Episode 74: Abbie DeCamp

Episode 74 of The Big Rhetorical Podcast features a discussion with Abbie DeCamp, the winner of the inaugural The Big Rhetorical Podcast Emerging Scholar Award. Abbie DeCamp is a PhD candidate in English, focusing on Writing and Rhetoric, at Northeastern University. She commits to justice, feminism, antiracism, and queerness in every aspect of her work. Her dissertation, “Queer Memes: Forms, Communities, Genres” traces queer memes as community-making practices that centralize humor, joy, and identity exploration. Her mixed-methods approach—which prioritizes community members’ voices through interviews—builds off her Computers and Composition article, “XM: A Schema for Encoding Queer Identities in Qualitative Research.” Her teaching philosophy centers students as community writers to help them develop and transfer skills in new and meaningful ways, seamlessly weaving deep engagements with memes and other genres.