Wendy S. Hesford

About

Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English at The Ohio State University and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. Since 2018, she has served as the faculty director of the Global Arts+ Humanities | Cross-Disciplinary Research Exchange. Hesford's academic interests include rhetorical criticism and theory, critical literacy studies, and human rights and humanitarian studies. She is particularly focused on the transformative role that critical human rights literacy plays in exposing the violence of representation and revealing hidden, repressed, and silenced stories. Hesford has authored and edited eight books, including 'Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy,' which won the 1999 W. Ross Winterowd Book Award, and 'Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions and Feminisms,' which received the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. Her work often explores the intersections of human rights, feminist criticism, and rhetoric, with recent publications such as 'Violent Exception: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics,' which examines the strategic deployment of the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in American political discourse. Hesford has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University, Emory Law School, and Yale University, where she participated in a residency research fellowship focused on modern day slavery and human trafficking. She has received numerous awards for her…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Law
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Library science
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Mobilizing Vulnerability: New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights

  Feminist formations · 2016-01-01 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Mobilizing Vulnerability: New Directions in Transnational Feminist Studies and Human Rights Wendy S. Hesford and Rachel A. Lewis Since August 2015, the New York Times has run a series of front-page articles about the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. The intensified media coverage of the crisis was initially sparked by the global circulation of the image of Aytan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child whose body was photographed washed up on a beach in Turkey on September 2, 2015.1 In respons…

  PublisherDOI

• Reading the signs: Performative white allyship

  Quarterly Journal of Speech · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL SCIENCE IS REAL LOVE IS LOVE KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING.These declarations grace the manicured lawns of...

  PublisherDOI

• Surviving Recognition and Racial In/justice

  Philosophy and Rhetoric · 2015-11-01 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Scholars across the disciplines have turned to theories of recognition to interpret recent cases of racial profiling, police brutality, and the militarization of the police in black communities. Social activists, too, have embraced the concept, staging recognition scenes to claim political legitimacy. I examine the rhetorical contours of five recognition scenes and the sociopolitical objectives that recognition is expected to perform: 1) dialectical recognitions, which showcase how reco…

  PublisherDOI

• Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics

  2021 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, which can be found at the following web address: https://openmonographs.org.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trafficking American Exceptionality

  Women s Studies in Communication · 2018-10-02 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem, Pardis Mahdavi elucidates the discursive fusion of the wars on human trafficking and terrorism in anti-trafficking campaigns, su...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Amy Shuman

  3 shared

• Crystal Parikh

  3 shared

• Rachel A. Lewis

  George Mason University

  2 shared

• Wendy Kozol

  2 shared

• K. M. Ferebee

  1 shared

• Edgar Singleton

  1 shared

• Greg A. Mullins

  The Evergreen State College

  1 shared

• Sunny Xiang

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• W. Ross Winterowd Book Award (1999)
• Rhetoric Society of America Book Award (2012)
• President and Provost’s Award for Distinguished Faculty Serv…
• Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teachi…
• Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award

Similar researchers at Ohio State University

• Robert Hughesh-90
• John Jonesh-52
• Jared Gardnerh-18