About
I work as a humanities scholar with training in rhetoric, meaning that I’m one of those odd people who still believes that language and symbols play a major role in our lives.
Although this interest began in philosophy of language as an undergraduate, my interests now lie in the intersections of rhetoric, philosophy, and political economy. Whether it is about drug stigma, higher education, or capitalist culture, my focus remains on how we humans are habituated and attuned to act in ways that support particular political or economic systems whether we are consciously aware of it or not. In my current position as a Ph.D. Candidate in Composition & Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I’m writing a dissertation about how anti-drug rhetoric stigmatizes drug users and affectively habituates people to act fearfully, violently, and prohibitively toward drug users. My other research has been published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and the Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
I have also been the primary instructor for twenty-five sections of writing and technical communication courses across various educational institutions, including UW-Madison, Whitworth University, and Western Washington University. As a teacher, my aim is to aid students in cultivating the critical tools and capacities to engage in the ongoing crises facing society. My classes are designed around the principle of being conceptually complex yet logistically simple. My current course about “The Rhetoric of Education” considers what pursuing education means today, including whether receiving a solely technical education (that might be get you a higher paying job!) remains the only aim of education.