Patricia started following the work of Robert Schwegler, University of Rhode Island, Writing and Rhetoric.
Patricia started following the work of Xiaoye You.
Patricia started following the work of Will Banks, East Carolina University, English.
Faculty Member, English
Purdue University, Rhetoric and Composition
Professor and Director, Graduate Programs in Rhetoric and Composition
About
Aside from my initial work on rhetoric and 17th century women's education in Britain, my scholarship/research has followed my teaching/work assignments. When I worked to test the usability of online card catalogs in the early 1980s at Carnegie Mellon, it cultured a long-standing interest in both usability and the relationships of memory and searching online. As I began administering Technical Writing, starting a major in Professional Writing at Purdue, and moving writing classes into computer classrooms in the mid 1980s, I studied program-building, the viability of case instruction versus experiential instruction, the cultures of computing, and women's responses to learning in technology-rich environments. I also conducted usability tests for several software developers and worked with James Porter to build a rhetorical methodology that could stretch across composition, technical communication, and computers and composition. That work took me through the 1990s, culminating in the Institutional Critique article (with Porter, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles).
Toward the end of the 1990s I took over direction of the Graduate Programs in Rhetoric and Composition. I completed a series of articles with Gail Hawisher on women's responses to technology and turned to questions of academic labor, the "image" communicated by philanthropic web sites, attempts to control visual rhetoric for the web, the virtual imaginaries built by mobile advertisers, how video restructures professional communication, and other increasingly more visual projects.
In 2008 I returned to institutional change, joining Libby Miles, Michele Simmons, Stuart Blythe, Bob Schwegler, and Jeff Grabill in studying flashes of emotion in institutional change efforts and how these "flashes" might make space for deliberation. Near that time I also returned to historical work, this time fascinated by the absences in our historical stories. I am working on that today with Tarez Graban, as we examine digital historiographic practices and use that as a platform for calling other historiographic practices.
Also, still involved with professional communication instruction and technology, I joined Jenny Bay in editing a special issue of the Writing Instructor <http://www.writinginstructor.com>, just published in May 2010, on technological disruptions of professional writing pedagogy.
I am also working with my husband, Peter Fadde, faculty at SIU and a career video producer, on "guerrilla video," which takes a rhetorical stance toward production issues. This work prepares me for my next big project. . . a multimedia collection, the Ong Project, that Kip Strasma and I are organizing to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Walter Ong's birth.
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