Research

I see you standing like greyhounds in the slips,Straining upon the start.--Henry V.3.1, William Shakespeare (1599)--

Trained as a Rhetoric and Composition scholar, with secondary fields in Renaissance Literature, Folklore, and LGBTQ+ Theory and Literature, I investigate the discursive strategies of embattled populations, a topic that integrates all of my disciplinary concentrations. I work to understand how members of underrepresented communities adopt and adapt the conventions of pre-battle oratory when there is an exigence to fight, physically and metaphorically. In my published articles, I analyze emergent social practices for what they reveal about negotiations of power, specifically, how power is established, reinforced, or subverted. The following list provides a partial summary of the work I have completed while at UHCL. For more detail, please review my CV.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Seahorn, Christal and Patricia Droz. “Marching On.” [soundscape] Rhetorics Change/ Rhetoric’s Change. The Rhetoric Society of America, ePub edition, edited by Eric Detweiler, Jenny Rice, and Chelsea Graham, Intermezzo and Parlor Press, 2018, pp. 61-63, https://www.parlorpress.com/rhetorics_change.

“Marching On” superimposes audio tracks from the January 21, 2017 Women’s Marches with a timpani drum beat as the keynote sound, marking instances from Hillary Clinton’s emails when she uses language coded for positive politeness markers, most specifically the word “please.” We created the digital drumbeat using a distribution frequency from Clinton’s emails and an open-source software named Sonification Sandbox from Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab. The mashup of audio from the Women’s March with the signified drumbeats makes audible the simultaneous amplification and silencing of women’s voices and the complex relationship between gender performance and linguistic access.

Seahorn, Christal and Madeline Jones. “Brave(r) Conversations and Course-Embedded Consulting, or ‘Once More Unto the Breach.’” Writing Center as Brave/r Spaces, special issue of The Peer Review: A Journal for Writing Center Practitioners, 2017, www.thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/seahorn/.

This autoethnography continues my focus on dialectical negotiations in contentious communities of practice. “Brave(r) Conversations,” presents a multimodal, expository dialogue between myself and my Composition I embedded writing center tutor (co-author, Madeline Jones) as we struggled to adjust our pedagogical approach to combat the persistent disinformation and “fake news” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election cycle. Shakespeare’s exhortation, “One more unto the breach” (Henry V 3.1), frames the dialogue to represent the alternating physical and, at times, existential battles confronting us. “Brave(r) Conversations” unfolds as an embedded timeline of images, videos, and audio files that invites readers to (re)experience the year of conflict and authority negotiation in the context of professional and sociopolitical pressures. It calls for faculty in embedded-consultant partnerships to acknowledge that their curricular decisions position Writing Center tutors in contentious spaces. The article offers strategies for anticipating and navigating those potential conflicts.

Seahorn, Christal, Diana Bowen, Charles J. Darwin, and Dragana Djordjevic. “Kinetic Typography: Reinserting Embodied Delivery into Recorded Oral Texts.” Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms, edited by C. S. Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Parlor Press, 2017, pp. 335-364.

This chapter applies rhetorical theory to analyze computer-mediated discourses as a heuristic for digital production. It analyzes a corpus of kinetic typography YouTube speeches. Using grounded theory, my co-authors and I propose a set of conceptual categories for classifying behaviors of animated typography that recreate nonverbal communication and rhetorical cues without the presence of a physical orator.

“Beneath the Outrage: 2009 USPSTF Recommendations Undermine Online Breast Cancer Community.” Cultural Manifestations of Violence and Socio-Cultural Trauma, special issue of Folklore Forum, vol. 41, no. 2, 2011. www.folkloreforum.net/2011/09/13/beneath-the-outrage-2009-task-force-recommendations-undermine-online-breast-cancer-community/.

For this article, I performed a critical discourse analysis of a membership discussion board on the Susan G. Komen website. This 2011 article examines the embattled discourse of breast cancer survivors as they respond to a perceived threat to women’s cancer screening protocol. In 2009, six years before I would receive my own breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 39, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) changed recommendations for mammographic testing and breast self-exams, raising the suggested age of first mammography from 40- to 50-years old and recommending against teaching women to do breast self-examinations. My article describes the ways breast cancer survivors identify as a community with shared experience and collective literacy and knowledge. I analyze how the change in USPSTF guidelines manifested in a language of disempowerment and government attack in the Komen forum posts, a legislative re-traumatization for the survivors that undermined the agency and momentum they had previously felt around this health issue.

