Embedded Files
Below, you’ll find my writing organized by publication type and year. For questions on any specific publication, feel free to message my office, and a teaching staff member will respond as soon as possible.
Guiding Principles
Four main themes guide my research.
A sense of place: I am drawn to study the different ways that people make sense of place rhetorically. As such, I am interested in how maps are created, how planners and urban designers conceptualize spaces, and how everyday citizens use spaces in ways that give them a sense of place. My work explores the connection between rhetoric and place in order to provide us with a greater understanding of how spaces are made and experienced — from both the perspectives of experts and users.
Digital Stewardship: Whether exploring GIS, Google SketchUp, or social media platforms, I see it important to learn about the affordances of digital technologies in professional and technical settings. My work looks at how digital tools can be deployed communally –whether that be in coordination with other classes, with other administrators, or with other users– in hopes of creating artifacts that carry more participatory weight that those constructed from a top-down perspective.
Professional Communication: I am also interested in the needs of students in STEM fields learning to become professional communicators. My research takes into account the institutional structures that need to be created and maintained to provide students with such experiences, as well as the friction that can arise from asking students to become “more professional.”
Diverse Publics: It is important to understand how minority populations are negatively impacted by work across all of the areas above. For example, how maps occlude the existence of racial minorities or how technologies negatively impact individuals with disabilities. This cultural work is vital to understanding issues of access and inclusivity across our rhetorical scholarship.
Professional writers’ emotions, beliefs, and decisions about their English major (2025)
Through qualitative interviews with seven professional and technical writers (PTWs) who majored in literature or creative writing, this study examines how students’ emotions and beliefs about English as literary brought them to major in English but also limited their confidence in pursuing writing careers. Findings suggest that PTW concentrations in traditional English departments must account for their majors’ affinity for the literary while also providing sufficient coursework that helps them understand how English actually leads to specific writing careers.
Sánchez, F. (2024). Professional Writers’ Emotions, Beliefs, and Decisions Regarding Their English Major. Technical Communication Quarterly, 34(2), 239–259.
Cultivating Phronesis Through Wicked Narratives (2025)
Recently, scholars have suggested that reading narratives helps develop students’ phronesis (wise judgment and decision‐making), which is crucial for understading today's major political, environmental, and transnational contexts. I extend this work by noting how writing narratives similarly cultivates students' wise judgment and decision‐making skills precisely because, as I show, narratives themselves are ambiguous and complex. Borrowing from Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber's concept of wicked problems, I describe the narratives that students produce in community‐engaged settings as "wicked stories", or "wicked storywork", in that students face uncertainty, contradiction, and failure in their attempt to tame multiple perspectives on an issue and impose their own authority. I argue that working with wicked stories can help develop students’ wise judgement in writing situations within and beyond the classroom.
F. Sánchez. (2025). Cultivating Phronesis Through Wicked Narratives. Pedagogy, 25(2), 243–271.
On rhetorical distortion: Examining mutated hashtags in proanorexia communities. (2024)
In writing, rhetoric, and composition studies, researchers have examined hashtags through their collectivizing, signifying, and disrupting qualities. In this piece, my co-author Katelyn Brunner, and I propose that hashtags can also be deployed in ways that are distortive, meaning that individuals and communities can rhetorically implement hashtags that may appear illegible to outsiders while still being meaningful to those within the group. Through the context of hashtags deployed by members of the pro-anorexia (pro-ana) community/ies on the microblogging site Tumblr, we recommend that researchers in health and medical move away from studying purely aggregable hashtag data when working with at-risk populations given their use of such distorted hashtags to avoid algorithmic detection/aggregation processes. Thus, we suggest that researchers of digital rhetorics and in rhetorics of health and medicine pay closer attention to the affordances of distortions, rather than dismissing them as irrelevant to larger narratives of clarity.
F. Sánchez & K. Brunner. (2024). On rhetorical distortion: Examining mutated hashtags in pro-an(orexi)a communities. Computers and Composition, 75,
Queer Rhetorics and TPC Pedagogies (2025)
F. Sánchez. (2025). Queer rhetorics and TPC pedagogies.The Routledge Handbook of Social Justice in Technical and Professional Communication (Edited by Natasha N. Jones, Laura Gonzales, Angela M. Haas, & Miriam Williams), pp. -- . Routledge.
Revising a Cover Letter, Revising a Life (2024)
In this book chapter, co-authored with Ellery Sills and published in the Revising Moves edited collection, we explore how revision as a process has the potential to destabilize not only written job documents but also a writer's identity as they redraft and recompose their experiences to match job advertisements.
