How to use this site.
There are links at the top of this page that will take you to my reading lists and dissertation work, as well as navigating to miscellaneous pages on the site. The first four buttons under “where those punk scholars hang out” will take you to content folders where you can download podcasts and even listen to my interviews with tattoo artists. The blog link is where I post research discoveries and stuff that I have written that won’t make it into the dissertation, conference materials, etc. My wiki is extensive and covers a wide range of topics. Currently it is primarily entries for my dissertation research. Below is a list of my academic areas of expertise. I am an interdisciplinarian that has worked in all of these areas. The “Learn More” buttons will take you to pages that have more detailed descriptions of these theories and disciplines, conference presentations, etc. While the wiki will grow and cover more topics over time, the links below function more like a textbook than a wiki. All of this is tied together with various Google searches. Please read below for more information about a convergence site like this.
What is this?
This site is a convergence site. It is a multimodal portfolio of my interdisciplinary work. It is the hub of all of my research. It’s accessible for both scholars and the public. There is a wiki that documents all of the notes for my research, including both primary multimodal sources and theoretical approaches. There is multimodal content like podcasts and blogs, and this is all tied together with various Google search engines to connect to infinite scholarly resources.
Who can use this?
If you are interested in convergence culture, adaptation studies, visual/rhetoric, feminism, comic books, memetics, performance theory, structuralism, writing pedagogy, mythology, tattoos, cave art, cultural anthropology, archaeology, gender studies, theater, film studies, rhetoric and writing, plays and ballets, interdisciplinarianism, or something called bitch rhetoric, welcome to the alley.
Search the University of Arkansas Library
The searches on this site will open a Google Scholar search. This search engine is setup to specifically search the UofA Mullins Library database. Whenever you see “Find it! at UofA” in the search result(s), click on the UofA to go to the Mullins Library entry. You will need a uark ID to go any further. 
AREAS OF STUDY
Convergence Culture
is a theoretical approach created by Henry Jenkins that focuses on popular culture media, how fans interact and use media, and how companies and studios can maintain and control intellectual property. This is one of my specialty areas of theory for my dissertation. This has obvious crossover potential with adaptation studies, but also synthesizing this with visual rhetoric theory helps to analyze the art itself. In particular, the way in which fans interact and perpetuate memes interests me the most from convergence culture. I am particularly taken with the way tattoos factor into fan interaction with the art.
Visual Rhetoric
is based on classical rhetoric, Aristotle’s philosophy of persuasion. It explores the ways in which the pisteis, ethos, pathos and logos, kairos, and the way people use space. My experience in archaeology actually informs this the most for me since that particular subfield of anthropology is concerned with how people use space. These theories work at the macroscale, such as the city planning of Washington D.C., to the microscale sketches and drawings of individual creators. Art theory also lends itself to this sort of analysis, but having a basic understanding of how line and space is used is all that is necessary to conduct this type of research. I am synthesizing this with adaptation studies and convergence culture as one of my specialty areas.
Adaptation Studies
is a study of the way primary sources get adapted or parodied into other iterations, be it the same modal, such as text to text, or multimodal, such as adapting that text to film, and the choices creators make. Linda Hutcheon is one of the pioneer theorists in the realm of parody, and along with Greg Bartolotti, they lay the foundations for the bio-evolutionary model of memes. They are formalizing theory by geneticist Richard Dawkins, who argued a meme, the smallest unit of cultural meaning and can evolve and spread just like biological organisms. This is a specialty area I am synthesizing with convergence culture and visual rhetoric.
Memetics
is the study of memes, which are the smallest unit of cultural meaning. The bio-evolutionary model, based on geneticist Richard Dawkins theory in The Selfish Gene and formalized by Bartolotti and Hutcheon, treats memes like genes in that they can spread and mutate similar to biological organisms. In my research into cemetery and city landscapes, and comic book imagery, I often find the meme is something that is reduced to something either solely visual, or a visual that is dependent on some degree of text to have any cultural meaning. Thus, visual rhetoric, adaptation studies, convergence culture, archaeology, performance theory, feminist critique, and classical rhetoric are just a few things we can employ to examine memes.
Interdisciplinarianism
is an approach to academics in which two or more disciplines are synthesized into a new theoretical approach. This is different than what is usually taking place in research, multidisciplinarity, but is often referred to as interdisciplinary. Alan Repko ultimately defines interdisciplinary as the synthesis of disciplines that have sufficient depth of knowledge, and a marked degree of breadth between the disciplines. Lisa Lattuca clarifies a lot of this through the concepts of transdisciplinary and informed disciplinarity. Veronica Boix Mansilla, Elizabeth Dawes, Duraisingh, Christopher Wolf, and Carolyn Haynes are some of the core theorists that formalized this pedagogical approach to education and research.
