Overview of Academic Research

Overall my research centers the narratives of minoritized people, minoritized ways of meaning making, and minoritized approaches to researching and mentoring in academia. Currently, the research that has developed from my dissertation focuses on tactile rhetoric and quilting as a qualitative feminist research method. This work examines how memorializing practices that constitute the life and death of migrants in the United States function in a tactile manner to be rhetorically effective. Drawing from rhetorical theories of touch and sensation, cultural critiques of migration in the US, and transnational feminist theories, I analyze textile productions that memorialize migrant lives lost while crossing the Southern Arizona desert. My research examines how quilters—often denied access to dominant discourses—document narratives of migration through crafting a quilt from materials that reify the migration experience. Examining such quilts also reveals how quilts can document the experience of migrants who otherwise do not leave a written record of their life nor journey. And interviews with quilters demonstrate how interactions between quilts and people promote a tactile rhetoric that facilitates empathy for an unknowable experience. Therefore, I examine the seemingly peripheral work of quilters and narratives of migrants to demonstrate that, when carefully considered, they can offer a complex understanding of migrant deaths in the US. Textile productions such as quilts are central to my research because they function to shift discussions in rhetorical studies beyond alphabetic writing.