E. Sills & F. Sánchez. (2024). Revising a cover letter, revising a life: Bridging professional identities. Revising Moves: Writing Stories of (Re)Making (Edited by Christina M. Lavecchia, Allison D. Carr, Laura R. Micciche, Hannah J. Rule & Jayne E. O. Stone), pp. 52–62. University Press of Colorado.
Slow Civic Violence and the Removal of USPS Mail Sorting Machines During the 2020 Election (2023)
This article combines historical research with demographic analysis and neoliberal/rhetorical critique to put forth the concept of slow civic violence—indirect injuries on civic process, particularly within marginalized communities. I tie the United States Postal Service's (USPS) rationale for removing mail sorting machines during the 2020 election year to systemic moves that damage democratic participation. I conduct an empirical analysis of where the USPS mail sorting machines were removed to show how neoliberal arguments in favor of cost cutting make voting by mail a more precarious and uncertain act primarily for those who reside in communities of color.
F. Sánchez. (2022). Slow civic violence and the removal of USPS mail sorting machines during the 2020 election. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 53(3), 175-197.
Queering Spaces (2022)
In this book chapter, I outline possible ways to engage in scholarship on spatial rhetorics through a queer lens. This chapter argues for a nuanced queer spatial methodology that highlights how individuals—especially those with marginalized subjectivities—navigate environments shaped by normative, often exclusionary policies and designs. Instead of categorizing spaces as "queer" or "safe," I encourage scholars to analyze spatial affordances, failures, and mis-fits. Drawing from queer and disability studies, I critique how spaces are built to accommodate typically white, cisgender, and able bodies, thereby disqualifying others through systemic design and policy. I propose that queer rhetorical geography should explore how individuals find (or fail to find) “fit” in various spaces, resisting binaries and embracing fluid subjectivities. This reframing enables a richer understanding of how spaces shape and are shaped by people’s lived experiences, emphasizing the need to consider multiplicities rather than impose categorical labels.
F. Sánchez (2022). Queering spaces. The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, (Edited by Jacqueline Rhodes & Jonathan Alexander), pp.156-164. Routledge.
Election Technologies as a Tool for Cultivating Civic Literacies in Technical Communication (2021)
This book chapter, co-written with Isidore Dorpenyo and Jennifer Sano-Franchini, presents election technologies as a promising topic for integrating considerations of social justice into technical communication courses. We describe an example course unit using The Redistricting Game, a browser game developed by the University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab that provides a basic introduction to the redistricting system. This unit was incorporated into an undergraduate general education writing course on spatial rhetorics as a way of using the election technology of electoral maps and geographic information systems (GIS) to teach students about the politics of space and spatial representations.
Methectic Tech Comm in an Urban Planning Comic Book (2020)
Winner of the 2022 CCCC Award for best article in Scientific and Technical Communication—Philosophy and Theory
Technical communication research has relied heavily on participatory, user-focused strategies as well as “participative”, posthuman frameworks. Both research methodologies have various strengths, yet also have been critiqued for underplaying the role of human and non-human agency (respectively) in rhetorical situations. Through an analysis of an urban planning comic book, I suggest that turning to the Greek concept of methexis – or “participation” – may help technical communication researchers bridge posthuman and user-centered investigative approaches.
Portions of this project were presented at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Baltimore, MD.
Distributed and Mediated Ethos in a Mental Health Care Call Center (2020)
This pilot study of a mental health call center clinician’s workplace tools, processes, and organizational structures proposes a preliminary theory of “distributed and mediated ethos.” A distributed and mediated ethos refers to how an organization uses various resources—artifacts, technologies, and processes—situated across disparate locations in order to expand and control their identity in the service of extending their reach and capacity to render essential services. An analysis of a participant clinician’s rhetorical context flowcharts and network pictures shows how an agency’s ethos is mediated through various technologies. Findings suggest that a distributed ethos
projects the impression of being “always there”;
relies on dexterity across several human and nonhuman actors; and
necessitates targeted tasks from branches that extend ethos farther from the organization.
This pilot study, thus, provides researchers of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) with a new tool for exploring the intricate and complex nature of health at a distance and other complicated 21st century healthcare delivery formats.
