My research is guided by a desire to interrogate systems of power, and the cultural products that explicitly and implicitly reify those systems. My objects of study have often been defined by my own location and position, both geographically and socioculturally. In addition, I am also drawn to disjunctures, juxtapositions, and seemingly incongruous relations. This has most significantly taken the form of what I identify as militarized landscapes — specifically those places that juxtapose natural, scenic, wild, conservation, and/or recreation with a military’s historical and/or ongoing use of that space.
As I have transitioned into a new stage in my career, I also find myself exploring new and potentially different avenues to research, from a continued focus on legacies and practices of a militarized Pacific World; to questions about normalizing neurodiversity in the (first-year) composition classroom; to interrogating the dominant heteronormativity of online blogging communities of homesteading and homemaking. While these interests are diverse and divergent, they all stem from asking: whose voices are we missing? Where can we find those voices? Which narratives are dominant? How do we make space for those narratives that aren’t dominant?
Publications
Bartels, Rusty. "Navigating Disclosure in a Critical Trans Pedagogy." Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition 58, no. 4 (2020). Click here for link to article.
Forthcoming
Under contract with University of Nebraska Press, my monograph Memories of Sacrifice: World War II National Parks in the US Pacific World (working title) examines the role that WWII memory plays in securing contemporary American occupation of states and territories in the Pacific World. It does this by examining sites administered by the National Park Service in five states and territories throughout the Pacific: American Memorial Park (Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands); War in the Pacific National Historical Park (Guam); World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument (Hawai’i, Alaska, California); Aleutian World War II National Historic Area (Alaska).