My research interests in risk communication, collaboration, social media, and grant writing are connected by an underlying curiosity about how relationship-building alters the exigencies of communication.

Dissertation:

In April 2013, I defended my dissertation, Safety at the Margins: A Rhetorical Analysis of Occupational Risk Communication in Construction. In this research, I examined the human contexts of construction risk communication created by grantees of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Susan Harwood Training Grant Program.  This research led to a collaborative article with Carlos Evia in the June 2012 issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication.

I am also working on a collaborative article that focuses on how graduate students in the humanities and social sciences are enculturated into the grant research and writing process. This research is based on a grant research program established by the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Past research:

As part of my association with the VT English Department’s Center for the Study of Rhetoric in Society, I conducted interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the public impacts of writing. This work led to three successful co-authored grant applications and a collaborative article, “Research Centers as Change Agents: Reshaping Work in Rhetoric and Writing,” which appears in the December 2010 issue of College Composition and Communication.

I have also presented my work at national and international conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing conference, and the Association for Business Communication conference.

If you would like more information about any of my research, please contact me at apatriarca@wcupa.edu.