Partners
Laura Gonzales, Ph.D.
Director
Laura Gonzales is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso. Her work focuses on the intersections of translation, technical communication, and community activism. She previously worked as the translations coordinator for the Language Services Department at the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan while completing her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing.
Lucía Durá, Ph.D.
Co-Director
Dr. Lucía Durá is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her research focuses primarily on risk communication, vulnerable populations, and innovative approaches to social and organizational change. She is an expert on positive deviance and liberating structures.
Ann Shivers-McNair, Ph.D.
Associate Director and Affiliate Researcher
Ann Shivers-McNair is an Assistant Professor and Director of Professional and Technical Writing at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on the intersections of user experience, technical communication, and social justice.
Tetyana Zhyvotovska
Research Assistant
Tetyana Zhyvotovska is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program and an assistant instructor at the University of Texas at El Paso. She previously taught at universities in Ukraine and in the Languages and Linguistics Department at UTEP. Her research interests include the rhetoric of translation and technical communication.
Victoria A. Garcia
Director of Translations
Victoria A. Garcia is the Director of the Translation Services Office at The University of Texas at El Paso. She also teaches translation courses for the Minor in Translation and Interpretation Program of the Department of Languages and Linguistics at UTEP. She has collaborated with non-profit, scientific and health related organizations in numerous translation, editing and research projects. Her research interest are translation, bilingualism and communication.
Tatiana Batova, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Tatiana Batova is an assistant professor at Arizona State University. She researches and teaches global/cross-cultural technical communication, content strategy, and user experience, particularly as it relates to issues of sustainability. She previously worked as a translator, project manager, and multilingual authoring consultant in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.
Anis Bawarshi, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Anis Bawarshi is professor of English at the University of Washington, where he specializes in the study and teaching of writing, rhetorical genre theory, writing program administration, and research on knowledge transfer. He is co-managing editor of the journal Composition Forum and coeditor of the book series Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition. His publications include Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition; Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (with Mary Jo Reiff); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (with Amy Devitt and Mary Jo Reiff); Ecologies of Writing Programs: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context (coedited with Mary Jo Reiff, Christian Weisser, and Michelle Ballif), and Genre and the Performance of Publics (coedited with Mary Jo Reiff).
Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Rachel Bloom-Pojar is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She studies rhetoric and writing at the intersections of culture, race, language, and health, with a specific focus on transnational health programs, translation practices, and Caribbean Spanish. Rachel is interested in challenging stigma with language hierarchies and highlighting community expertise for rhetorical studies of language, culture, and health.
Alison Cardinal
Affiliate Researcher
Alison Cardinal is a Lecturer at the University of Washington Tacoma and a graduate student in Language and Rhetoric at the University of Washington. Her research uses participatory video methods to investigate students' language and literacy practices across contexts. Her work is situated at the intersections of literacy studies, mobility studies, technical communication and sociolinguistics.
Elvira Carrizal-Dukes
Affiliate Researcher
Elvira Carrizal-Dukes is an Assistant Professor at El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas, in the Mass Communication discipline with a specialization in film, video production, and mass media. Her research interests include visual rhetoric, border discourse, and rhetorical genre studies. She is a filmmaker, playwright, comic book writer and educator. Elvira earned her bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Chicano Studies with a minor in Theatre Arts from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities and her Master of Fine Arts degree in Film from Columbia University in New York City. She is a doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at The University of Texas at El Paso. Elvira studies new media that communicates social justice messages through multiple modes of artistic production. Elvira’s work is meant to raise the volume on voices being quelled in our modern society.
Jennifer Clifton, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Jennifer Clifton is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her scholarship puts theories and rhetorics of public life, deliberative arts, and situated action to work in contexts where globalization and transnational movement complicate the conditions and consequences of engagement in public life. Recent projects have included community think tanks to explore water resource issues and policies; Photovoice projects to explore educational and workplace issues and to cultivate participatory local publics; and student-led community film festivals to explore the risks and rewards of rural living under conditions of globalized capitalism. Her second book—Argument as Dialogue Across Difference: Engaging Youth in Public Literacies Routledge, 2017) — unpacks important concepts and assumptions that are often tacit in the ways we imagine and operationalize argument and public life. Importantly, she attends to those concepts—rationalities, reasonabilities, polity, and commons—that have the most significant implications for self-other relations because stranger relationality is both central to public life and often neglected in teaching argument.
