trisha n. campbell, phd 

I teach writing, rhetoric, and digital writing + production. My research asks enduring questions around fostering empathy through intentional composing practices. I obsess over digitally recorded sounds, the digitally recorded voice, and how to live non-divisively through our language, writing, and voices.

“If ethics involves a relation, an approach in which I turn toward an other who is not simply an object, toward an other who may also turn toward me, it first of all implies that neither I nor the other is an enclosed entity, but that both are already exposed…radically non-selfsufficient…” (86).

—Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity

Currently, I am working on a manuscript entitled, Rhetorical Empathy, which discusses how we can foster and teach empathy through intentional digital production experiments using the voice, body, and other sonic composing materials.

At the heart of my work are enduring questions around the ethical, the rhetorical, the public, the body, and the digital. I take up each of these both separately and together through my art installations, articles, practices, pedagogies, and civically engaged or community-centered work. I found my way to empathy accidentally through my doctoral research on violence in inner cities. For years, I spent most of my time thinking about how violence circulates visually, textually, and digitally in networks, how empathy lacks, and how contagious our affects have become. By the last chapter, I realized that I was eavesdropping on how violence in the 21st century manifests. What I found through this method of rhetorical listening was the lack of another fraught 21st century word: empathy. Violence and empathy thus become my intertwined areas of research. 

On some days, my work attempts to practice rhetorical listening and rhetorical empathy through and with publics, performance, found media, archives, and voices.