Kaitlyn Patia | Whitman College (original) (raw)
Professor Patia is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Public Discourse at Whitman College. She fell in love with the study of rhetoric as an undergraduate student who was eager to change the world. In her classes, Professor Patia hopes to kindle the same spark of wonder and excitement in her students that she felt when she first encountered rhetoric as a student. Rhetoric is the interdisciplinary study of language, politics, history, and culture, allowing students to ask big questions about how symbolic communication shapes our world and equipping them with the tools to make a difference. Professor Patia tends to adopt a discussion-oriented approach in many of her courses (especially the upper 300-level seminars), treating students as fellow interlocutors in critical inquiry of the subject matter.
In her teaching and research, Professor Patia examines how power is challenged and maintained through rhetorical and communicative processes. She explores these relationships of power and difference through historical and contemporary rhetorical efforts by marginalized rhetors to create a more just world. This is necessarily complemented by interrogating discourses of the powerful, who would maintain and expand the discriminatory policies and practices of the status quo. The aim of Professor Patia's work is to analyze the role of rhetoric in social change, and specifically what rhetorical practices tell us about how we can create and sustain a more just world.
Professor Patia teaches classes on rhetorical criticism and theory; rhetoric and public culture; rhetoric and social protest; rhetoric, gender, and sexuality; rhetoric and violence; the black freedom struggle; and rhetorics of feminism. Many of her courses count toward the Gender Studies major and minor program at Whitman, and she is available to serve on Gender Studies senior thesis committees. Her published research includes an article in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric on the 1970s intersectional feminist activism of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a book chapter (with Kirt H. Wilson) in “Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century” on how ideas about race and gender were constructed through popular entertainment in the late nineteenth century, and a book chapter in “An Encyclopedia of Communication Ethics: Goods in Contention” on the works of Black educator and activist W.E.B. Du Bois.
Professor Patia received her Ph.D. in Communication Arts and Sciences (Rhetoric) from Penn State and her M.A. in Communication Studies (Rhetoric) from the University of Minnesota. Her undergraduate degree is from Northwestern University, where she double majored in rhetoric and political science. She is a member of the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR), and the National Communication Association (NCA).
less