Jeannie B. Concha, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Dr. Jeannie B. Concha is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences. She received her PhD in public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her MPH from the University of Texas Health Science Center. Her research focuses on psychological well-being and diabetes prevention in ethnic minority and marginalized populations. Specifically, she investigates the impact of psychological distress on diabetes development, prognosis, and outcomes. Dr. Concha is particularly interested in the cultural meaning of stress and diabetes in Hispanic/Latino populations. Her previous work experience includes academic quantitative and qualitative mixed-methods research, managing non-profit community oriented diabetes education and prevention efforts in New Mexico, and conducting diabetes community resource and needs assessments. Her strength as a researcher is the ability to identify and garner cultural and community assets for reframing the public health messaging. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) diabetes awareness and management project tailored specifically for men in the El Paso, Texas community.
Victor Del Hierro
Affiliate Researcher
Victor is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He studies and teaches Technical Writing, Digital Writing and Cultural Rhetorics. In his teaching and research, Victor use Hip Hop and Borderlands theories to build spaces that emphasize our engagement with multiple modalities, local communities, and rhetorical practices.
Ronnie Dukes
Affiliate Researcher
Ronnie Dukes was born on a Friday the 13th on the south side of Chicago and is a comic book creator. Raised in South Shore, Ronnie Dukes had his first professional artist position with Gallery 37. He went on to earn his degree in computer animation in Minneapolis before relocating to Harlem, Manhattan where he began to paint and exhibit work throughout the city including multiple solo exhibitions at Columbia University as well as group shows including the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, the Abrons Art Center and Columbia University. Ronnie’s past work includes a coloring book on diversity for the city of Minneapolis and multiple children’s books. Ronnie created his publishing company DUKEScomics with his wife, partner Elvira Carrizal-Dukes, featuring their first major print project A.W.O.L. followed by A.W.O.L.2, The Dukes of Chuco, and Student Xers(Crossers). To see more about Ronnie Dukes’ past and upcoming work, visit DUKEScomics.com.
Avery C. Edenfield, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Avery C. Edenfield is an assistant professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Utah State University. His research agenda works at the intersections of professional communication and community-embedded workspaces with specific attention to cooperatives, collectives, and nonprofits. His research interests include theories of participation, rhetorics of empowerment and democracy, and community engagement in professional communication. Avery’s work has appeared in Journal of Technical Writing and Communication and Nonprofit Quarterly. He can be reached at avery.edenfield@usu.edu
Genevieve Garcia de Mueller, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Genevieve Garcia de Mueller is an Assistant Professor in the Writing and Language Studies Department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her work intersects deliberative rhetoric, immigration policy, critical race theory, and writing program administration. She previously worked as the co-director of the Albuquerque Community Writing Center and as a research assistant in the Chican@ Studies Department at University of New Mexico.
Matthew Gomes, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Mathew Gomes is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, where he teaches writing, conducts program assessment research, and has helped develop WAC partnerships across the university. His current research focuses on writing program designs that operationalize opportunities for social and linguistic justice.
McKinely Green
Affiliate Researcher
McKinley Green (pronouns he/him/his) is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, where he teaches classes in first-year writing and technical and professional communication. He locates his research along intersections of rhetoric, technology, and critical theories including feminist, queer, and critical race studies. He has also coordinated and participated in numerous community-embedded projects and endeavors to develop pedagogies centered on civic engagement and social justice.
Juan Guerra, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Juan Guerra is professor of English and chair of the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle. His work examines the ways students of color navigate and negotiate the various rhetorical and discursive contexts they encounter in the writing classroom and beyond.
Michelle Hall Kells, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Michelle Hall Kells is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in 20th Century Civil Rights Rhetoric, Contemporary and Classical Rhetoric, Writing and Cultural Studies, and Discourse Studies. Kells has served as Special Assistant to the Dean of the College of Arts and Science 2012-2014 and Program Chair of the Writing Across Communities (WAC) initiative at UNM 2004-2014. Kells received the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library Research Fellowship in 2008. Kells’s research interests include civil rights rhetorics, sociolinguistics, and composition/literacy studies.
Minerva Laveaga
Affiliate Researcher
Minerva Laveaga Luna is an Assistant Professor of English at El Paso Community College and Co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books, a press that publishes fiction, poetry, and translation into English from Spanish and Portuguese. She has worked in various projects on literary translation and her fiction and essays have been anthologized in the U.S. and Argentina.
Elenore Long, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Elenore Long’s scholarship draws on a wide array of rhetorical methods to test the limits and potential of day-to-day democracy under contemporary conditions. With colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh’s Community House, she helped develop a rhetorical model for contemporary deliberative democracy and then has tested and extended that model in other contexts, including environmental studies and human-computer interaction. Long’s work has been featured in the two issues of The Community Literacy Journal that earned awards from the Academic Council of Learned Societies for use-inspired research. Her third book—A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Artistic Methods for Contemporary Public Life—is under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press and due out in 2018. Long is an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Kristen Moore, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Dr. Kristen R. Moore works at the intersection of public rhetoric and technical communication, focusing specifically on the ways diverse communities might be served by critical theories, inclusive rhetorics, and activist scholarship. Of particular interest for Dr. Moore's research is the ways that seemingly mundane institutional infrastructure might serve as a sight of institutional and social change. She is currently working with Dr. Natasha Jones on a research project that collects, reviews, and geo-maps inclusive scholarship and programs in technical communication.