“Pride Translated: The Gay Carnival, San Francisco 2008.” Queers in American Popular Culture, Vol. 3: Sport, Leisure, and Lifestyle, edited by Jim Elledge, Praeger, 2010. pp. 209-226.

This chapter is an ethnographic study of the 2008 San Francisco Pride festival that examines the event’s carnivalesque elements—how they invert and subvert conventional, exclusionary social policies. The chapter captures a fleeting celebratory time for California’s LGBTQ+ community, after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage with a ruling in May but before voters passed Proposition 8 that November, constitutionally limiting legal marriage only to opposite-sex couples. Drawing from interviews I conducted with Pride participants, I argue that the performative carnivalesque celebration and its adopted symbols signifying queer identity both embody and complicate preconceptions of sociopolitical unity and group membership. I support these conclusions by interpreting the 2008 San Francisco Pride festival through the lens of festival theory from Victor Turner’s descriptions of liminality and communitas and Barbara Babcock’ symbolic inversion.

Awards

In 2017, I and my co-author, Dr. Patricia Droz, won the Marilyn Mieszkuc Professorship in Women’s Studies for our project, “Gendered Demeanors of Authority: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Hillary Clinton's Emails."
In 2013, my dedication to collaborative pedagogy in online classes won the Teaching Learning and Enhancement Center's Instructional Innovation Award for my proposal, "Collaboration in the 21st Century: A Large-Scale, Multimodal, Online Group Project."

Academic Presentations

I have delivered 20 professional presentations in my time as an assistant professor at UHCL at international, national, local, and campus locations. Highlights include presentations at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society of America, Shakespeare Association of American, and Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference.

The following selection shows the range of my presentations in the last three years. Please see my CV for a complete list.

Conference Presentations

I presented my paper “'Wars, / Wars, Wars to Plant the True Succeeding Prince': Just Cause Theory and the Rhetoric of Rightful Succession in The Battle of Alcazar" as part of the work group on "Forgotten Histories" at the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America Conference.
At the biannual Rhetoric Society Conference in 2016, I presented two papers. I workshopped my manuscript, “'Conjure Up the Blood”: The Pre-Battle Oration as a Learned Social Genre,” with a Research Network Forum group led by Dr. John Murphy (UT-Austin). Also at RSA 2016, I presented "Conservative Counter-Rhetorics: Analyzing the Discourse of Effeminacy in Elizabethan War Manuals” for the Pre-Eighteenth Century panel.
For a 2012 CCCC panel about launching the inaugural First-Year Composition Program at UHCL, I presented with my colleagues, Dr. Chloe Diepenbrock, Dr. Lorie Jacobs, and Ms. Leticia French. My paper, “Flying the Plane While Building It: WPA Action Strategies in a Time of Exponential Growth,” illustrated my philosophy and strategic approaches as the university's first, First-Year Composition Director.

Invited Presentations

I worked with educators from KIPP Texas Public Schools for a discussion of “K-12 Writing Practices for College Readiness” at their statewide Academic Team Meeting, in Austin, TX, in 2018.
For the 2017 CWPA, I was invited by the WPA-GO to participate in a discussion on “Fostering Diversity in the WPA: WPAs of Color on Inclusivity and Mentoring.”
In 2016, I participated in Alvin Community College's English Faculty Spring Colloquium, delivering a presentation entitled, “Responding to Student Writing: Grading vs. Commenting.”

Campus Talks

As co-coordinator of UHCL's Digital Humanities Faculty Learning Community, I presented a demonstration of corpus analysis programs, Voyant Tools and AntConc.
As a co-recipient of the Marilyn Mieszkuc Professorship of Women's Studies, I presented “Gendered Demeanors of Authority: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Emails,” with co-Mieszcuk Professor, Dr. Patricia Droz.
For International Women's Day, I led a discussion on “#MeToo & #BlackGirlMagic : Complicating the Strong Black Woman Archetype” for the #TimesUp Tea Party, sponsored by Delta Xi Nu Multicultural Honor Society.
As co-coordinator of THATCamp-Clear Lake, I presented my talk, “Mere Exposure Theory in Shakespeare’s Plays, or, Why No Love for the Histories?,” offering a socio-psychological rationale for why Shakespeare's history plays are performed least among the his dramatic genres.

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