Sharon Yam

Research Interests:
Transnational Studies
Affect/emotion
Critical Theory
Citizenship and Civil Society
Reproductive Justice
Critical Animal Studies
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. She is currently working on a book, tentative titled New Grammars for Reproductive Justice (under advance contract with the Johns Hopkins University Press), with Dr. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz.
Selected Publications:

"Against Gender Essentialism: Reroductive Justice Birthworkers and Gender Inclusivity in Pregnancy and Birth Discourse." Co-authored with Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz. Women Studies in Communication 45.4 (2023): 1-22.

"Towards a Differential Ethics of Belonging in a Transnational Context: Navigating the Hong Kong Movement in the US in 2020 and 2021." Frontiers: A Journal of Woman Studies 43.3 (2022): 29-62.

"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.