Sara Baugh

Background

I am joining Davidson as a critical/cultural rhetorician. My research and teaching are centered in the decolonial feminist theory of faithful witnessing to understand how diasporic Latina/o/x communities participate in resistive world-building.

Broadly, my scholarship and teaching engage issues of identity at the nexus of race, gender, class, sexuality, and colonial power structures in the Global South and in the U.S. I’m particularly interested in how decolonial Chicana/x and Latina/x rhetorical memory performances create resistance movements.

My research is informed by personal and familial experiences, particularly those of my mother and the other women in her family, Chicana and Mexican women who developed resistive survival strategies through storytelling.

Similarly, my teaching style is also informed by personal experience. I entered university as a Chicana student from a low-income household with no understanding of how college/university systems worked. Drawing from this experience, my teaching is based in a desire to “demystify hidden knowledges” that we often take for granted in elite academic spaces.

In 2020, I was immensely honored to have my approach to rhetorical studies recognized as I won two national-level dissertation awards from the National Communication Association: 1) The Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award, which considers candidates from all subfields of the Communication Studies discipline; and 2) the NCA Critical/Cultural Studies Division Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Advisor for the Communication Studies honor society Lambda Pi Eta at Davidson College.