Dr. Wieskamp started teaching in the Communication Department at Appalachian State in 2015 and became an affiliate faculty of the Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Program in 2016.
She brings both her experience working as a communication professional for non-profit and advocacy organizations as well as her academic background in rhetoric into her classes. This means that her teaching focuses on civic engagement, or how folks use their voices to participate in and think critically about public life.
In her research and writing, she studies media and public advocacy in the intersections of gender, race, and violence. She has written about sexual violence in U.S. wars, gendered representations of heroism, and public advocacy and social movements that address sexual violence, including the use of comic books in challenging the social norms that contribute to gendered violence.
Recent GWS scholarship
Valerie Wieskamp and Cortney Smith, “‘What to Do When You’re Raped’: Critiquing and Coping through a Rhetoric of Survivance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (Forthcoming, 2020)
Valerie Wieskamp “‘Learning to “Speak Without Shame’: A Feminist Response to Gendered Violence,” The Comics World: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Forthcoming 2020)
Kate Lockwood Harris, Megan McFarlane, and Valerie Wieskamp, “The Promise and Peril of Agency as Motion: A Feminist New Materialist Approach to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment,” Organization (2019): 1350508419838697.
Valerie Wieskamp, “‘I’m Going Out There and I’m Telling This Story’: Victimhood and Empowerment in Narratives of Military Sexual Violence,” Western Journal of Communication 83, no. 2 (2019): 133-150.
Valerie Wieskamp, “Research on Rape Culture: The Missing Piece in Reporting on the #MeToo Movement,” Media Ethics, 30 no. 1 (2018).
Title: Assistant Professor
Department: Department of Communication
Email address: Email me
Phone: (828) 262-2226