About Ailea
Ailea Merriam-Pigg earned her Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the area of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture. While her primary work focuses on digital discourse, Ailea is ultimately interested in how power moves through discourse in non-normative spaces, including gaming spaces, musical theater performances, vernacular archives, and funerary practices. She has published on the literary evolution of the Wicked Witch of the West, the musical Hamilton‘s color-purposeful casting practices, evolving practices of community leaders across generations, and metagaming practices on the livestream gaming platform Twitch. Her dissertation focuses on how considering digital discourse around marginalized identity as play enriches our understanding of the rhetorical strategies utilized and opens rhetoric to the consideration of play as a rhetorical strategy.
Ailea is a dedicated teacher with a focus on inclusive pedagogical practices. She has received awards for her inclusive practices, including the Baxter Inclusive Excellence Award and the Distinguished Future Faculty Partner Award. Ailea has also led pedagogical workshops on inclusive pedagogical practices, both as a Comm B TA Fellow and as an invited speaker for the UW Teaching Academy. Her teaching praxis has spanned courses from in-person, online, and hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous, and from writing-intensive to performance-based. Ailea takes a student-first approach to her teaching and incorporates accessibility standards across all her courses as a commitment to universal design. Ailea always seeks feedback from students and other educators regarding ways to make her courses more accessible and successful.
