Efe Plange, M.A.

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Assistant Professor
Department of Core Studies
St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Efe F. Plange is a scholar of rhetoric, media, and cultural studies whose research examines non-Western feminist media practices, with a particular focus on African digital feminisms, mediated activism, and transnational feminist politics. Drawing from her lived experience as a Ghanaian feminist activist, she investigates how African and diasporic women use digital platforms, visual culture, and performance to resist patriarchal systems, produce counter-discourses, and shape public debate.

Her dissertation project, “‘Don’t Bring Your Feminism Here!’: The African Hair Braiding Salon as a Rhetorically Charged Space for Feminist Activism,” is a qualitative media ethnography of a Ghanaian-owned salon in El Paso, Texas. It explores how intimate storytelling and everyday labor in diasporic spaces generate alternative feminist media narratives.

At St. John’s, Dr. Plange teaches first-year writing, helping students explore how their linguistic and cultural experiences shape their voices as writers and thinkers. She guides students in composing across genres and media—inviting them to view writing as an act of civic participation and a means of imagining more equitable worlds. She aims to cultivate writing classrooms that are intellectually rigorous, culturally responsive, and grounded in critical awareness.

· “The Pepper Manual: Towards Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices,” Peitho Journal, Vol. 23 (Special Issue on Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric).

o Honorable Mention, Kathleen Ethel Welch Outstanding Article Award (2023).

o Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition (2022).

o Featured in Everyone’s an Author (4th Edition, Lunsford et al.).

· Book Chapter: "The Afterlives of Protest Images: The Myth of Togetherness in the Women's Movement." in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetoric, eds. Jacqueline Rhodes & Suban Nur Cooley.

· Dissertation Manuscript in Progress: The African Hair Braiding Salon as a Site of Feminist Rhetorical Praxis.

· Doctoral Dissertation Project: ““Don’t Bring Your Feminism Here!’: The African Hair Braiding Salon as a Rhetorically Charged Space for Feminist Activism.” The University of Texas at El Paso.

· “From Protest to Platform: How a Women’s March Photograph Disrupted the Myth of Feminist Unity.” Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Conference, Portland, Oregon (May 2026).

· “What Informal Activist Spaces Can Teach Us about Feminist Work.” Study of Communication, Language, and Gender Conference, Memphis, Tennessee (October 2025).

· Panelist: "Border Crossings" Thirty Years Later: Feminist Rhetorical Reconsiderations and Revisions. Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, Spelman College, Georgia (October 2023)

· “Of Symbols, Traditions and Activist Work; Feminist Rhetorical Practices in an African Context.” Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, James Madison University, Virginia (November 2019).

English 1000c Courses taught:

· Rhetorical Listening in Action