Elora Pfriender
Elora Pfriender (she/her or any) is a graduate student, instructor, and researcher in the Rhetoric and Composition M.A. program at the University of Central Florida (UCF). As a prospective PhD student, her work aims to investigate the intersections of digital and physical lives, identities, and worlds.
Growing up as the child of two public school librarians, Elora has had a lifelong passion for writing, teaching, and learning. Her time as an award-winning student journalist lends to her dedication to accessible public writing, and her work with the UCF Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and University Writing Center (UWC) has equipped her with writing and teaching experience across a variety of genres and disciplines.
Elora's research is primarily concerned with digital embodied rhetorics, identity, and game/fan studies. Her current M.A. thesis project is a digital ethnography of a “modded” (modified) Minecraft science-fiction/fantasy roleplaying community, investigating how players leverage community-made gameplay additions and custom in-game character models to improvisationally embody and enact both their out-of-character (OOC) and in-character (IC) identities. Elora's work asks how these identities may intersect or impact one another (particularly in regards to gender and alterhuman identity in this primarily queer community), how modding the game can be a way of “queering” the game, and how improvisational storytelling affects and is affected by the use of Minecraft as a medium for roleplaying games (RPGs).
On the rare occasion she's not writing, Elora can be found planning elaborate TTRPG campaigns, making a wide variety of arts and crafts, and singing in local choirs and opera programs.
Teaching Philosophy
Fall 2026
In my experience as both a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and a peer-to-peer writing tutor, I have developed an approach to education which places value not only on what I can teach students, but also on what students already know. Whether in the writing center or in the classroom, my role is to facilitate learning by communicating writing studies concepts and scholarship in a way that is accessible to first-year students and allows them to name and reflect upon the diverse perspectives and knowledges they carry. Through this, I aim to foster an understanding of writing as highly contextual, rhetorical, and communal: an understanding which will continue to inform students’ writing processes and rhetorical decisions across disparate writing situations throughout their academic, professional, civic, and personal lives.
My pedagogical approach blends feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994; Ratcliffe, 1999) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) to promote a community of student writers who listen both critically and compassionately to the experiences of their peers, their audiences, and themselves. I believe writing is an inherently social and reciprocal practice. To truly foster conversation and equitable collaboration, I cannot position my disciplinary knowledge as the instructor as more important than the personal and cultural knowledges of my students. Instead, by candidly acknowledging the role of power in writing and the writing classroom and inviting student input on fair course expectations, I challenge the top-down classroom hierarchy while also modeling rhetorical listening practices students can then apply in collaborative activities with their peers.
These practices also lend themselves to an emphasis on reflection, as students learn to listen to themselves and critically consider their unique values, voices, and writing strategies, as well as how these might adapt to and/or resist conventions across writing contexts. As an educator, one of my primary goals is to leave students with a greater understanding of and appreciation for their own writing processes, as well as an awareness of the inherently recursive and reflective nature of writing. By positioning myself not as a teacher imparting incontestable wisdom, but rather as a facilitator offering tools and information to guide students’ learning and reflection based on a combination of writing studies theory, research, and students’ own preexisting knowledges, I hope to empower all of my students to view themselves as writers in their own right, helping them to gain transferable writing skills on top of what they already know.
Click to open as PDF
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
Updated: Nov. 4, 2026
Click to open as PDF
Buttons and “blinkies,” originating as a means of self-expression on the early indie web, persist as a tradition within modern-day indie web revival communities. Some have been passed around for decades, while others are created now in a pixelated style which emulates historical conventions. These images, then, represent an intergenerational accumulation of multimodal literacies and technologies (Rumsey, 2009) and are in many ways emblematic of transgressive internet values: personalization, anti-censorship, refusal, public access, piracy, and intersection with other transgressive communities/practices.
As the modern internet is steered forward by monopolistic companies, many of our online practices (and, consequently, our study of those practices) revolve around a small few social media platforms. With this shift has come censorship, pushing many of those oft-censored communities and subcultures away from mainstream social media. My work asks how these internet users are reclaiming their online privacy, freedom, and creativity in in an increasingly homogenous digital landscape. I am particularly interested in how internet users combine official and “homebrewed” digital tools to “mod” (modify) video games, elude surveillance, combat AI data scraping, pirate media, publish fanworks, return to the decentralized “indie” (independent) web, and resist the online norms pushed by tech companies. In short, I like to think about online communities which resist or “queer” dominant technologies.