Sharon Yam
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Research Interests:

Transnational Studies
Affect/emotion
Critical Theory
Citizenship and Civil Society
Critical Race Theory
Reproductive Justice

Education

Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, English (Composition and Rhetoric)

M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison, English (Literary Studies)

B.A. University of Pittsburgh, English, Politics and Philosophy

Dr. Sharon Yam's monograph Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, Intersectional Rhetorics Series) draws attention to how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. This book was shortlisted for the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award.

Her current research and teaching focus on the framework of reproductive justice. Her most recent project adopts the reproductive justice framework to examine how doulas, particularly those who work with marginalized communities, conceptualize and enact advocacy.

Selected Publications:

"Visualizing Birth Stories from the Margin: Toward a Reproductive Justice Model of Rhetorical Analysis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50.1 (2019): 18-34.

"Birth Images on Instagram: The Disruptive Visuality of Birthing Bodies." Women Studies in Communication 40.1 (2019): 80-100.

"Interrogating the 'Deep Story': Storytelling and Narrative in the Rhetoric Classroom." Composition Forum 40 (2018).

"Citizenship Discourse in Hong Kong: The Limits of Familial Tropes." Quarterly Journal of Speech 104.1 (2017), pp.1-21.

"Instagramming the Starbucks Bing Sutt: Nostalgia Memory Kitsch and the Construction of Cosmopolitan Consumer Subjects." enculturation (2017).

"Affective Economies and Alienizing Discourse: Citizenship and Maternity Tourism in Hong Kong." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 46.5 (2016), pp. 410-433.

"Education and Transnational Nationalism: The Rhetoric of Integration in Chinese National and Moral Education in Hong Kong." Howard Journal of Communication 27.1 (2016), pp. 38-52.

"Edward Snowden in Hong Kong: Transnationalism and the Local Deployment of Human RIghts Tropes" (Co-authored with Ling Yang). Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 5.3/4 (2015), pp. 50-63.

"Grassroots Tactics and the Appropriation of State Nationalist Rhetoric: Protest, Mockery, and Performance in Hong Kong." Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 4.2 (2015).