"Flocking to the Fold: Pope Francis's (De)(Re)Territorialization of Catholicism"
Once I learned that theory could be applied to more than literature, it permeated into everything. The excerpt from this essay shows my ability to understand complicated theory and apply it to popular culture and religion. In this piece, I use both Foucault’s theory of the panopticon and Deleuze and Guattari’s work, A Thousand Plateaus to illustrate how the newly elected Pope Francis used rhetoric to change the face of Catholicism, which, in turn, brought thousands of people around the globe back to the church. After presenting this project at University of Nevada-Reno’s College of Liberal Arts Graduate Symposium in February 2014, I began reworking the material to submit for publication. |
"A Tutor's Audience Is Never a Fiction: When Written and Oral Communication Collide in the Writing Center"
As I mentioned before, I learned quickly in graduate school that research is more than mining articles on JSTOR. I wanted to understand how and why writing center tutors see themselves rhetorically during sessions with students. Once I focused my research goal, Susan Andersen, the assistant writing center director, approached me about collaborating on the project and we set about obtaining IRB approval for our study. While designed, distributed, collected, and analyzed the surveys, Susan used her role in the writing center to observe the tutors and take notes; we believed that because observations were already a part of Susan’s role, the tutors would feel most comfortable with her in the room rather than myself. I then took her notes and analyzed them for both quantitative and qualitative data to support the conclusions we made from the data collected from the surveys. Together we presented our study at the 2014 International Writing Centers Association conference held in Orlando, FL. The article is currently under revision with the Writing Center Journal. |