Janine Butler - Featured Faculty 2024
Janine Butler
National Technical Institute for the Deaf
Dr. Janine Butler’s interdisciplinary scholarship is rooted in the field of rhetoric and composition and extends to technical and professional communication, digital writing, filmmaking, the performing arts, and related disciplines. Her projects, publications, and presentations highlight the value of captions, performance, and embodiment across different spaces and communities.
Dr. Butler’s individual projects and interdisciplinary collaborations reflect her commitment to improving captions and accessible communication for D/deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing individuals—particularly through designing a space for captions when creating videos.
Dr. Butler has been developing a digital book project that will demonstrate how captions and subtitles can make multimodal and multilingual communication accessible to a wide range of audiences. The design of her born-digital book—with written text, images, and subtitled American Sign Language videos—embodies her argument for the value of communicating across multiple modes and languages.
In 2024, she became the principal investigator (PI) for a grant project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Grants in the Arts, entitled “Captioning Live Theater for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences.” This project has a goal of developing guidelines for captions that would support access to live theater in spoken English.
In addition to other manuscripts, her recent work includes an article entitled “An Even Better ‘View’ of Sound: Embodied Sonic Rhetorics and Sound Detectives” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She spotlights embodied sonic rhetorics (embodied experiences of sound) and demonstrates how we can meaningfully engage with sound through sharing multisensory sonic experiences, sensations, and feelings.
Her earlier work can be found in venues that include College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Through her scholarship, Dr. Butler has continued to pursue her aim of contributing to more accessible communication across disciplines and spaces.
Janine Butler
Associate Professor
Department of Liberal Studies
National Technical Institute for the Deaf