Comic Book Analysis
is one of my interdisciplinary areas where I examine comic books from adaptation studies and convergence culture approaches looking at how archetypes and tropes are adapted to comic books, then how those characters are adapted to screens. I look primarily at feminist texts and tropes in comics, such as Bitch Planet, but I have also worked extensively in horror comics. I have a great deal of expertise in Wonder Woman and Amazon lore and representations, which is part of my dissertation work. I have also written on the works of underground-adaptation-artist-turned-cult-icon, Richard Corben.
Feminist Philosophy
is the philosophy of equality. I have an extensive background in feminist philosophy. One of my first Gender studies courses was a philosophy course on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Since then I have worked my way up to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I am also very interested in media that represents feminist movements, such as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies Ourselves or Bitch Magazine. I have done a lot of research and studying in all five forms: proto-feminism, particularly the French Revolution and Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Gilmore Perkins and Mary Wollstonecraft in early first wave feminism, particularly the French, British, and U.S. suffragette movements. From second wave I have studied film criticism, such as Teresa de Lauretis, causes such as the Boston Women’s Health Collective and several other feminist groups from the 1960-1970s. Most of my contemporary and third wave research is in anthropology, visual rhetoric, and comic books, for example authors like Hillary Chute.
Cultural Anthropology
is one of the four field approaches to anthropology: cultural anthro, physical/forensic anthro, linguistics, and archaeology. U.S. anthropologists are educated and versed on all four, but naturally we all gravitate towards one or the other (and often away from one or the other). Cultural anthropology is what led me to my pop-culture studies of western cultures. I always incorporate anthropological, social science approaches to all of my work, which often puts the focus on ethnicity and gender. My master’s research was heavily focused on mortuary analysis or how cultures treat and deal with death. The liminality of death and ritual becomes a major component in my research, thus incorporating performance theory, structuralism, and functionalism into the research. I conducted a great deal of research through a cultural anthropological, archaeological, and visual rhetoric lens. Grave markers were the subject of my research. I live in a unique culture whose dead have a visual epitaph of some sort, usually carved in a headstone.
Rhetorical Philosophy
is Aristotle’s philosophy of persuasion. The text, Rhetoric, itself become the formal basis for argument structure in western cultures. From Aristotle we get the three appeals, or the pistis: pathos (appeal to emotion), ethos (credibility of author), and logos (logic and grammar). He also gave us kairos, or the timeliness of things. Of particular interest to me is Russian scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin, who gave us the concept of the utterance. Simply put, the utterance is the smallest unit of discourse you can reduce something to before it loses all meaning. In “I think, therefore I am,” the word “therefore” is the only thing you can remove without reducing the sentence to meaninglessness. We can remove “lessness” and reduce the word to “meaning,” but that is about as far as you can go. This heavily informs my theories on memetics. Marxist rhetorical scholar, Deborah Brandt, is another major influence on my rhetorical work.
Bitch Rhetoric
is a term I have coined to account for a pattern of punk-like rebellion in feminist media. The re-appropriation of the word “bitch” is a tangled quagmire of a mess. Just in trinary, male/female/non-binary, factoring sexuality into this mix, there is a minimum of 8 different meanings for this word depending on who is saying it to who. A sort of punk movement began around the turn of the century in which the use of the word “bitch” by feminists has become a sort of rallying cry, such as the phrase “bitches get things done,” the creation of BITCH magazine, and of interest to me, the comic book Bitch Planet.
Logical Philosophy
is the formal philosophy dealing with logic models and true and sound argumentation. Unlike other philosophies, logic doesn’t seek to answer and grand questions, but rather is a functional philosophy in everyday use. Most philosophers are employing a heavy degree of logic in their arguments, thus it became its own field of philosophy, similar to rhetorical philosophy. I have been teaching and tutoring Thomas McKay’s Reasons, Explanations, and Decisions: Guidelines for Critical Thinking for over a decade. The majority of “new” logic philosophy is coming out of or focused on computer programming and coding.
Performance Theory
is Victor Turners anthropological theory. Turner himself was influenced by his dissertation chair, famed anthropologist, Max Gluckman, a processualist. Turner would incorporate structuralism and functionalism into a new approach that analyzes liminality in ritual. Turner conducted research on Native American dance rituals, noting the importance the liminality of the ritual plays. The person begins as one identity, enters a state of liminality, then emerges from the ritual with a changed identity. Franca Tamisari takes it a step further into proto-participation theory, essentially noting the audience’s role in the ritual as an act of doing. Participation and play theory will partly evolve out of performance theory, however when applied to more mundane rituals, like putting on makeup or performing daily prayers, all of those theories are still applicable. Richard Schechner is another theorist I use who applies this to theater.
