Julie Gerdes (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor of Technical Writing and Rhetoric
Virginia Tech
Description of Work:
Julie Gerdes is an assistant professor of professional and technical writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of technical communication and public health, and she teaches courses in workplace and technical writing and in qualitative research methods. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on improving health equity through inclusive risk communication, particularly during outbreaks of infectious disease. She is currently working on COVID-19 vaccine communication research with local health district counterparts, conducting focus group and surveys about vaccine rhetorics with marginalized communities in the eastern United States. She is simultaneously conducting interviews with public health officials about their decision-making in communication design and outreach. Her goal is to improve health equity by using stasis theory to diagnose barriers to inclusive, community-led risk messaging for public health communication decision-makers while also identifying normative discourse and assumptions in health messaging that result from those challenges. In addition to stasis theory, Gerdes is examining the role of kairos and chronos in perpetuating arguments for vaccination that are embedded in ableism and racism.
She began this work during the 2015-2016 Zika outbreaks, which were the subject of her dissertation in technical communication and rhetoric. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Gerdes spent five years working as an advisor on global health programs for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she primarily worked across Latin America and the Caribbean. Although Gerdes’ current work is domestic in nature, she continues to employ a transnational lens to risk communication research, and she is interested in reversing global inequities around public health through participatory and community-led communication design.
Dr. Gerdes is also part of an interdisciplinary team at Virginia Tech that is researching social media misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and is currently working on an article that reports results on an experimental survey study that was conducted across Appalachia. An initial finding of this work focused on the role of trust in healthcare and science as a predictor of readiness to get the vaccine and showed the power of trusted providers as a site of vaccine service delivery. Last, Dr. Gerdes is currently serving as subject matter expert for a federally funded project on vaccine education.
Contact: jgerdes@vt.edu | https://liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/department-of-english/faculty/julie-gerdes.html