“Donation Bag Programs as Multimodal Permission Structures: Selling Climate-Positive Consumerism through Digital Marketing.”
Technical Communication and Social Justice, vol. 3, no. 2, 2025.
Keywords: digital marketing, website rhetoric, greenwashing, environmental communication, permission structures, multimodal rhetoric, technical communication, UX/UI
Media Researched: business websites
This project explores how the emergent trend of buying donation bags in exchange for store credit creates a consumerist permission structure for people who are concerned about overconsumption’s environmental impacts. I analyze two forms of technical communication from a commercial donation bag program: the bags themselves and the websites that sell them. This analysis shows how these forms of communication establish a permission structure that appears to enlist audiences into a greenwashed consumerist cycle and presents unclear evidence of positive environmental impacts. I conclude by recommending digital and technical communication strategies for improving business websites’ credibility and audience engagement.
“Imagination, Identification, Intensification: Rhetorical Strategies for Climate Fiction on Television.”
Environmental Communication, vol. 18, no. 7, 2024, pp. 967-986. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2331799
Keywords: climate fiction, cli-fi, environmental rhetoric, narrative, popular culture, television
Media Researched: Extrapolations television series
Television climate fiction is an emerging, promising genre for environmental communication. Because audience uptake of this genre’s early texts will likely influence future texts’ production, it is important to attend to early texts’ persuasive successes and shortcomings. Thus, I rhetorically analyze Extrapolations (2023), a climate-fiction television series intended to provoke climate action from its audience. This analysis reveals three rhetorical strategies as critical to the genre’s persuasiveness: imagination, which helps audiences envision and evaluate information being presented to them; identification, which fosters feelings of connection and responsibility from audiences; and intensification, which moves audiences to act by imbuing emotion into the delivery of information. I show how these strategies can serve as a conceptual framework for developing and assessing climate fiction in popular media, and I suggest ways in which these strategies can more effectively motivate climate action.
“Responding to Cultural Crises Through Social Media Research and Student–Faculty Collaboration.”
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 29, no. 1, 2024. With Stephanie Tam, Emily Stead, Nathaniel Shimkus, Drew Mulcare, Ngoga Julien Vainqueur Mugabo, Jorgo Gushi, Nathaniel Gamboa, Tian Yu Fan, Charles Dursin, and Ryan Crowley DOI: 10.7940/M329.1.PRAXISWIKI.RIDDICK
Keywords: social media, digital rhetoric, digital methods and methodologies, student-faculty collaboration, open pedagogy
Platforms Researched: YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram
Although researching social media in undergraduate classrooms offers students opportunities to explore timely topics of personal and professional interest, it also poses methodological challenges. We may be asking students to research and write about social media without first teaching them to reflect on and carefully select method/ologies that are suitable for this work. This project demonstrates how student–faculty collaborations in the classroom can contribute to conversations beyond the classroom. Our collaboration explored two key questions that center on emergence and exigence:
- How can rhetoric and writing classrooms provide space for students and faculty to develop method/ologies for emergent research areas (e.g., social media)?
- How can open pedagogy help rhetoric and writing classrooms become more responsive to cultural exigence (e.g., events of cultural crisis)?
We begin with an overview of the seminar’s context and its connections to collaborative pedagogies and interdisciplinary research and writing. From there, we discuss our learning goals and research motivations. Next, we present a guide of our weekly individual and collaborative work; instructors can use this guide as a resource for developing and organizing similar projects with students. We conclude by offering recommendations for future work, which may help instructors anticipate and address potential challenges and constraints.
“Deliberative Drifting Over Time: A Critical Reflection on Designing Social Media Methods for Longevity.”
Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, edited by Ashley J. Holmes and Elise Versoza Hurley. Perspectives on Writing Series with the WAC Clearinghouse, 2024.
Keywords: digital rhetoric and writing, digital methods, digital humanities, social media, rhetorical fieldwork, digital fields
Media Researched: social media
This chapter addresses the ongoing methodological challenges of social
media research in rhetoric and writing studies, including developing
method/ologies suitable for this work. To do so, I reevaluate a method
I introduced in 2019 called deliberative drifting, which I designed
for researching spontaneous, ephemeral rhetorical activity on social
media (e.g., audience engagement with livestreams). I begin with a
brief overview of deliberative drifting’s development. Next, I reflect on
the institutional, disciplinary, and cultural conditions that informed
its initial design, as well as three underlying methodological themes:
engagement, positionality, and feasibility. To explore these themes, I
examine deliberative drifting alongside current scholarship and re-
search guidelines related to digital rhetoric, writing, and social media
studies. I explain that although deliberative drifting is founded on
an ethic of care and on careful considerations of the aforementioned
themes, it—like any other method—is a product of its time and may
benefit from updates. Rather than offer firm conclusions and solu-
tions, I conclude by advocating for reflection (methodological and self)
as part of responsible research, and I offer guiding questions to help
rhetoric and writing researchers develop social media method/ologies
today.
“The Ideograph and the #Pussyhat: The Multimodal Rhetorics of Brevity in the Women’s March.”