Dr. Moore serves on the Diversity Committee for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication and works on the Women in Tech Comm Initiative for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.
Liza Potts, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Liza Potts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University where she is the Director of WIDE Research Center and the Co-Founder of the Experience Architecture program. Her research interests include digital rhetoric, social user experience, and participatory culture. Her work have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and others. Her professional experience includes working for startups, Microsoft, and design consultancies as a director, user experience architect, content strategist, usability specialist, information architect, and program manager.
Sara Proaño
Affiliate Researcher
Director & Professional Development Coordinator
Hispanic Center of Western Michigan
Sara moved to the U.S in 2007 and has served the Latino/Hispanic Population of the Kent County Area in the Fields of Mental Health and Domestic Violence through the Community Mental Health-Network 180 and Project HOPE-HCWM. She has brought a broad Latino American appreciation to the Language Services Department due to her multinational background and her degree in Clinical Psychology, applied in Neuropsychology Research obtained at of U.C.L. in Quito-Ecuador.
Her functions at the Hispanic Center include to supervise the Marketing, Human Resources and Professional/Leadership Development of the Language Services Department.
She thinks that one of the biggest challenges faced by new immigrants, refugees or closed ethnic groups is equality in resource access reflected in language and cultural inaccessibility. She firmly believes that the investment in Language Services will bring a great return to the community and can act as a financial stabilizer agent.
Joy Robinson, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Dr. Robinson began her career as an engineer and later pursued her Ph.D. to become an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she teaches technical writing, new media, and user experience courses. Joy also runs the new VUElab—an evaluation and user experience lab—where she interrogates systems seeking to improve HCI design. Her work has been published in TCQ, JTWC, and IEEE ProComm. Her newest article “Historicizing UX: The past, present, and future of UX empirical research,” appearing in CDQ in Dec 2017, is a systematic analysis of UX scholarship since 2000.
Emma J. Rose, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Emma J. Rose is an Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma where she teaches classes in designing technology and technical writing. Her research is motivated by a commitment to social justice and a belief that the way technologies are designed ultimately shapes our world. She holds a PhD in Human Centered Design and Engineering and an MS in Technical Communication both from the University of Washington and a BA in Creative Writing from Duquesne University. Prior to her current position, she spent over a decade as a User Experience consultant helping organizations bring a human-centered approach to their design processes.
Clarissa San Diego
Affiliate Researcher
Clarissa is Founder of Makerologist, a creative technology agency that creates interactive experiences using IoT and maker technology. They invoke curiosity and educate technical and non-technical audiences alike through special events, workshops, and interactive installations. At Makerologist, Clarissa demonstrates her abilities in business development, STEM education, and industrial design. Leading up to Makerologist, Clarissa co-founded SoDo MakerSpace and lead developer engagement at Particle. She has also served as co-producer of numerous tech events including the Women Who Code CONNECT 2016 and the DevRel Summit conferences. Majority of her work focuses on bringing inclusion into the IoT and maker communities through the introduction of hardware technologies.
Heather Turner
Affiliate Researcher
Heather is a PhD candidate in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at Michigan State University, an instructor for the Professional Writing Program at MSU, and a ux designer and project manager for the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) Research Center, and the HUB for Innovation in Learning and Technology. Inside the university, she researches social justice in technical communication, design, and visual/digital pedagogy. Outside the university, she advocates for users by designing documents, graphics, and managing ux projects.
Rebecca Walton, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Dr. Rebecca Walton is an associate professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Utah State University. Her research interests include social justice, human rights, and qualitative methods for cross-cultural research. Primarily a field researcher, she has collaborated with organizations such as the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, and World Vision to conduct research in countries including Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, and Bolivia. Her work has appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and other journals and edited collections. Three of her co-authored articles have won national awards: the Nell Ann Pickett Award in 2017 and 2016, as well as the STC Distinguished Article Award in 2017.
Miriam Williams, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher
Dr. Williams is a Professor at Texas State University, where she directs the MA in Technical Communication Program. Her areas of specialization include technical communication, rhetoric, public policy writing, intercultural communication, and ethics in technical communication. Dr. Williams was recently honored as a ATTW Fellow in 2017, being the first person of color to be recognized as a Fellow of Teachers of Technical Communication after over twenty years of work in the discipline.