The Spaces Between: Mapping Gaps in the Assemblages of Spatial Renderings (2020)
This piece examines how assemblage theory can be used to map out the hidden agents in students' composing work. Through a months-long study of 3 urban design students learning to master the design rendering software SketchUp we can see that although students rely on personal, spatial, technological, social, theoretical, and supervisory constraints, that their attention to community based discourses is lacking. This signals an opportunity for Communicating and Designing Across the Curriculum faculty to help create more fully contextualized design assignments that are rhetorically aware.
Portions of this work were presented at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication and the 2015 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference, both in Tampa, FL.
The Perils of Oral Presentations for Trans Students (2019)
This article highlights the problematic ways in which professional communication textbooks prescribe cis-gender norms when discussing bodily performances in the classroom, such as with oral presentations. Through an analysis of 30 popular textbooks in the field, I note the ways in which these normative practices have the potential to put our transgender students into situations in which they must compromise their gender identity for the sake of their grades. While it is important for students to develop a professional ethos when presenting information, in this article I argue that textbooks’ discussion of professional dress and voice privilege cisgendered bodies and erase the differences and bodily experiences that transgendered individuals face. This may cause dissonance in trans students who may come to believe that they must choose between their genders and being professional. Given the increasingly diverse population of students that we meet in our technical communication courses, I note how we, as instructors, may pay attention to our positionality and privilege in order to promote more inclusive learning environments for all of our learners. The abstract is presented below:
A version of this project was presented at the 2018 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference in Kansas City, KS.
Racial Gerrymandering and Geographic Information Systems (2018)
Using the 2017 Texas court case involving the 2011 district map involving districts 23 and 35, this article analyzes the methods with which legislative mapmakers operate and deploy GIS software. As previous researchers have noted, latinidad is often constructed in political and governmental documents within the United States to position Latinos as a threat to White Americans. Frequently, this constructed threat is mitigated by inflating the contributions of White Americans over their Latino counterparts. Yet, this examination of the 2017 court case illustrates that mapmakers can also utilize Geographic Information Systems to gerrymander districts and thus suppress Latino’s voting power to help White Americans maintain political power. Most worrisome is mapmakers’ deference to and citation of the Voting Rights Act to justify the creation of districts that account for and control electoral agency. The article concludes by asserting that technical communicators move beyond compliance in order to account for multicultural publics and to avoid engaging in similar technological practices. It also encourages technical communicators to become more active in identifying practices that threaten democratic integrity and in using their skills to promote more socially equitable electoral practices across their teaching, research, and advocacy.
Portions of this article were presented at the 2018 Rhetoric Society Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN and the 2019 Conference on College Composition & Communication in Kansas City, MO.
Disability Mapping (2018)
This article extends scholarship centered on using mapping activities as a means to develop students' familiarity with local community issues by asking students move beyond thier own positionality and instead view local issues through external mapping practices. In particular, I discuss the results of a student project in which students mapped campus through disabilities as a way to open conversations regarding the ideologies of space. Such an approach may help students to break from their usual view of space and may develop a first-hand awareness of how spaces have an impact on others in their community.
Color versions of figures can be see here: Figure 1 and Figure 2.
An iteration of this project was presented at the 2014 Society for Disability Studies in Minneapolis.
Roles of Design Researchers in TC (2017)
As the field of technical communication looks at design thinking for research and pedagogical purposes, I argue that it is important to take note of how researchers in the field have recently positioned themselves in relation to the design of artifacts in their scholarship. The abstract to the article follows:
Design has come to be understood as an essential aspect of the work that technical communicators claim. As a result, research in the field of technical communication has approached studies of design in numerous ways. This article showcases how technical communication researchers assume the roles of observers, testers, critics, creators, and consultants in their handling of design artifacts. Such a model regarding these roles may help us to better understand the design relationships researchers presume as they further knowledge of design within our field. This article offers a framework to leverage into a comprehensive and integrated model for explaining our work on design to others outside of technical communication.
The Appendix to this article can be accessed by visiting this Google Document
WAC Partnership with Animal Sciences (2017)
In this book chapter, co-written with Stacy Nall, we trace the collaborative work involved in creating sustainable partnerships across writing and STEM fields. Using a case study from our institution as a backdrop for this discussion, we ask WAC scholars, teachers, and administrators to consider the different priorities for assessment that professionals outside of writing programs have for their students, and how we can help shift these priorities through time and negotiation.
