I specialize in composition and rhetoric; in addition to my teaching in these
areas, I serve as Director of the Writing Center. My most recent
research, which has been published in College Composition and Communication and the anthology A Brief History of Rhetoric
in the Americas, focuses on the rhetorical practices employed in Hawai‘i to both resist and promote colonization and oppression; specifically, in these publications I examine kaona as a Hawaiian rhetorical strategy and the rhetorical work of writing in Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English). I have also published an ethnographically-informed study on UHM’s Writing Center that explores cultural perceptions and stereotypes about working with tutors. I am currently co-editing, with Jeff Carroll and Brandy Nālani McDougall, Huihui: Aesthetics and Rhetorics of the Pacific,a multi-genre anthology whose authors represent different nations of the Pacific (forthcoming with UH Press). I approach both my teaching and research
from the perspective that theory should inform practice and practice
necessarily informs theory. This philosophy is embodied in an on-going project
of mine that employs a teacher-research model to explore how and to what ends
location-based rhetorical strategies (such as the ones mentioned above) are
produced and reproduced in the classroom.
I regularly present my research at
the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication and have also
presented at the Computers and Writing Conference as well as at conferences in
Belgium, Amsterdam, and China.
Areas of Interest
Critical pedagogy and composition (including Writing Center
Theory) and the implications of location on praxis, Place-based rhetoric, and
Ethnography, with a particular focus on intersections between these areas.
Awards
The 2012 Richard Braddock
Award for the article “Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike (In the Work is the Knowledge):
Kaona as Rhetorical Action,” a collaboration with Brandy Nālani McDougall.
Education
BA, English, University of
Hawai‘i at Mānoa
MA, English/concentration: Composition
and Rhetoric, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
PhD, English/concentration:
Composition and Rhetoric, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
