Amanda is assistant professor of English at Fort Hays State University and received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona, where she was a Crossroads Scholar for the Crossroads Collaborative, a Ford Foundation-funded research collective focused on youth sexuality, health, and rights. Her research focuses on youth performances and identifications, and this influences her pedagogical applications in writing classrooms through efforts to account for and practice the intersectionality of identifications across rhetorical contexts. Her collaborative scholarship has been published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy and the Journal of Adolescent Research, and collaborative chapters are forthcoming in Making Space: Writing Instruction, Infrastructure, and Multiliteracies (University of Michigan Press) as well as Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Schooling (Oxford University Press). She co-edited Toward, Around, and Away from Tahrir: Tracking Emerging Expressions of Egyptian Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Her creative writing has been published in Indiana Review, Brevity, and Nashville Review, among others, and she has been a Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction. Amanda can be reached at ajfields@mail.fhsu.edu and www.amandajfields.com.
Londie is assistant professor of digital rhetorics in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where she teaches courses on digital narrative, web design, and multimodal composition. As a rhetorician, Londie pursues interdisciplinary work in new media, performance, and activist contexts. Her research and teaching take up theories of space and place to illuminate the rhetorical force and function of mediated performances in/across digital and face-to-face contexts, and she is most interested in youth-driven community research and pedagogies focused on activist, coalitional new media productions. In 2011 she was selected as a Crossroads Scholar for the Crossroads Collaborative, a Ford Foundation-funded think and act tank at the University of Arizona. She serves on the editorial board for Feminist Formations. Londie can be reached at ltmartin@ualr.edu and www.londietmartin.com.
Adela C. Licona, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Arizona is affiliated faculty in Gender and Women's Studies, Mexican American Studies, the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, & Families, and the Institute of the Environment and serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee for the UA Institute for LGBT Studies. Her research and teaching interests include borderlands rhetorics, cultural, gender, and sexuality studies, immigration, social justice media, community literacies, action research, and public scholarship. Adela is co-director of the Crossroads Collaborative, a "think and act" research initiative funded by the Ford Foundation for community action-oriented research to address youth sexuality, health, rights, and justice. She is co-founder of Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric (FARR), a group of progressive feminist scholars engaged in public scholarship and community dialogue. She is author of Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY Press, 2012) and co-editor of Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (JHUP, 2009). She is Editor Emeritae of Feminist Formations and serves on the board for Women's Studies in Communication (WISC), QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and Spoken Futures / Tucson Youth Poetry Slam. Adela can be reached at aclicona@email.arizona.edu and www.u.arizona.edu/~aclicona. For more on Adela's photography, some of which is featured throughout this webtext, please visit mividalandscapes.blogspot.com.
As a researcher, Elizabeth is interested in the broad applications of economic and evolutionary theory to explain human behavior; however, she cannot help but be intrigued by the details of the stories that capture the lives of individuals. For that reason, her aim is to use the combination of numbers and stories in a meaningful way, one that can broadly define actions of humanity, but that can express individual lived experiences. She has found that this expression is often more difficult to achieve due to the methods available in the social sciences, or rather, the perception of how methods should be used to explain human behavior. With these limitations, a researcher must find alternative ways to weave a tapestry that tells an all-encompassing story. Elizabeth’s ultimate goal is to discover these alternative ways of telling stories and to qualitatively quantify their meaning.
The Crossroads Collaborative, funded by the Ford Foundation, brings stories and numbers together—and interrogates their relationships—through action-oriented research and arts-based inquiry with academics, youth serving organizations, and youth from the community to develop knowledge, increase understanding, amplify youth voice and share what we learn with the broader community. Learn more about the Collaborative at mcclellandinstitute.arizona.edu/crossroads.
The Crossroads Collaborative includes Amanda Fields, Adela C. Licona, Londie T. Martin, Stephen T. Russell, Shannon Snapp, Elizabeth H. Tilley, Jenna Vinson, & Ryan Watson.
Background photographs in this section by Adela C. Licona.
We would like to acknowledge the following people for their help in putting together this webtext:
Leah Stauber for editorial assistance.
Lana Dionne and Casey Heinsch for poetry coding.
Sheila Dong, Eric House, Devon Randall Kehler, Araceli Montaño, and Zack Taylor for their help in identifying TYPS themes in 2011.
Background photographs in this section by Adela C. Licona.