about andréa
Andréa D. Davis is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University, Tri-Cities in the Department of English, where she is also the campus Writing Program Administrator. Andréa teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Composition, Rhetoric and Professional Writing, as well as in the Digital Technology and Culture program.
Andréa received her Ph.D. in dual concentrations—Cultural Rhetorics and Digital Rhetorics & Professional Writing—from Michigan State University under the advisement of Malea Powell (chair), Julie Lindquist, Dànielle N. DeVoss, and Dean Rehberger.
research précis
My scholarship demonstrates a commitment to focused interdisciplinary engagement across cultural rhetorics, digital rhetorics, composition, and administration. I weave these strands of my scholarship together under the rhetoric of storytelling.
Storytelling, for me, is a rhetorical-material discursive formation that uses and/or produces culturally relevant codes. In this sense, it is an embodied rhetoric in which the “particularities of linguistic culture, historical moment, and social responsibility” become explicit through various semiotic modes of expression (Kates, 1997, p. 61). Stories are the accumulation of situated knowledge that shape, influence, and produce identity and representation (Maracle, 1994).
Thus, my research applies a combined Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies approach to contemporary media examples as well those found in archival records in order to rhetorically analyze relationships between the cultural construction of identity and the ways in which various cultures and individuals are represented through textual, digital, and material media.
“...storytellers do not represent the world; they call forth worlds that can be inhabited and that generate new stories.” ~ John D. Niles