Drawing on archival and interview research, they explore the decade-long collaboration between graduate student coordinators and course faculty to negotiate between learning to write and writing to learn objectives. This chapter aims to encourage WAC practitioners to engage with content experts about differing concepts of and approaches to writing instruction in STEM courses. The history of this partnership demonstrates that graduate students can make a strong impact on faculty development in writing instruction. The authors conclude with a list of recommendations for administrators who may be forming writing partnerships on campuses where there may not be a strong WAC presence.
Aspects of this project were presented at the 2014 International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference in Minneapolis, MN and at the 2014 Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference in Bloomington-Normal, IL.
Tactical WAC Assessment (2016)
This article, co-authored with Dan Kenzie, offers a framework for engaging in tactical assessment practices. Although much of the scholarship in Writing Across the Curriculum has focused on strategic planning and partnerships, we can learn much from looking at WAC work tactically as well. This focus on strategy makes sense given that administrative endeavors typically involve shoring up resources and expanding programs. However there are salient benefits to adding tactical thinking to strategic planning in WAC work. Borrowing from Michel de Certeau's framework on strategies and tactics, this article argues that thinking tactically can 1) lead to increased administrative agency—particularly for WPAs and graduate WPAs (gWPAs) who spearhead WAC programs that are not on the path towards evolving—and 2) reveal new strategies that can aid in administrative work as particular WAC programs and partnerships mutate (rather than evolve). Through two case study experiences of how assessment-based tactics can function in WAC contexts, we discuss the benefits of introducing local "busts of action" into WAC administrative work.
Portions of this article were presented at the 2016 Conference on College Composition & Communication in Houston, TX.
Mapping Queer Rhetorics (2015)
This article, co-authored with Don Unger, discusses how mapping technologies can aid researchers in identifying relationships that may often remain hidden. We use Google Maps to trace queer dissertation networks, noting the spatial relationships that begin to emerge.
Because of the sheer abundance of scholarship employing spatial metaphors to trace Rhetoric and Composition’s development, it feels disingenuous to argue that mapping has recently emerged as an important method for shaping and reshaping the field. However, much of this scholarship challenges the lay of the land by describing the discipline as a map (e.g., Glen’s “Remapping Rhetorical Territory,” 1995). In so doing, this work glosses the complexities involved in making and reading maps. More recently, Sullivan and Graban (2010), Tirrell (2012), and others have delved into these complexities by employing mapping technologies to visualize aspects of the field that get overlooked. We draw inspiration from both bodies of work in order to locate queer rhetorics in two maps: one visualizes published work, and the other marks where, when, and from whom dissertations emerged. In one sense, our maps conceptualize queer rhetorics as a landscape in order to complicate how published works define this area of inquiry. In another sense, discussing our processes for creating and reading these maps points toward the limited way we are able to extend this conversation and complete our project. Put simply, we argue that mapping is an inventional method, and maps not an end in themselves. In order to raise questions for future research, we address how our maps locate (and dislocate) what they attempt to visualize.
Portions of this article were presented at the 2012 Watson Conference in Louisville, KY.
WAW and Digital Rhetorics (2014)
In this course design, my co-authors Liz Lane and Tyler Carter, and I discuss the implications of combining digital rhetorics pedagogy within the framework of a Writing About Writing approach to first year composition. We review the advantages of asking students to engage in such practices as
developing a visual and reflective awareness of their sponsors of literacy through social media platforms,
creating multimodal assignments that showcase the communication practices of discourse communities that they are a part of, and
networking across sections of our introductory composition courses to ask for and receive feedback on the design and content of these multimodal assignments.
We include feedback from our students as well as samples of their products which showcase students' enhanced learning in these "hybrid" sections and end by making recommendations for other instructors wishing cultivate students' meta-awareness of their writing practices through digitally engaging ways.
Accessible Online Spaces for ESL Learners (2013)
This essay responds to the 2012 CCCC featured session, "Access--A Happening," wherein, Paul Kei Matsuda called on instructors and WPAs to create access for ESL students into such spaces. WPAs have long sought out opportunities to allow students to have more of a voice when it comes to policy; in this way, this study examines whether WPA documents--specifically information and support resources available on writing center websites--meet the needs of ESL students. I studied eight OWL (Online Writing Center) websites in universities with large international student populations to gauge how well these sites took into account criteria pertinent to ESL students as evident in the available scholarship: intercultural needs, writing resource needs, plagiarism resource needs, and readability. The article ends with specific recommendations for WPAs to follow in creating documents--online or otherwise--that will incorporate ESL audiences.
An iteration of this article was presented at the 2012 Symposium on Second Language Writing in West Lafayette, IN,
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