Like my teaching interests, my research is located at intersections.The function of social media in writing studies and the implications of New Media for student writing is central to my research. Specifically, I investigate social media such as blogs, last.fm, Vox, and Facebook as part of my ongoing interest in textuality and the ways New Media forms are challenging how we think about what a text is, how a text delivers messages and how writers and readers experience digital spaces.
Because Web 2.0 technologies encourage us to extend our offline lives by bringing them online, the complexity of place, and the participation in community has intensified along with our nostalgia for neighborhoods, community and small town America. I am currently working on an article which explores the "whereness" of identity, and the priviliging of geophysical locations. Specifically, I examine the trend of hyperlocal content, user-generated content emerging from location, and from connections to place.
I am also particularly intrigued by how "New Media" affects the ways we view "old media" texts, such as scrapbooks, quilts, and recipes. Additionally, I am curious about the role nostalgia plays when technologies become "outdated." Geoffrey Sirc relates the process of selection in composition to the iterative and combinatory process of selecting songs for a mix tape, which requires a number of rhetorical decisions some more tangible than others. He talks about the sense of cool, and the sublime process of selection; how you just "know" when you've got it right. Inherent in Sirc's passion for the mix tape and its metaphorical applications is a sense of nostalgia. Would the mix tape be an approporiate metaphor if the technology had not been replaced by mp3 players and iTunes? Johndan Johnson-Eiola reminds us change encourages nostalgia, and "we allow our nostalgia to channel new possibilities into old pathways." I am interested in the ways in which "old media" texts absorb these new possibilities. Further I am concerned with how we map memories and fondness onto both new and "old" media texts in restrictive and dangerous ways, particularly for women. I hope to explore these issues in a future research project.
{creative non-fiction}
I recently completed a narrative essay titled Living in Between: Stories of a Southern Girlhood which reveals the ways classed silences create a space for nostalgia. My essay argues that Southern nostalgia, inexorably tied as it is to place, promotes storytelling over truth in ways that maintain the necessary pretenses of middle-class survival and that doing so denies the rhetorical violence enacted in/on/through class subjectivities and identities.
