Announcing the 2020 CPTSC Diversity Scholarship Winners!
We are happy to announce two winners of the 2020 CPTSC Diversity Scholarship! The selection committee received many strong applications this year from applicants who are already changing the field of technical and scientific communication in important ways. Our two winners stood out for their invaluable transnational projects that will continue to shape our field.
Our two winners are:
G. Edzordzi Agbozo (first place). Agbozo is a final year PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture at Michigan Technological University. His research interests are located at the intersections of Technical Communication, Critical Discourse Studies, and Rhetorics. His dissertation contributes to international technical communication and technologies through analyzing how the locally developed GhanaPostGPS system was created to organize an addressing system for easier location of residences and to associate voters with verifiable local addresses through new digital communications technologies. Edzordzi demonstrates that postcolonial nations are fully capable of creating new technologies within their countries, though they still struggle to distribute the benefits of these technologies to all their citizens and to deal with the debilitating consequences of monetizing personal information that substantively drives the information technology industry. He also researches and publishes in Applied Linguistics (especially, language policy and planning; multilingual pragmatics, and translanguaging), Translation, and Transnational Literature. His most recent publications and reviews appeared, or, are forthcoming in Programmatic Perspectives, African Journal of Rhetoric, Applied Linguistics Review, Current Issues in Language Planning, and Multicultural Shakespeare, among others. His poems also appeared in Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, and Dunes Review, among others. He received the ATTW Graduate Research Award in 2019.
A member of the selection committee commented: “Agbozo’s work is much-needed in the field of TPC. His voice adds to the work of scholars theorizing, practicing, and teaching about the Global South as an important site of theory and practice in TPC. Agbozo’s work re-centers the focus of the TPC to privilege the Global South–which is an important move in TPC given the social justice turn of the field. His potential to contribute is undeniable and his work is necessary.”
Suresh Lohani (second place). Lohani is a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and an assistant instructor in the English Department. Before joining the Ph.D. program at UTEP, he earned his master’s in English Studies at Pokhara University, Nepal. He is an enthusiastic instructor. His research interests include user experience, user localization, multimodal composition, standard language ideology, and technical communication. He is conducting his dissertation research on the use of smartphones by South Asian international students. His dissertation explores the ways the South Asian international students use mobile technology to grapple with various complexities of their academic and personal undertakings in the U.S, focusing on how, in these processes, they participate in acts of user-localization and appropriation. Suresh’s research builds on Sun, Haas, and Gonzales’ works, among others. His positionality as a Nepalese national with different linguistic, cultural, and technological experiences, provides a unique interpretive lens, helping him contribute to the understanding of seemingly commonplace things often overlooked by U.S. based researchers.
A member of the selection committee commented: “Investigating the ways south Asian students adopt mobile technological at a Hispanic serving institute in the U.S. helps recognize how such digital technological devices impact users’ lives in a different cultural context. Further studies on localization, appropriation, and technology design will add needed specificity to the field’s understanding of TPC in the cross-cultural context. Lohani’s research stands to offer new perspectives that can contribute to understanding design that might seem commonplace to U.S. users.”
Congratulations once again to Edzordzi and Suresh, and thanks to all of the applicants for sharing your important work. Thank you as well to the fantastic selection committee who took the time to provide thorough feedback to each applicant.