My research is firmly situated within cultural rhetorics, writing center theory, and composition theory. In each of these areas, my research centers on the importance of place-making in communities of practice. I am particularly interested in rhetorical practices that take place outside of classroom spaces, such as how people write and learn to write in non-academic spaces, and the interplay between the practices inside and outside the classroom. My scholarship and relationships with and within these communities encourages me to develop a cultural rhetorics scholarly practice and allows me to extend disciplinary conversations and questions about the ways in which places make rhetorical practices and these practices make places.

In my dissertation, Crafting Place: Rhetorical Practices of the Everyday, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying space and place as simultaneously rhetorical, cultural, social, and physical. This framework emphasizes the importance of everyday practice in the making of meaning and the making of space and place and include five key arguments: 1) Space is fluid and relational and exists within and/or alongside place, 2) Place is more stable than space and is given meaning through artifact, language, and practice, 3) Spaces are made to change, adapt, and manipulate places, 4) Space and place are performed in multiple ways simultaneously, and 5) Space and place are mobilized through everyday cultural practices. These arguments inform my other scholarly endeavors and will be further developed in articles inspired by the dissertation.

I am involved in a number of scholarly projects alongside the work of my dissertation. I am currently collaborating on a book-length edited collection, Echoes of Home: Bringing Home to Work, which explores the ways that home practices influence the professional lives of Rhetoric and Composition scholars. My co- editors and I envision the stories included as part of conversations about mentoring within academic communities that could contribute to the retention of graduate students and new faculty. In my chapter of the collection, “Patterns of Home: Crafting a Life,” I reframe and extend portions of my dissertation by telling a story about the intersections and interplay between home and work places, reinforcing the idea that space and place are mobilized through everyday cultural practices. In the future, I would like to build a digital archive of heritage practices, similar to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, focused on cultural rhetorical practices of home and family. As my dissertation and the Echoes of Home collection exhibit, my scholarship focuses on the interplay between home and professional spaces.

While those projects emphasize home spaces, much of my other work emphasizes professional spaces. I am currently co-authoring an article, “Graduate Writing Groups as Thirdspaces: Spaces of Professionalization Outside-but-Alongside Academic Programs,” which investigates the everyday practices of multidisciplinary writing groups and how they contribute to participant confidence when writing in their disciplines. In addition, I am collaboratively editing a special issue of Across the Disciplines on Graduate Reading and Writing Across the Disciplines (Spring 2014). We are requesting articles that discuss existing writing learning practices that graduate students engage in and those that propose new approaches to graduate writing instruction and support. We ask questions like, “How are students socialized into disciplinary writing? How do graduate students take on the task of writing in discipline specific ways? How do research methods and methodological paradigms affect writing? How do graduate students’ coursework writing experiences transfer into their exam and dissertation writing experiences? How do the complex contexts of “dissertation writing” influence how graduate students write?” In future work, I will continue investigating questions like these, questions that take into account how communities of practice work and where their practices come from. I also see this work as valuable to program-building in the areas of an undergraduate Writing majors and Rhetoric & Composition graduate programs.

Wherever I live and work, I will continue working with academic and non-academic communities of practice. As seen by my current research, my future scholarship will heavily depend upon the relationships formed and cultivated within the communities and the spaces and places to which I belong.