I’m thrilled to announce the 2025 Presidents Dissertation Award Winners! In recognition of the close relationship between scholarly excellence and professional leadership, the CFSHRC Presidents Dissertation Award is given to the author(s) of a recently completed doctoral dissertation that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of feminist histories, theories, and pedagogies of rhetoric and composition. This award is adjudicated every year and carries a $200.00 honorarium.
I also want to express my deep appreciation for this year’s committee: Vanessa Kraemer Sohan, Jill Swiencicki, Temptaous McKoy, TJ Geiger, and Renee Ann Drouin (chair). Thank you for your service!
Winner: Elena R. Kaoloder-Martin, “Medical Evidence, Expertise, and Experiential Knowledge: A Study of Patients’ Communication Practices on Social Media”
In “Medical Evidence, Expertise, and Experiential Knowledge: A Study of Patients’ Communication Practices on Social Media,” Elena R. Kaoloder-Martin furthers conversations around ‘coalition-building’ in medical contexts through her research and work with women with chronic illnesses. Shaped by the limitations of American medical care and combining numerous disciplines of rhetoric (feminist, health and medicine, disability, technical/professional), Kaoloder-Martin’s research gives voice to patients often gatekept from their own medical knowledge. Subsequently, patients utilize social media to ‘reframe’ effective health care delivery from an individual to a universal, collective issue. Using participants and voices often ignored by medicine, Kaoloder-Martin subsequently gives space and opportunity for all to build resources and create a stronger version of medical justice.
As one judge notes, the dissertation is “A thorough, original, a project design that others will learn from, build on, and extend. A focus on women-identified people, especially women of color. It is outstanding work that will be attractive to a wide audience; the conclusions translate well for public intellectual work on podcasts, news articles, and should influence policy. It features a version of rhetorical listening to patients and a decision to interrogate the ideological threshold concepts (like evidence) that keep us all from getting heard and delivering care.”
Another judge agrees, stating, “Kaoloder-Martin’s project is original and breathtaking, but its truest success is how it creates opportunities outside the field of rhetoric to understand patients and the need for community.”
Honorable Mention: Hannah Taylor, “Unruly Periods: Reproductive Futurities and the Rhetorics of Menstruation”
Hannah Taylor’s “Unruly Periods: Reproductive Temporalities and the Rhetorics of Menstruations” challenges our cultural misconceptions of menstruation and our over-reliance on examining it through medical institutions. Analyzing menstruation through the lens of reproductive rhetoric, Taylor calls for us to move past solely recognizing it through rhetorics of shame and regulation. By foregrounding voices of women with color and activist organizations like the Period Project and Period, Taylor demonstrates how must re-construct menstruation though new material and temporal constraints to create opportunities for social justice.
One Judge celebrates what the dissertation offers for the field, as “the framing of “unruly” periods permits a new kind of critical interrogation. The focus on “futurity” promotes imaginative reframing of sexist assumptions and structures. The reproductive justice and activist and materialist orientations enhances the study of biopolitics and critical menstruation studies.
Honorable Mention: Jessica McCrary, “Oral History, Activism, and Remembrance: The Rhetorical Agency of Georgia’s Women Activists in and Beyond the Equal Rights Amendment”
Jessica McCrary’s “Oral History, Activism, and Remembrance: The Rhetorical Agency of Georgia’s Women Activists in and Beyond the Equal Rights Amendment” performs feminist rhetorical microhistory to both recover and preserve the activists who appealed to Georgia politicians to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1979s and 80s. Through documenting oral histories of the Georgia Women’s Movement Project, McCrary offers valuable insight into how ‘actors’ within such events define themselves within feminist work. Her work concludes with a call for examining oral history as a rhetorical act and for further methods using feminist rhetorical microhistory to track social movements.
One judge noted the impact of studying failed political movements, saying, “In re-conceptualizing failure, McCrary encourages us to celebrate feminist rhetorical work and use feminist rhetorical microhistory to empathetically understand diverse female perspectives.”
