This summer I'm teaching (for the second time) Nursing 310, an academic writing course for students in CSU Chico's RN-BSN program. While online teaching isn't typically my favorite thing, I really enjoy the students in this program! A colleague and I are working on a program profile together that talks through our experiences teaching writing in a different discipline (nursing), and we're hoping to have a draft finished this summer.

Last month (June), I attended the RSA Meeting in Minneapolis, where I presented work on Just War Theory, rhetoric, and the War on Terror. That conference was just AWESOME. I always have a blast at RSA - something about the nonstop rhetoric panels just makes my heart sing.

In other news, I'm in the very early stages of a book project! This is big for me, because 1) books, obviously, are big news, but 2) I have two very young children, and 3) I teach a 4/4 load. I was doing a lot of reflecting this past semester about my career and where I see it headed, and I came to the decision that if research matters to me, I've got to carve out the time for it. While I enjoy teaching and being at a teaching institution, I miss my dissertation and I REALLY miss being a part of conversations about rhetorical theory, materiality, temporality, and torture. I don't have the funding for conferences, for the most part, so I am committing to a renegotiation of how I spend my work time - specifically, I will better protect my writing time and refocus on my larger, in-depth project on rhetoric and torture.

After an intense three weeks in June participating in Chico State's Academy E-Learning, I find myself hard at work this July on an article revision I've been fiddling with for a year now. Originally a dissertation chapter, this particular piece uses the Bush-era Torture Memos to think through the relationship between torture and rhetoric. My current focus is on 1) situating torture/rhetoric in terms of Obama's presidency, as well, 2) re-considering how I frame the conversation I see myself taking part in, and 3) re-framing my intervention (always the most challenging part).

My break from writing is taking some time to read texts for my upcoming graduate seminar in rhetoric and human rights! There's so much brilliant work out there - I have no idea how I'll narrow the field...

The Rhetoric Society of America's conference has so far been my favorite. conference. ever. Just looking at the schedule gets me anxious for the semester to end - must get to Atlanta STAT. This year I'm presenting with a few folks I met in the Rhetoric & Ethics pre-conference workshop at CCCC in 2015. Because we're all interested in rhetoric and human rights, we've put together a panel titled "Structures of Imprisonment: Rhetoric and Change in 21st Century Prison Activism." My contribution to this May's line-up is research on Abu Ghraib Detention Center as a space where (sometimes violent) material rhetorics haunt us.

Tom Fox and I have proposed a joint paper for this fall's Thomas R. Watson Conference in Louisville, KY. Bringing together his experiences with the Boles Fire (Weed, CA) last year, my research in rhetoric and repair/making, and our shared excitement over Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, we decided that presenting together on how communities repair following disaster would be just the thing.