Sharon Yam

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  • Associate Professor
  • Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies
  • Gender and Women's Studies
  • Center for Equality and Social Justice
s.yam@uky.edu
1333 Patterson Office Tower
859-323-3922
Personal Website
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 is the winner of the Rhetoric Society of America Fellows' Early Career Award in 2021. Her 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 is shortlisted for the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award, and is the winner of the 2021 CCCC Outstanding 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: 

"The City of Tears: Reproductive Justice and Community Resistance in Hong Kong's Anti-ELAB Movement." Feminist Formations 33.2 (2021): 1-24.

"Complicating Acts of Advocacy:Tactics in the Birthing Room." Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric 20.2 (2020).

"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.