Seeking Ph.D., Rhetoric and Language Studies

Jenna Hanchey is a first-year Phd student in the Department of Communication Studies, and recipient of a three-year Powers Graduate Fellowship from the Graduate School here at UT Austin. Though she is pursuing a degree in Rhetoric and Language, her work also intersects with Organizational Communication, Critical Intercultural Communication, Women and Gender Studies, and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Her MA thesis examines the political construction of Peace Corps narratives through the lens of intersectional postcolonial theory.  She not only criticizes the neocolonial, raced, and gendered narratives of returned Peace Corps volunteers, but also seeks out points of rupture from which to theorize decolonial possibility.  Using participant observation and in-depth interviews in addition to textual analysis, her work helps to bring postcolonial theory into a relatively new arena.

Currently, she is interested in postcolonial and subaltern criticism of rhetorics of international aid and assistance, and possibilities for revolutionizing the current systems in place.  She hopes to integrate analyses of not only race, gender, and nation, but also class, in order to examine the complexity of materiality that both underlies and in some cases sustains international aid.  Having lived in East Africa for two years, Jenna hopes to return for her dissertation research and put her Swahili skills to good use.

Web: http://utexas.academia.edu/JennaHanchey

View Jenna Hanchey's vita in PDF format