Bio
Courses I am teaching
ENGL 5480: Cultural and Critical Theories of Communication and Rhetoric
ENGL 5920: Core Studies in Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional Communication (Feminist Rhetorics)
ENGL 2750: Analysis of Popular Culture Texts
SPCM/WGS 3230: Gender & Communication
ENGL 4180: Seminar in Argumentation
ENGL 6110: Seminar in Rhetorical Theory (Fall 2016: Social Justice Rhetorics; Spring 2012: “What Difference Does Rhetoric Make: Activism, Justice, and Social Change”)
ENGL 4770: Special Topics in Technical Communication
ENGL 2500: Written, Oral, Visual, and Electronic Communication
ENGL 3020: Business Communication
Degrees
PhD English/Composition & Rhetoric, Miami University Ohio
MA English, Ohio State University
BA English, University of Missouri Kansas City
Research areas
• gendered/feminist rhetorics
• activist rhetorics/pedagogy
• rhetorics of peace/war
• digital and multimodal writing
• writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines
• rhetorical history and theory
• disability studies
About my teaching
I work to design courses that ask students to understand rhetoric and writing not only as pervasive in their lives but also as avenues by which they can participate in cultural production. To those ends, I emphasize investigating multiple perspectives; engaging in discussion; and crafting arguments, narratives, and counter-discourses with alphabetic and digital projects.
How I came to teach Rhetoric and Composition
I have always been interested in how people use literacy practices like writing and speaking to accomplish their goals. And my interest remains in discovering and analyzing how citizens use rhetoric to get things done in their lives.
Publications
Journal Articles
Martinson, Tracie, and Abby M. Dubisar. Beer farmers: cultivating an agribusiness atmosphere and consuming agrarian myth.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630:.2024.2415932
Dubisar, Abby M. “Student Ethos and Feminist Intervention Toward Food Justice.” Peitho, July 2023.
Dubisar, Abby M. “‘Dainty, Sparkling, Delicious’: Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 2023.
Dubisar, Abby M. and Julia Slocum. “Ending Lacewing Acres: Toward Amplifying Microperspectives on Farm Closure.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, vol. 11, no. 4, 2022, pp. 1-15.
Dubisar, Abby M. “Cultivating Legitimacy as a Farmer.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 31-51.
Davis, Sara and Dubisar, Abby M.. “Communicating Elective Sterilization: A Feminist Perspective.” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019.
Dubisar, Abby M. “Mothers Against Gun Violence and the Activist Buffer.” College English, vol. 80, no. 3, 2018, pp. 195-217.
Dubisar, Abby M. “Toward a Feminist Food Rhetoric.”Rhetoric Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2017, pp. 118-130.
Dubisar, Abby M.. and Kathleen P. Hunt. “Teaching Ethos from the Dumpster: Dive and Food Waste Rhetorics.” Communication Teacher. volume 32, issue 2.
Dubisar, Abby M.., Claire Lattimer, Rahemma Mayfield, Makayla McGrew, Joanne Myers, Bethany Russell, and Jessica Thomas. “Haul, Parody, Remix: Mobilizing Feminist Rhetorical Criticism With Video.” Computers and Composition, vol. 44, 2017, pp. 52-66. doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.03.002
Hunt, Kathleen P. and Dubisar, Abby M.. “Diving into Food Justice: Food Waste in the Anthropocene.” Teaching Media Quarterly, vol. 4, 2016.
Dubisar, Abby M.. “Linking Rural Women Transnationally: Iowa’s ‘First Lady of the Farm’ and Post WWII Ethos.” Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, vol. 19, no. 1, 2016.
Dubisar, Abby M.. “‘If I Can’t Bake, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution’: CODEPINK’s Activist Literacies of Peace and Pie.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-18.
Dubisar, Abby M.. “Embodying and Disabling Antiwar Activism: Disrupting YouTube’s ‘Mother’s Day for Peace.’” Rhetoric Review. 34:1 (2015): 56-73.
Dadas, Caroline, Dubisar, Abby M. Denise Landrum-Geyer, and Kate Ronald. “Composing a Curricular Circle: A WAC Program/Writing Center Embedded in Business.” Composition Forum 30 (Fall 2014).
Dubisar, Abby M.. and Jason Palmeri. “Palin/Pathos/Peter Griffin: Political Video Remix and Composition Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition 27:2 (June 2010): 77-93.
Book Chapters
Dubisar, Abby M. “Students Question the Academic Agrifood Industrial Complex and Promote Food Justice.” Food Justice Activism and Pedagogies: Literacies and Rhetorics for Transforming Food Systems in Local and Transnational Contexts. Lexington, 2023.
Dubisar, Abby M. “Maintaining ‘Meat’s’ Masculinity: Rhetorical Constructions of Vegan Manhood.” The Rhetorical Construction of Vegetarianism. Routledge, 2023.
Palmeri, Jason and Abby M. Dubisar. “Participation as Reflective Practice: Digital Composing and Feminist Pedagogy.” The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces in and Beyond the Classroom. Eds. Paige Banaji, Lisa Blankenship,
Katie DeLuca, and Lauren Obermark. Computers and Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State University Press, 2019.
Dubisar, Abby M.. “Promoting Peace, Subverting Domesticity: Cookbooks Against War, 1968-1982.” Food, Feminisms, and Rhetorics. Melissa Goldthwaite, Ed. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.
Adsanatham, Chanon, Abby Dubisar, et al. “Going Multimodal: Programmatic, Curricular, and Classroom Change.” Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres in Student Compositions. Eds. Carl Whithaus & Tracey Bowen. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. 282-312.
Dubisar, Abby M.. “Motherhood and Activism in the Dis/Enabling Context of War: The Case of Cindy Sheehan.” Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge. Eds. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jennifer Cellio. Syracuse University Press, 2011. 222-239.
Current research
Currently I’m writing a book based on interviews with 34 women farmers, an essay on coauthoring with undergraduate researchers, and an archival project on activist cookbooks.
Outside of the university
When not in the classroom, my office, or the library, I can be found knitting, cooking vegetarian food, enjoying Ames’s lovely parks, exploring Iowa by biking and walking, and taking in the local live music scene.