Technology.

Community.

Sensing.

As a community-engaged researcher, I help people organize around their experience of digital technology. My dissertation project, Dissonant Rhetorics: Hearing, Uniting, and Maintaining Community in Extractive Environments, takes up this subject by developing a community-based framework that supports rhetorical action around artificial intelligence infrastructure. Spanning technical and professional communication, the digital humanities, and communication studies, the project advances public engagement with emerging digital technologies to create more equitable sensory futures.

In this project, I employ methods related to soundwalking, digital mapping, and folksonomy to explore how academic researchers can partner with communities to support more effective communication practices around technology. My dissertation contributes to scholarship and research on public engagement with digital technology by clarifying the possibilities and limitations of community-engaged research on sonic and environmental problems in rhetoric and writing studies.

For completion of this project I was awarded an English Excellence Fellowship, and fieldwork related to it has been supported by the Modern Language Association and Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. 

Selected Publications

  • Extractive Partnerships: Environment, Community, and Reciprocity Along the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Pipeline is a forthcoming article in Community Literacy Journal (summer 2026). This article theorizes extraction as a logic that simultaneously exploits communities and their environments, producing compounded risks for community partnerships. Focusing on the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Pipeline (PRGT) and its passage through Indigenous territories, I argue that extractive partnerships operate rhetorically by collapsing the diverse needs of communities to facilitate resource exploitation and environmental harm.

  • Dissonant Rhetorics: A Mood, Object, and Proposition at the Limits of Resonance is an article in second-round peer review at Rhetoric Review. It advances rhetorical theories of resonance by examining dissonance as a mood, object, and proposition that shapes sonic relations. Dissonance reveals how conflict, tension, and upset permeate sonic environments, producing affective experiences that are unevenly distributed and deeply contested. Focusing on the Permian Basin and a group affected by the sound of its natural gas pipelines, I demonstrate how extractive systems generate unsettling and discomforting conditions that shape organizing around sound. Ultimately, this article offers a framework for sonic rhetoric that expands the concept of resonance to encompass the plurality of fraught, divergent, and inequitable sonic experiences animating rhetorical action.

  • Marked Sound: Rhetorical Listening and the Affordances of Digital Annotation (co-authored with Tanya Clement) was published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. This article examines how digital annotation functions as an affordance for rhetorical listening in audiovisual archives. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s theory of affordances and Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening, we argue that annotations reconfigure listening as an inventive and relational process that offers new directions for sonic engagement. Focusing on three case studies—Anne Sexton, Roy Kiyooka, and Muriel Rukeyser—we illustrate how marked sound can foster cross-cultural rhetorical exchange and create new ways to listen in digital environments. In these case studies, rhetorical listening is accomplished through the use of AVAnnotate, a minimal computing application that enables users to create, publish, and circulate time-stamped annotations and develop new possibilities for interpretive invention across audio and video recordings.

  • Digital Rhetoric in the Age of GenAI is a webtext submitted to Computers & Composition. The webtext reconsiders velocity, hypertext, and remix according to the rhetorical situation imposed by generative artificial intelligence.

  • Multimodal Community Listening: Building Radios as a Preparatory Sonic Practice will be published in Remixing the Archive: Sonic Rhetorics and Resistance Across Time and Signal. This article develops the concept of “multimodal community listening” : which reveals new ways to relate, make meaning, and locate knowledges beyond the university. This multimodal understanding of community listening activates the sensorial capacities involved in becoming familiar with community-based problems and their future resolutions.

  • Symposium of Past CCCC Chairs (co-authored with Sam Turner) will be published in Jennifer Sano-Franchini and Donnie Johnson Sackey special issue of Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal: “CCCC At 75 Years: Engaging our Abundant Past, Present, and Future.” This symposium collects the stories, values, goals, and aspirations of seven Past Chairs of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC): Andrea Lunsford (1989): Victor Villanueva (1999); Kathleen Blake Yancey (2004); Doug Hesse (2005); Gwendolyn D. Pough (2011); Howard Tinberg (2014-15); Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt (2018). These Past Chairs span thirty years of CCCC history, and we present our conversations with them to consider the past and future of the annual convention and the organization.