Julia Moore Wins Outstanding Dissertation Award from Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender
New Assistant Professor Julia Moore has been awarded the 2016 Cheris Kramarae Outstanding
Dissertation Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender (OSCLG).
Her award-winning dissertation is titled "From Childless by Choice to Mother: Performative and Subversive Negotiations of Face in Relational Communication about (Never) Having Children." She received an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) during the 2015-2016 academic year to support writing this dissertation.
Moore describes her research as follows:
"Mothers who once told others they never wanted to have children have embodied two seemingly contradictory childbearing identities because they vocally articulated themselves as permanently childless by choice but then became mothers due to change in choice or circumstance. Researchers have demonstrated that motherhood continues to be privileged above voluntary childlessness, yet few have analyzed what happens if/when women’s childbearing desires/statuses change. My primary purpose in the present study was to understand how these mothers negotiated childbearing face in relational communication across their lives, and to connect these negotiations of face to broader operations of power. I developed and employed Performative Face Theory, which extends Erving Goffman’s theory of face by placing it in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. In this theorization, discourses cited or repeated in negotiations of face constitute and sometimes subvert naturalized identity categories and relations of power."
Recent PhD graduate Megan McFarlane was honored with the same award in 2015 for her dissertation titled “U.S. Military Policy and the Discursive Construction of Servicewomen’s Bodies.”
Congratulations to Dr. Moore for this fantastic honor, and for keeping the department's winning streak going for another year!