Riki Thompson

University of Washington Tacoma | UW Tacoma · Faculty of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

Through a historical case study of the mental health community website HealthyPlace.com, the author applies social semiotics and critical discourse analysis to interrogate the visual discourse surrounding mental health online. Web design transformations over the course of a decade demonstrate how visual imagery conveys a shift from a biomedical dis...

With the rapid changes in digital media, the need for research methods that address the constantly changing landscape are vital. In a perfect world, researchers design a plan and implement methods to ensure that data collected answers the research questions developed at the beginning of the process. However, with the speed at which digital technolo...

Bumble brands itself as a feminist dating app that’s designed to empower women. According to Bumble’s website, the app was developed to “challenge the antiquated rules of dating” by requiring those who identify as women to initiate communication with men they match with. But my research shows that Bumble, despite purporting to empower women, leaves...

Success in the digital dating world is often dependent on an individual's ability to negotiate the affordances and constraints of platforms (Bucher & Helmond 2017) while effectively expressing who one is and what they are looking for. Since mononormativity is the dominant script that underpins ideals of romantic love and intimate relations in our s...

We are in an age of media transition in which the textual is increasingly integrated with other semiotic modes and old and new media interact in a complex relationship. This chapter examines the evolving technology of whiteboard animation as a relatively new digitally mediated multimodal storytelling form that exemplifies the complexity of the conv...

People are swiping on dating apps in record numbers and roughly half of these individuals identify as women, which may be the reason why the dating app industry recently assigned the top leadership roles to women. This past year, the most powerful dating apps in the world-Bumble and Tinder-were both run by women. Whitney Wolfe Herd is at Bumble whi...

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/b1PC5I0ziMQ Abstract: Over the last three decades, the search for love, sex, and eroticism has increasingly become mediated by technology, with online dating as one of the most common and fastest growing means for people to meet (Anderson et al., 2020). With the emergence of mobile devices, online dating has become a...

A few years ago I started conducting interviews with people about their online dating experiences. I wanted to know how people presented themselves on their profiles, perceived other users on the platforms, and made decisions about whom to date. My participants included single people trying to find “the one,” some simply looking to casually date an...

Reports about apparent declines in reading continue to gain attention, playing into social anxieties about literacy and the state of education. In this article, we examine concerns about changing reading habits, address the role of digital media in literacy practices, and the problem of adequate access to reading materials. To meet the rapidly chan...

Thompson’s chapter focuses on her specialized Writing through Comics course, an upper-level course for a recently formed Writing Studies major that includes a track in Creative Writing and Technical Communication. As Thompson explains, this interdisciplinary course draws on the traditions of creative writing, visual design, art, rhetoric, and new m...

Over the past century, mental health disorders have become an area of concern for maintaining a "productive" population, as attention has shifted to endemics that slowly diminish the capacity to live a long and productive life and the care of society depends upon disciplinary technologies that aim to educate and manage people about health and self-...

The turn to narrative as a form of therapy has become a common practice with individuals telling their stories in private and public forums in hopes of finding healing and recovery for a wide variety of mental health disorders. With the emergence of the internet and the proliferation of new media forms, narrative practices have evolved concurrently...

All persons with new disabilities must grieve and mourn aspects of their own identity, and engage in the process of re-authoring and developing new conceptions of self and living. This is particularly true for men whose identities are often anchored by traditional conceptions and traits of hegemonic masculinity, which often make seeking and receivi...

Poetry matters: a case for poetry in social work This article seeks to contribute to an unfortunate decline in literature that explores the importance of the arts and humanities to social work practice, education and research through an exploration of the role of poetry in social work. The authors explore the metaphor of the poet/practitioner, iden...

The notion that names, identity, and the self are closely related is not a new concept (Dion, 1983). However, little research has approached this subject from a (socio)linguistic perspective (Lieberson, 1984), as early research on names and identity centered on psychological aspects (Busse & Seraydarian, 1979; Ellis & Beechley, 1954; Houston & Sumn...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. This dissertation argues that mental health has become an object of governmentality (Foucault), in which current mental health discourses normalize ongoing disorder and promote personal responsibility for attaining an idealized state of wellness. The broadening of mental health disorder categories ha...