Research Projects and Collaborations
My primary focus is bridging gaps between research institutions and rural communities. This means first understanding rural concerns and learning from local experiences. By pairing scientific research with local knowledge, we can create new and important learning together.
Read more about some of my projects below.
Laundry day in front of the village mosque
Morocco
In 2017, I travelled to Morocco with a team of women researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students to learn about the communication practices and strategies of women’s associations in rural areas. These women are incredible and working hard with limited traditional literacy to achieve their goals of economic independence and community resilience. Learn more about this in my chapter in Sean D. Williams’ edited collection: Technical Communication for Environmental Action!
Agritourism is not only a way for producers to diversify their revenue streams toward economic sustainability and resillience; it is also a way to improve communications between producers and consumers and help producers advocate for their way of life.
Montana Agritourism
I partnered with faculty in the Montana State University College of Agriculture to develop the Montana Agritourism Fellows Program in 2022. We built a network of agritourism professionals, government agencies, and industry leaders across the state toward developing the first Montana Agritourism Association. Agritourism has a long history in this state going back to dude ranchers in our early days, and in recent years, it has become an increasingly important method of diversification of revenue for family farmers to keep their farms sustainable amid major shifts in the industry. The end goal is to revitalize rural communities by increasing visitors and jobs to the areas and improving producer-consumer connections. My role has been improving communications about agriculture and helping producers share their story and share their localized knowledge with visitors.
Read more about it in our article in Technical Communication Quarterly.
The pickled beets group learns and teaches at the same time.
Food Preservation Media
In 2024, I began a collaboration with faculty in Montana State University’s Extension program to develop clear social media messaging around food preservation safety. Dr. Brianna Routh’s research had found that younger generations in Montana are getting into food preservation, but that they are mostly turning to social media for information on this practice rather than research-based resources, such as Extension.
In Fall 2024, Dr. Routh came to my Digital Rhetorics and Multimodal Writing course and taught my students all about safety in food preservation; my students then went to the campus test kitchen and created social-media-ready videos for Extension to share. Read all about it in our peer-reviewed proceedings at SIGDOC or our forthcoming article in the Journal of Extension, or get the full assignment scope and see examples on my Teaching page.