Title: Graduate Student/Instructor
University: University of Minnesota
Email: james806@umn.edu
Description of your work
I am a second year masters student at the University of Minnesota with plans to continue through the PhD program. My interests, broadly construed, are feminist rhetorical practice, reproductive justice, and rhetorical studies of archives (digital or analog). At the RHM Symposium, I am workshopping a summer fellowship project and potential masters thesis: a rhetorical study of an online collection of abortion stories. The website that houses the collection, Women on Web (associated with Women on Waves), also mails medical abortion pills to those who need them in areas where access is restricted by law, geographic hardship, or prohibitive expense. I am interested in the collection’s function as an archive of experience/feeling as well as the user experience of navigating the stories. I ask questions of what role pain (or lack thereof) plays in individual medical narratives and in community building around medical and reproductive experiences. Looking beyond this project, I am interested in applying a critical feminist lens to communities and identities that form around diagnoses; for example, the chronic lyme community.Â