Alisa Hardy
Research Expertise
Digital Media
Race/Ethnicity
Rhetoric
Alisa Hardy is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She graduated with her B.A. in Communication from Western Illinois University and recently graduated with her M.A. in Communication with a focus on Rhetoric and Political Culture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Alisa’s research interests are race/ethnicity, rhetoric, and digital media. She teaches two sections of COMM 107: Oral Communication: Principles and Practices.
Publications
Naming, Blaming, and “Framing”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Rhetoric of Black Feminist Pedagogy
This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TEDTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.”
Author/Lead: Alisa Hardy
This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TEDTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.” Crenshaw enacts three distinctive features of Black feminist pedagogy in her activism for the #SayHerName Campaign. She challenges traditional “frames” of antiBlack police brutality, uses blaming vocabulary from a Black woman’s standpoint to create new frames, and names an audiences’ “revolutionary potential” in dismantling misogynoir in the justice system. An activist rhetoric of blame expands frames in dominant discourses so that the collective blame toward an institution can encompass intersectional oppression.