Dramaturge/Theatrician
are the formal terms for someone who “studies” theater, generally as a whole and including acting, directing, playwriting, lighting, costuming, set building and operations, stage management, and stagehand work. A dramaturge is someone who knows and has experience in all or most of those things, as well as doing close reading analysis of plays, examining the rhetorical situation the plays were written in, their exigence, and most often, a focus on genre or specific playwrights and directors. I have personally done extensive research on Shakespeare as an actor, dramaturge, and researcher. Specifically, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am an expert on Bertolt Brecht, all of his essays, treatises, and specifically the plays The Good Woman of Setzuan, Mother Courage, and I was the university dramaturge for Caucasian Chalk Circle. I have also written and staged three different plays, Dogs, Seed of Evil, and Boys.
Literary Analysis
is based on various schools of theories. I am heavily focused on adaptation studies, which looks at the way stories are adapted and evolved over time. I also employ a lot of my rhetorical skills, as well as creative writing theory. I am particularly versed in Young Adult lit (Laura Ingells Wilder, S.E. Hinton), auto/biography, comic books, African American speculative fiction and Afrofuturism (Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin), horror (Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Charlain Harris), science fiction (Clarke, Bova, Herbert), and weird tales (Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, H.P. Lovecraft). I am also heavily focused on character archetypes and so I also focus on a lot of prehistoric or oral tradition era mythology. I work with a lot of Greek, Norse, and Hausa mythos, as well as stories from the Mahabharata and the Qu’ran.
Mythos and Lore
is a collection of stories. Technically, it has nothing to do with the truth or validity of any religious aspects. That being said, few people today still worship the old gods, as the horror tropes like to say. Close reading analysis of Greek, Hausa, Norse, Indian, and Middle-Eastern mythos are one of the subjects of my research. This is a bit ironic in that much of my literature is from oral forms. While some mythos have been compiled into texts, such as as the Norse Eddas or the Greek tragedies and comedies. Other mythos and lore is stored in song, dance, and imagery. The Yolngu tribes of East Arnhem Land, Australia, preserve their their mythos through dances associated with animals such as the shark. Sculptures and statues have been created for a great deal of mythological figures. Someof this is even preserved in heavy metal songs such as Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” It is a good example of how long-lasting these stories and archetypes are.
First Amendment Studies
is a field of scholarship that I stumbled into. I was interested in some of Deborah Brandt’s later work in looking at the way journalists were constrained in reporting on congress. No writing implements were allowed by non-government spectators during a congressional session, at the time. This became a question of how much access and agency a journalist has in writing. This led me to study the First Amendment. Of rhetorical interest was that the entire legal ramifications of “free speech” hinged upon a single word: disruption. I have presented and lectured on the relevance and importance of Pickering v. Board of Education, a 1968 SCOTUS decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a 1969 SCOTUS decision, and Bell v. Itawamba County School Board, a 2015 5th circuit court decision that rolled several rights for “students” back to pre-1969 standards. I am very interested in Lauren Berlant’s Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship as a cultural studies text that deals heavily with that anonymity and the way in which women’s issues are taken from the private sector into the political sector through political maneuvers. These machinations often involve the first amendment, or the process is often the result (punishment) of women exercising their 1st amendment rights in the U.S.
Film Studies
is the critical study of film and television, though we have expanded both the title and the definition to a more multimodal-friendly meaning. The formal study focuses on the creative and adaptation processes, technological capabilities, directorship, dramaturgy, etc. I have written extensively about women’s roles in film, specifically horror and action films. Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis are two women I have written about. I have researched and written extensively on memorializing WWII in film and television, with a focus on the use of those movies as propaganda, to later films that are memorials of a past era. Along with that, I have been forced to sit through The Wild Bunch and Taxi Driver more times than I care to remember (4 out of 5 classes, no kidding)I know Citizen Kane, Casablanca, several Shakespeare films, The Magnificent Seven, Aliens, Star Trek and Doctor Who inside and out.
