DR. ASHLEY M.

BEARDSLEY

Research Agenda:
Food Rhetorics, Multimodal
Composing, Digital Social Activist
Rhetoric & Community Literacy
#BakeClub: The Rhetorical Strategies and Literacy Practices of
Baking Together on Instagram During a Global Pandemic

Participating in an online baking club hosted

on Instagram, women use food to
1. Cultivate relationships in times of isolation
2. Highlight cooking as a valued epistemology
3. Use food as an activist literacy

Dissertation Research: Key Findings

More Than "A Show About Life's Appetites": Developing Feminist
Culinary Expertise on The Splendid Table

Cooking texts that take a feminist approach and

1. Incorporate the cultural, political, and social
qualities of food (foodways)
2. Use analogies
3. Emphasize sensory feedback
to teach women how to cook and disrupt patriarchal
ideologies around gender and food

Constructing Regional Identity in Community Cookbooks: The

Constitutive Rhetoric of the Junior League of Denver's
Fundraising Texts

Junior League of Denver Community Cookbooks

1. Establish and preserve a regional identity
2. Memorialize the organization's community
impact through location
3. Raise funds for children's literacy initiatives

Creative Food Rhetorics: Composing Embodied Food Memories

Sharing recipes and food, both virtually and in

person, is a creative outlet that empowers the
Key Findings

maker through
1. Cultivating embodied experiences that
captures cooking as a creative response
to uncertainty
2. Serving as a publicly empowering rhetoric
3. Memorializing shared experiences

"Calling All Bakers, Chefs, Home Bakers & Cooks":

#BakersAgainstRacism and Baking as Digital Social Activist
Rhetoric
Research Questions

1. How do social movements use digital tools

to support in-person activism?
2. In what ways do hashtags contribute to digital
food activism?
3. How have platform-specific Instagram
vernaculars (comments, posts, archived
stories) shaped distinct performances
of social activism?

Cooking as Feminist Techne: Using Food in Community

Literacy Programming
Research Questions

1. How can community literacy programs

incorporate local foodways and food literacy?
2. What literacies do makerspaces prioritize?
3. How can feminist rhetoric use makerspaces
as sites of embodied epistemologies?

@am_beardsl ey
ashl ey. m. beardsl ey@gmail. co m