On March 21st, David Powers Corwin, faculty member in the School of Integrative Studies (SIS) and Women and Gender Studies (WGST) and associate director for WGST (they/them) successfully defended their doctoral directions in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric Program. Through their dissertation, “Friendship Shouldn’t Hurt: Toward a Trauma-Literate Rhetoric of Friendship Through Post-2010 Television” David explores the gaps in current trauma rhetoric through an analysis of televised friendships. They utilize a framework of feminist rhetorical analysis and evaluate post-2010 television such as Private Practice, Thirteen Reasons Why, and The End of the F***ing World. They argue that the narratives within television have historically decentered survivor’s experience in favor of how the respective traumatic event affect the friend group(s) net wide. From this data, they concluded that viewers are trained to identify with the dominant, narrative-controlling character and in turn enable the process of chastising survivors and victims' via the dominant character. All of the core faculty in WGST attended and David’s dissertation director is Dr. Heidi Y. Lawrence, Associate Professor of English and WGST Affiliate Faculty.
Congrats to Dr. Powers Corwin on this milestone!
March 29, 2022
