WRAC is a home of and hub for cutting-edge scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies. Our collective scholarship addresses issues that span the broad work of the discipline, and addresses issues related to cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, writing studies and pedagogy, visual rhetorics, experience architecture, professional and technical communication, the history and theory of rhetoric, and more. Indeed, many of our faculty braid approaches and orientations, theoretical frameworks, and methodological scaffolding from across the discipline and related disciplines.
Trixie G. Smith
Cultural, Queer, Feminist Rhetorics; Writing Centers; Global Literacies and Engagement
Research Questions
- How do we develop and mentor the next generation of writing center leaders?
- How do feminist/queer approaches to literacy and leadership inform our research, teaching, and engagement?
- How do we build equitable partnerships to create context-specific research and writing support programs?
- How do we sustain local and global community partnerships?
Casey McArdle
Accessibility, AI, and Creating Just Systems
Research Questions
- How can accessibility be built into systems from initial stages rather than being viewed as an afterthought at completion to comply with law/policy?
- What is the impact of generative AI on assistive technologies and how can it be used to transform education by granting access for all users/students?
- What role can Experience Architecture play in researching, designing, testing, and deploying efforts to create more inclusive, engaging, and just systems?
Nancy DeJoy
Poetics, Public Art, Rhetorics, and Social Justice
Research Questions
- How does healing the split between rhetoric and poetics open spaces for social justice?
- How can first-year writing curricula move institutions of higher education from a focus on consumption and adaptation to participation and contribution, especially in the service of equity and inclusion?
- What have been the implications of restricting creativity in the construction of research methodologies in the field and how can we overcome the inequities inscribed through those restrictions?
Liza Potts
Social User Experience, Systems Theory, and Digital Culture
Research Questions
- How do people use digital spaces to find and share information online?
- How can we build, moderate, and curate social media platforms for community building?
- How do disruptive design patterns contribute to the deterioration of public trust?
- How can we ethically design people-centered communication technologies?
- How should we build A11y-centered experiences for neurodiverse participants?
Sara Doan
Data Visualization, Equitable Health Communication, and Digital Accessibility
Research Questions
- How can data visualizations ethically and effectively communicate with both the public and key decision makers during disease outbreaks?
- How is subject-matter expertise enacted across different audiences, contexts, and genres?
- How can technical communication and user experience design create more equitable systems of care for historically oppressed people?
Kristin Arola
Indigenous Theory and Practice, Multimodality, Environmental Justice, and Cultural Rhetorics
Research Questions
- How do worldviews shape the processes and products we individually and collectively value for making meaning and sharing research?
- How do alternative writing processes and products—be they multimodal, land-based, relational, and/or rooted in storytelling—expand the processes and products that institutions value?
- How is change made within structures that are often resistant to it?
Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
Digital, Cultural, and Visual Rhetorics
Research Questions
- How do digital interfaces/spaces shape our writing, making, designing, and composing practices?
- What issues arise in the representation of online participants and the use of participants’ digital writing in research reports? How are digital tools raising new (or remediating old) ethical issues for writing researchers related to identity and representation?
- Where are the significant intersections between intellectual property and digital, multimodal writing?