2021 Diversity Scholarship Winners

The CPTSC Diversity Committee congratulates two Diversity Scholarship winners for 2021: Elena Kalodner-Martin and Shyam B. Pandey. The committee commends both scholars for their groundbreaking research in technical and scientific communication, their attunement to justice and equity in the field, and the potential of their work in and beyond academia.

 

Thanks to the CPTSC Executive Committee for supporting the CPTSC Diversity Scholarship, which continues to support students from marginalized backgrounds attending the CPTSC conference to share their work. Be sure to check out the CFP for this year’s CPTSC Virtual Conference, and lookout for Elena and Shyam and welcome them to the CPTSC Community.

 

Congratulations! And thank you, as always, to the CPTSC Diversity Committee for your work selecting and supporting the winners.

 

Elena Kalodner-Martin is a fifth-year MA/PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her research is at the intersection of the rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, and technical communication. As she transitions into the dissertation stage of her program, her research interrogates questions of what it means to have “professional” knowledge, what counts as “technical” writing, and who gets included (or excluded) in these definitions. She plans to examine how patient narratives, an often-overlooked form of writing in clinical contexts, function as a form of technical communication in ways that challenge traditional power dynamics between “expert” writers and “novice” audiences.

Elena currently teaches courses in the Professional Writing and Technical Communication certificate program and in the College of Information and Computer Sciences. She is an assistant editor of Kairos and a member of the Graduate Student Outreach Committee for CPTSC.

 

Shyam B. Pandey is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Purdue University, where he is also working as a professional writing instructor. His research interests include multimodal composition, technical and professional communication, digital writing, transnational rhetorics, multilingual writing, and social and environmental justice. Shyam recently co-edited a special issue of the journal, Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies on “Multimodal Composition in Multilingual Contexts.” His recently co-edited collection entitled Multimodal Composition: Faculty Development Programs and Institutional Change is in press by Routledge. As part of his dissertation, Shyam is conducting an empirical study to explore how transnational TPC writers can work in a variety of mediums to express complex engineering concepts within a global communication network. Specifically, he is studying multimodality in the career unit, a common sequence in technical communication courses. The career unit is increasingly becoming multimodal as companies are looking for more evidence of qualifications and skills beyond the resume and letter of application, especially during this pandemic. By bringing together multimodal composition, transnational writing, and TPC, his transdisciplinary research will be able to theorize technical communicators’ multimodal composing acts that establish the technical writers’ composition and rhetorical practices. His dissertation is supported by a year-long fellowship, the 2021-2022 Ross-Lynn Research Scholar Fund Award, provided by the College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.

 

Congratulations again, Elena and Shyam! We are lucky to have you in the field.