Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Expertise
Whiteness; anti-Muslim sentiment; precarity; feminist surveillance approaches
LB’s work examines bizarre iterations of anti-Muslim sentiment and whiteness in mediated texts. She uses critical race and feminist surveillance approaches to examine how discourses of terrorism, nationalism, and disability animate texts of marginalization. LB’s work has appeared in leading journals, including Communication, Culture and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, in addition to creative venues. She has also received top paper and research awards from the National Communication Association, Southern States Communication Association, Eastern Communication Association, and Conference on College Composition & Communication.
Additionally, LB is involved in community education and gives recurring talks to parents at various schools in Austin about how to talk about race with their children. She also secured a national grant to organize a Muslims in Academia Symposium at Southwestern.
LB has a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in Rhetoric from Michigan State University, and a BA in English from the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where she grew up.
LB’s teaching hinges on three values:
- Accessibility: for students with varying learning styles and expertise
- Flexibility: through classroom routines that are explicitly structured but also explicitly open
- Portability: with course takeaways that are applicable to students’ various home disciplines