Inaugural Feminist Research Grant Recipients

The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Feminist Research Grant (FRG). This grant is designed to support the research of feminist scholars and teachers, especially to support archival research, translation, interview transcription, digital archivization and/or digital project development. Join us in congratulating the inaugural recipients of the Feminist Research Grant: Christine Garcia, Krystin Gollihue, and Nancy Henaku.

This grant has been made possible through the support of several generous donors, to whom we offer our gratitude. We also thank this year’s selection committee, which included Sara DiCaglio (Chair), Nancy Dejoy, Carrie Leverenz, Andrea Lunsford, and Kate Navickas, for their time and energy in vetting applications.

Dr. Christine Garcia is a mother, wife, writer, and professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Eastern Connecticut State University. She pushes boundaries to make any realm she enters a better, more inclusive space. From her support of her students to her empowering and challenging pedagogies, she molds critical thinkers and writes like a chingona. She will use FRG funding for a research trip to recover previously unpublished materials by Chicana and Latina rhetors such as Dolores Huerta, Helen Chávez, Anna NietoGomez, and Marta Cotera. In her work teaching Chicanx and Latinx Rhetorics, Garcia sees the genuine and immediate need for more rhetorical texts not only by Huerta, but also by other Chicana and Latina rhetors. These voices were at the intersections of the labor and civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s, movements that closely reflect the milieu of contemporary times. Now is the kairotic moment for a rediscovery of these important women rhetors.

Krystin Gollihue is a PhD candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric & Digital Media program at NC State University. Her research explores feminist approaches to critical making that account for the deeply historical and multimodal ways marginalized people have created communities of work, literacy, and communication. Her project “Makerspaces, Craft Communities, and Non-Institutional Spaces of Making,” is poised to bring important historical and cultural perspective to current trends in maker cultures. Gollihue will be conducting a participant-led video ethnography of three sites of making: a university Maker lab, a university Crafts Center, and her family farm in order to examine the ways that bodies are constructed in relation to one another as well as in relation to their technologies for meaning-making in each of these spaces. She will develop a model for a Makerspace that acknowledges and re-embodies the deeply multimodal and complex ways that women, people of color, and working class people have always and already been making.

Nancy Henaku is currently a doctoral candidate of Rhetoric, Theory and Culture (RTC) at Michigan Technological University. The FRG will support the project “Discourse, Women and Politics in the Postcolony: A Critical Discourse Historical Perspective on Ghana’s Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings,” which features a case study about Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, a famous Ghanaian female politician who was first lady for almost two decades (1979, 1982-2000) and is generally considered as the face of gender empowerment discourses in Ghana. The project employs an integrative approach that comprises communicative (mainly discourse and rhetorical theories), critical and historical perspectives that together provide a holistic explanation of the ways in which the discourses and experiences of a female politician in a postcolonial context provides significant insights into the contradictions, limitations and possibly, the potentialities of transnational empowerment rhetorics. Ultimately, Henaku hopes to contribute to ongoing research in transnational feminist rhetorics by examining the rhetorics surrounding a postcolonial African female politician, which are interlinked with discursive and experiential patterns from a much broader transnational milieu.

Coalition members are invited to apply for this award again in fall 2020.

Sincerely,
The CFSHRC Executive and Advisory Boards