It’s time to check in with the members of WRD’s faculty! As always, they’re busy with research, presenting at conferences, and publishing writing in multiple genres. So what have they been up to during the last year, and what are they working on now?
Professor Lisa Dush presented about DePaul’s HumanitiesX program, which she directs, at the Conference on Community Writing in Detroit, MI, this October, with WRD colleague Lydia Saravia and English/Media and Cinema Studies student Taylor Sellers-Varela. Their presentation was titled, “The Experiential Humanities in Practice: Activating Historical Memory and Community Archives.” Lisa also traveled to Sydney, AU, last summer with colleagues from DePaul, to present on HumanitiesX at the Australia Catholic University and DePaul Conference on Community Engagement and Service-Learning. In April, she published a book review in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement on the Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship. She is currently preparing a paper for the 2026 Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC) conference, which will take place next October in St. Paul, MN.
Tim Elliott presented a talk at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC)’s 2025 annual conference in October in Lubbock, TX. His talk, titled “Lessons Learned from Creating and Documenting a Community-based Tutoring Program,” shared six years’ worth of insights from his experiences co-creating and sustaining a tutoring program with community partner TCEP in Little Village.
In November 2025, Jason Kalin presented “A Visual Inventory of the (Infra)Ordinary Anthropocene” at the Annual Convention of the National Communication Association in Denver. In February 2026, he presented “Walking, Writing a Demon Archive” at the Annual Convention of the Western States Communication Association in San Diego. Both presentations explore how we sense and make sense of the “self-conscious Anthropocene.” Jason walks along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, including North Avenue Beach, noticing and photographing what happens to show up as a way of inhabiting “détourned Nature,” the dis/continuities and disrupted rhythms of the climate crisis.
In May 2026, he will present a panel at the Biennial Conference of Rhetoric Society of America in Portland, examining rhetorical in/dignities as they are mediated and manifested through sensory experiences of place. Jason will also be co-chairing and participating in a roundtable titled, “The In/Dignities of Identification: What may be Rhetoric After Identification.” This roundtable brings together contributors to the edited collection Rhetoric After Identification: Essays on Burke, Difference, and Acting Together (November 2026, University of South Carolina Press), which Jason is co-editing with his colleague Dr. David Gruber.
In July 2026, he will also be presenting with Dr. David Gruber at the international conference on rhetoric and Kenneth Burke at Ghent University. The conference theme is “Rhetoric in a precarious world. Moving forward with and from Kenneth Burke.” The panel presentation titled, “Rhetoric After Identification: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on Division, Opacity, and Democratic Futures” asks three European scholars of rhetoric to consider how the mostly American perspectives presented in the edited collection resonate with, diverge from, or challenge European rhetorical traditions.
In March 2026, Maria Prikhodko facilitated a workshop on integrating non-Western rhetorical traditions into First-Year Writing classrooms at CCCC. She introduced alternative frameworks for knowledge, voice, and assessment, emphasizing relationality, storytelling, and adaptability. The workshop offered practical, adaptable strategies to support diverse writers and cultivate inclusive, place-based pedagogies within FYW programs.
She will also publish a book chapter—”Decolonizing Freshman Writing by Teaching with Rhetorical Traditions from Siberian Indigenousness Amid Traumas of War and Pandemic”—in The Inclusive Works of Global Rhetorics with the University Press of Colorado later in 2026. The chapter develops pedagogical frameworks grounded in relationality, endurance, and narrative knowledge. It contributes to expanding non-Western perspectives in composition studies and supports more inclusive, globally responsive writing instruction.
Margaret Poncin Reeves recently published a piece titled “GenAI Authorship and Agency in a Professional Writing Course” in the Proceedings in Computers and Writing. The research examined students’ use of generative AI and how that use impacted their perceptions of writerly agency. It found complex and sometimes contradictory experiences that challenged traditional notions of authorship and autonomy. As a result, the article suggests a pedagogical process for AI literacy that is iterative, building in repeated opportunities for AI-assisted composing, reflection, and instructor feedback on both the writing product and process.
Monica Reyes will be presenting “‘Now, I’m Going’: Clothing as Affective Rhetoric toward Migrant Social Mobility” at the Applied Rhetoric Collaborative Symposium (June 4-5) at Marshall University. This article examines a migrant-run “free store” in Chicago as a site of cultural knowledge and affective rhetorical practice. By attending to the material and embodied labor of clothing, this study expands cultural rhetorics scholarship on migration, reframing volunteerism not as charity alone but as relational, future-oriented rhetorical work through which migrants build community and negotiate new social worlds. This work was also accepted for the per-reviewed publication POROI.
Jason Schneider presented at two national conferences in March. At the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference in Chicago, Jason shared a paper titled “Ethics and Writing Assessment: What is ‘Good’ Grading?” In this talk, he drew on theories from the philosophical tradition—deontology, utilitarianism, and care ethics—to offer new ways of reflecting on the grading of multilingual writers. At the Comparative and International Education Conference in San Francisco, Jason drew out key insights from his recent book, International Student Mobility in Higher Education: Case Studies in Agency.
Justin Staley had a short story, “A Trip Through the Desert on a Summer Day When It Rained,” published in volume 4 of Cola Literary Magazine, and a personal essay, “A Giants Fan Walks Into a Bar,” published in volume 17 of Sport Literate in spring 2025.