Hashtag Activism Interrogated and Embodied: Case Studies on Social Justice Movements, edited by Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie. UP Colorado and Utah UP, 2023. https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/6275-hashtag-activism-interrogated-and-embodied
Keywords: ideograph, hashtag activism, digital publics, dissent, counterpublics, circulation, multimodality, feminist rhetoric, social media, social movements
Platform(s) Researched: Twitter
In this chapter, I argue that the Pussyhat Project’s strategic use of brevity in its various texts—including and beyond the hashtag “#pussyhat”—plays an essential role in the march’s rapid, ongoing international success because these texts collectively create an ideograph, or a brief communicative unit whose use metonymically signals a larger ideology (McGee, 1980). Arguably, hashtags exemplify ideographs today. I show how multiple (types of) texts can collectively comprise a multimodal ideograph. Specifically, I argue that the Pussyhat Project employs brevity in a four-pronged approach of its name, web materials, hashtag, and namesake hat, wherein these components collectively create a multimodal ideograph that continues to encourage audience uptake and sustain the project’s influence. Ultimately I call for expanding our conceptions of brevity to be more inclusive of its multimodal, nondiscursive qualities, which can help us better account for its significance.
“Points of Contact between Activism, Populism, and Fandom on Social Media.”
Media and Communication, vol. 10, no. 4, 2022. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v10i4.5738
Keywords: celebrity, citizen journalism, digital publics, fan activism, fan studies, hashtag activism, popular culture, pop music, populism, social media, social movements
Platform(s) Researched: Instagram
This article explores how music fans used social media to increase a social movement’s public support. Although initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory, the movement eventually gained widespread support and is motivating communities to engage in broader cultural conversations. The movement’s success, this article argues, is largely owed to social media’s networked communication affordances and how they facilitate fan-based citizenship and citizen journalism. Through a rhetorical analysis of social media communication related to the movement, this article examines how online fan-based citizen journalism can draw together seemingly disconnected ideologies and audiences to diversify and bolster social movements’ support.
“Students’ Social Media Disclosures: Reconsidering the Rhetorics of Whistleblowing.”
Rhetoric Review, vol. 41, no. 4, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2022.2109400
Keywords: whistleblowing, student writing, social media, parrhesia, dissent, kinderuption, care work, intentionality, audience
Platform(s) Researched: Reddit, Twitter, YouTube
This article examines how whistleblowing evolves as a rhetorical genre alongside emergent media. By analyzing three events involving student disclosures on social media, this article argues that students’ social media communication can qualify as whistleblowing, just as whistleblowing can qualify as rhetoric. Notably, whistleblowing’s current conventions, which are heavily based in business and organization studies, suggest otherwise. This article introduces a concept called kinderuption to facilitate rhetorical analyses of whistleblowing. Approaching whistleblowing events as kinderuptions invites critical attention to audience engagement and influence, and a reconsideration of underlying themes like intention, harm, and care.
“Affective Spamming on Twitch: Rhetorics of an Emote-Only Audience in a Presidential Inauguration Livestream.”
Computers and Composition, vol. 64, June 2022. With Rich Shivener. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102711
Keywords: political rhetoric, visual rhetoric, emoji, affect, audience, social media, online comments, livestreams
Platform(s) Researched: Twitch
This article analyzes what is at stake when social media platforms restrict the modes in which audience members can publicly compose and communicate. More specifically, we are concerned with how platforms adjust users’ multimodal affordances during livestreaming public events, and how these adjustments affect public deliberation. This article focuses on an historic, political Twitch livestream: U.S. President Joe Biden’s inaugural address on January 20, 2021. For rhetoric and writing scholars, this event is significant for two reasons: (1) it is the first presidential inauguration to be livestreamed, officially, on Twitch by the president’s committee, and (2) the livestream’s chat was restricted to “emote-only,” meaning online audience members could only communicate with Twitch emotes in the “live chat” space of the stream. Based on an analysis of more than 12,000 comments, our findings support a theory of what we call affective spam, a more nuanced, visual-content-based form of spam that online audiences use to influence public communication and deliberation on social media during live events.
“Strangers Holding Space: An Online Carework Experiment between Pre-Tenure Writing Program Administrators.”
Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022. With Ashanka Kumari. http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/6-2-kumari-and-riddick
Keywords: writing program administration, care work, collaboration, academic labor, academic productivity, women faculty, tenure-track pressures
This is a story about a carework experiment. We wondered how we—two tenure-track professors at widely different institutions and experiences but with similar positions—value (or don’t value) carework. For a month, we documented and checked in with one another each day and each week for accountability. Notably, we were holding each other accountable not for typical work (e.g., research and writing), but rather for carework. Our goal was to relearn how to take care of ourselves amidst our ongoing challenges; to get there, we experimented with self-carework and caring for each other. In this article, we share this carework in action as we worked to feel safer as precarious professionals, to prioritize our health, and to challenge and unlearn academic values of productivity toward centering carework as priority.
“Deliberative Drifting: A Rhetorical Field Method for Audience Studies on Social Media.”
Computers and Composition, vol. 54, December 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2019.102520
Keywords: audience studies, methods and methodologies, social media, rhetorical field studies, digital fields, livestreams, political rhetoric, online comments
Platform(s) Researched: Facebook, YouTube
Recent studies of online audiences point to a continuing need to develop methods for studying emergent media and its actual audience engagement. This article proposes that studies of online audiences can strengthen their approaches by employing elements of rhetorical fieldwork. Advocating for the digital field’s place amongst rhetorical fieldwork, this article introduces a method called deliberative drifting designed for researching the digital fields of live-streaming videos and their online audience engagement. Through a case study of three moments of democratic deliberation live-streamed on social media, this article shows how rhetorical field methods designed for digital fields can produce findings—especially for rhetorical audience studies—as robust as those found in traditional fields.
Sarah Riddick 