Category: From UMD

Public Humanities: Research profile on ARHU blog

The University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities recently featured me on their Voices from the Field blog that highlights research from ARHU graduate students.

As his interest in a career in local journalism declined, he found rhetorical studies in a slightly different hallway of the communication department. Matthew knew he was hooked when he started taking courses on media and cultural criticism, social movements, and argumentation, because they linked his interest in media, publics, activism, and education. He ended up at UMD after his undergraduate mentors introduced him to the work of his now-adviser, Dr. Damien Pfister. He thought: “I can do that for the next 5-6 years? Great. Sign me up.” 

Now, as a Rhetoric and Political Culture Ph.D. Student in the Department of Communication, Matthew is researching digital media, social change, and affect. Rhetoric is, by Cicero’s definition, an ancient art of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Matthew is primarily concerned with invention. He wants to explore how digital media could be (and are being) used to invent more equitable, just worlds.

You can read the full profile on the Voices from the Field blog. Thanks to Fatima Montero for interviewing me and Fielding Montgomery for passing on my research to ARHU.

Scholarship: Lemons or Lemonade? in Women’s Studies in Communication

Matthew Salzano presenting his Women's and Gender Studies Capstone at Pacific Lutheran University, Thursday, May 24, 2018. (Photo: John Froschauer/PLU)
Matthew Salzano presenting his Women’s and Gender Studies Capstone at Pacific Lutheran University, Thursday, May 24, 2018. (Photo: John Froschauer/PLU)

I’m excited to announce the publication of my first sole-authored scholarly article, “Lemons or Lemonade? Beyoncé, Killjoy style, and Neoliberalism” in Women’s Studies in Communicaiton. You can read the whole article at T&F’s site. The abstract is below:

This article focuses on the controversy surrounding bell hooks and Lemonade to contend with the neoliberal constraints of digital, feminist, public intellectual argumentation. I argue that hooks’s critique reveals her killjoy rhetorical style. Drawn from Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the feminist killjoy, hooks’s killjoy style provides a rhetorical interruption that reshapes the affective orientations of feminist communities. Its snappy affect opens up the potentiality for critical feminist theory amid the challenges of neoliberalism.

This essay was originally written as my PLU Capstone (pictured above). Thanks to all the killjoys that helped me take this paper from there to here.