Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University . PhD Pennsylvania State University.

As a scholar:
I work at the intersections of technical communication, african american rhetoric and technology issues more broadly defined in order to examine questions of access. How can African Americans and other groups who have been systematically marginalized from the technologies, economics, politics, education, and other structures that make up American life gain a meaningful, equitable, just access to those structures and technologies? African American rhetoric and technical communication help me to work through these issues of access for several reasons: technologies are far more than the boxes and wires we think of, and the quest for technological access that is a major part of African American struggle in this current moment mirrors in many ways other movements. The ways Martin King and Malcolm X work through the complexities of access to the franchise, for example, teach us much about what is involved in access to digital technologies now

Current research:
I'm working on revisions to my manuscript, Higher Ground: African American Rhetoric and Composition in a Digital Age (under contract, NCTE/Lawrence Erlbaum). In the book, im trying to take those issues I've noted above and work a vision for what African American rhetorical study can look like in this moment when so much of Black experience--in both our successes and our struggles--is tied up in the technological. I argue that African Americans' relationships with technology have been exactly the same as our relationship with the nation: one of demanding access to the society on just and equal terms, and working to transform it in the pursuit of that access. this approach of seeking a transformative access also has to guide how we engage the seeming dominance of technologies in our lives right now.

In other words, we can't be satisfied with any old bone a school system or a government or nonprofit organizations or Bill Gates' foundation throws us. Six computers in a library that serves 6,000 or a state of the moment lab installed in a school in which the district has no plan for integrating that lab meaningfully into students' academic lives is unacceptable. Even if material access (the equipment, software, and connections in the case of computers) were equal, that ain't nearly enough. We have to demand participation in design processes, in policy discussions, in documentation and user testing, in debates about the roles technologies should play in our lives.

On the flipside, while we have to think about technologies in radically different ways and with intense new commitments, we get there by looking at where we've been. Malcolm and Martin point the way, Ida B Wells points the way, everyday blackfolk in their play with language point the way. We have rich traditions that we have to bring to the technologies, to the point of forcing the technologies themselves--and the larger nation-- to change.

In the classroom:
I try to encourage my students to feel free to play with language, to play in language, to experiment with ideas, because as important as specific skills and competencies are, the broader ability to shift to wide ranging environments and discursive conventions is even more necessary to students' long term success as writers. I encourage my students to play with the complexity and the messiness of ideas....to argue, to agree with each other, to problematize, to develop, because we know that in a major sense, there are no completely right answers to the big issues with which we struggle, but only the best and strongest answers we can develop right now. I want students knowledgeable of the conventions of whatever we call academic discourse, or the many other discourse communities they might become a part of, but I want them always searching, always working, always thinking far, far more.