About

Hello. I am Paulette Stevenson, PhD. I have been a faculty member at Arizona State University since 2011. I am part of Arizona State University’s English Department where I teach First Year Composition and Professional Writing. Additionally, I teach courses at Mesa Community College and Arizona State University’s Polytechnic Campus throughout the year.

As an educator, I am positioned to shape students’ contributions to public life. I realize that most of the students in my courses will not be placed in jobs with writing, rhetoric, or social justice as their primary responsibilities, and thus, the concepts that we discuss and practice in class must lodge deep within their intellect to inform their future lives. To establish the value of writing, rhetoric, and social justice in students’ everyday life I use process-based projects, dynamic multimedia assignments, and engaging online discussions to guide my teaching.

In my writing and rhetoric classes, the major products that students produce are long-form, argumentative contributions via composition—in written, visual, or multimodal formats. To get students to cogently and persuasively argue a position, I approach these projects through a process-based pedagogy, allowing students to learn from each other. One of my rough draft workshops has students read as many of their peers papers as they can in one class period. They are asked to not write anything on the paper, but rather, students are to keep a running tally of the things they liked about the papers they read. After reading these, students reflect on how these papers will inform how their paper will be revised. This workshop privileges the power of learning through positive models of writing and scholarship.

Critical transnational feminist rhetorical analysis guides my assignments. Beyond understanding basic concepts of rhetoric and writing, students in my courses take away a critical understanding of the rhetorical situation to include not just audience, author, and text but also social location, privilege, and power. To allow students to practice critical rhetoric, I assign a project where students work in groups to make an advocacy project that voices an underprivileged population concerns to a powerful organization. Recently, I had a group of Native American pitch a website geared towards ASU’s Greek system that gave examples of how fraternities and sororities could be more inclusive to welcome Native American students. In these projects, students learn real-life applications for social justice and rhetorical concepts, and by having them engage with a real audience, the knowledge they take from my course has a better chance of transferring to their future public life.

My research intervenes in long-standing conversations that center the global north and economically privileged white women’s victories as the project of feminism. Adopting transnational and intersectional feminist perspectives for analyzing landmark feminist victories such as Title IX shows that these historical successes also create and disseminate ideologies centering hegemonic feminism that gloss over and ignore marginalized women in the global north and the global south. My methodology of reading network analyses (Dingo, 2012) sideways has implications for scholars working with transnational feminist theory in Women’s Studies and Rhetoric, for by tracing ideological and discursive narratives across rhetorical occasions, scholars can better theorize how seemingly national discourses work in transnational contexts.