science for the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics official blog.
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory & Culture, has published “A Feminist Bioethics Approach to Diagnostic Uncertainty” in The American Journal of Bioethics.
Nancy Henaku, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the RTC program, has received one of three inaugural Feminist Research Grants awarded by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. This will support her travel to archives for her dissertation research on the rhetoric of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, the first female candidate for president of Ghana. The review committee “expressed great enthusiasm for [her] dissertation project, which is poised to bring important perspective from the global South and specifically from Ghana to ongoing research in transnational feminist rhetoric.”
Brilliant Books in Traverse City, recently interviewed Rhetoric, Theory and Culture PhD student, writer and poet Edzordzi Agbozo about his writing. Two of Agbozo’s poems appear in the spring 2018 issue of Northern Michigan’s premier literary journal, Dunes Review. See the full interview online.
RTC PhD student Sarah Potter received a top paper award and presented the paper on the panel, Top Papers in the Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice Interest Group at the Central States Communication Association Conference. The paper title is “Different Rights (in)Different Times: Rendering the Invisible Visible in a Comparative Iconographic Analysis of the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913 and the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.” She was also a panel member for the graduate student discussion session, “When the Experts Don’t Agree: Navigating Differences in Faculty Advice.” The conference was held April 5-8, 2018 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.