Dr. Jonathan Shailor’s guest today is Adrienne Viramontes, who is Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She’s been a faculty member for the past 16 years and is the current department chair. She earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Communication from Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, IN and went on to earn her Ph.D in Speech Communication from Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, IL. She specializes in the study of lived experience at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geographic locale and focuses on Mexican American identities in the Midwest. The methods she regularly employs are auto-ethnographic, performative writing and is immersed in the area of phenomenology (the study of how things appear to us and how we come to understand particular phenomena. She also publishes work in the scholarship of teaching and learning.