Disability Studies
is the study of disability status in the U.S. (for me). Since the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990, the studies have focused on discrimination in the workplace, microaggressions towards people with challenges, support and organizations, and the sociological and cultural aspects of their culture. I am particularly interested in the way work and academic culture treats people with disabilities. I have argued that first, shifting it from “disabilities,” the “dis” meaning “not” or the opposite of abled. Instead, shifting this concept to people with unique challenges, takes away the “unable” to people who overcome challenges, be it physical or mental health, everyday. Society tends to want to fix the challenged, as my hearing impaired peer told me once, “there are a lot of cochlear implants at the deaf school.” After an AmeriCorps year at the VA hospital, I became interested in the visual dysphoria of amputees and how people look and treat those patients. This later led to my interest in mastectomies as they relate to Amazons and the graphic novel, About Betty’s Boob.
Archaeology
is the study of how humans used space in the past to present. A lot of people do not think of applying archaeology to modern practices. Since the 1990s there has been a great deal of interest in exploring the ways people used to build structures, equipment, and farm in the past, and applying it to modern, planet-friendly practices. My interest in Norse mythology led me to research L’anse aux Meadows, the only proven Viking settlement in North America. A book by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks simply titled Theatre/Archaeology, used archaeological theory to examine the decisions that are made in theater as a microscale version of a larger society or culture. I have also done archaeological research for the Mosaic Templars, a historic organization and building, and the Oakland Fraternal Cemeteries in Little Rock, AR.
Creative Writing
is pretty much the flip side of my writing instruction in rhetoric and composition. However, I still bring many of these elements in through creative non-fiction. I have worked in and can instruct writing for YA or Young Adult literature genres, biographical storytelling, spoken word performances, science fiction and fantasy genres, as well as writing for ethnicity.
Multimodalism
is the use of multiple technologies to communicate thought. Whether it is a script for a television newscast or an article in a newspaper, it is multimodal by the fact that the same story can appear in multiple forms. To this day most writing instruction still treats the word processing program like a typewriter. Multimodal approaches expand the use of word processors to include hyperlinking to outside sources, incorporate images, and increase the amount of editing and revising capabilities far beyond print media formats of old. And that is just for a paper or article. My own education is being preserved electronically/digitally. I can pull up any paper or note I ever wrote for school with a simple search. This convergence engine site utilizes a wiki, these textbook-like entries you are reading now, blogs, essays, podcasts, interview recordings, images, videos, and whatever else feeds the research.
Mortuary Analysis
is the exploration of death and dying in cultures. It is literally “morbid.” My interest in liminality inevitably led me to research death rituals and practices in cultures. My particular favorite is the Sky Funeral, in which your body is hauled up to a mountaintop to be fed to the birds, who will carry you with them through the air for the rest of their lives. From Tibetan bone flutes and skull cups, to the memento mori death’s head motifs of the early U.S., I have been fascinated by how we handle someone’s final presence on earth. My master’s thesis was on the Oakland Fraternal cemeteries in Little Rock, AR. Along with visual rhetoric theory, and other anthropological approaches, I was particularly focused on grave marker semiotics and rhetoric, the numerology that appears on both black and Jewish grave markers, as well as the layout, and in that case segregation, of cemeteries. I have done research and written Geertzian thick description about “Babylands” that exist in almost every cemetery, and the hardest part of mortuary analysis. I also have research on the trail of Woodmen of the World (WoW) markers that run along the major whistlestop towns and cities from Texas through Tennessee. They are these four to six feet tall stone trees adorned with a lot of accoutrement. I am also an expert on stellae, the shape of the Washington monument, and there role in Masonic burial rites.
Discourse analysis
is not just the obvious study of discourse, but the ways in which discourse is affected by context, the rules for discourse that are established and who can violate those rules, as well as the socio-cultural aspects that frame the discourse. It might be easiest to say that the difference between discourse analysis (DA) and linguistics is that DA will look at the psychological aspects that shape discourse. It’s not can we code-mesh and change what we say or how we pronounce words, it’s why do we do that? This carries over into Swales’ Discourse Communities. I use DA theory to look at the way signs and visual images are used in discursive ways. So, how does comic art get reproduced as tattoos on fan’s arms, what does that say about their role in the community, and what does that say to the outside communities. Also multivocality.
MArxism
is the philosophy founded by sociologist Karl Marx. Originally Marxism was focused on socialism and the development of communist societies, arguing these societies have existed historically and that we shifted away from them with the advent of capitalism. Marxism would argue that at least socialism is inevitable. Basically, every capitalist system must either evolve beyond itself or it usually falls to revolution. In the 1960s-70s the French Marxists, such as Louis Althusser, begin to shift the focus away from goals and outcomes, and begin using Marxism as a critical lens to look at how things like empiricism or a free economy affect capitalist societies. This is tied heavily to the French Structuralist movement. From this point on it is more commonly referred to as Marxian.