Title(s): Assistant Instructor, Department of Rhetoric & Writing; Assistant Director of Lower-Division Writing; Associate Editor, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal
University: University of Texas at Austin
Email: tristinhooker@utexas.edu
Description of your work
I am beginning my third year as a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the last ten years, I have been a writing and literacy instructor, disability support counselor, and writing center administrator. In all of these roles, I have been motivated by the effect of infrastructure (both of places and of institutions) on bodies, and the diagnostic criteria that determine who is and who isn’t a part of our communities in education.
Now, in my research, I am interested in the rhetoric and implications of absence, as it relates to diagnosing and defining bodies and conditions in health and medicine. More specifically, I’m interested in the rhetorical and material infrastructures that can be catalyzed by diagnosis or pursued in the absence of a diagnosis: where do communities of people with rare, difficult, precarious, or missing diagnoses go? What do they make of themselves and the communities they form? In my submission for this symposium, I’m looking at the digital/social media activism of a group of people with rarely diagnosed, but often comorbid conditions, who attempt to establish a shared ethos and identity, in part by arguing for a stronger association between their conditions in the public mind. I’m interested in exploring the tension between public-facing activism and culture-building that takes place in the process of developing the ethos these activists present to each other and to the broader digital public.