COMPOSING(MEDIA) = COMPOSING(EMBODIMENT)
editors:
Kristin L. Arola, Washington State University
Anne Frances Wysocki, Michigan Technological University
…

Trinh Minh-Ha, Julia Kristeva, Howard Cruse, Emily Dickinson, Alison Bechdel, Julie Dash, Carole Maso, and Avital Ronell have each shown us how unexpected potentials of media can intercede in the mixed formations of gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and bodily potential. Dickinson was criticized for the unconventional punctuation that is now considered central to her shaping of temporal perception; Minh-Ha breaks cinematic conventions to question ethnographic conventions; Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse draw comics to make visible the layerings of growing up and living gay in the United States. Such compositions visibly question and confront textual norms while constituting identities in and through media.

The editors of this collection believe that as instructors of writing in this time we must encourage not only an expanded notion of what it means to be literate -- moving beyond literacy concerned only with singularly alphabetic texts -- but also must encourage a rich understanding of how identity is constructed and performed by and through the affordances of multimodal texts. We agree with the New London Group that “just as there are multiple layers to everyone’s identity, there are multiple discourses of identity and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated.” We believe that we should, along with people in the classes we teach, be addressing and investigating these multiple discourses and how our identities are entangled with and through them.

Broadly, this collection aims to interrogate alternate ways and media for composing -- growing out of or beyond the standard academic alphabetic page -- and the possibilities such compositions have for  identity formations. If we accept what Stuart Hall describes, that “identities are… constituted within, not outside, representation,“ how are we to understand and question, along with people in the classes we teach, the roles of production and representation in multimodal texts? And what happens to our pedagogy when we begin to view multimodal texts through theories of difference? How can we open up to classroom discussion and use aspects of media that usually aren’t considered in writing discussion but that are inseparable from performances of gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and other embodied potentials? We invite abstracts on how you are using the theoretic frameworks of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, postcolonial theories, and/or theories of new media to engage with the materialities of the texts you are producing or are asking people in the writing classes you teach to produce or analyze.

 

THE QUESTIONS THAT INFORM THE WRITING WE SEEK COULD CONSIDER:

-- What do feminist new media texts and practices look like?
-- In what ways do practices for composing in digital technologies conflict with or support the communication practices of particular cultures?
-- How is the creation of a social networking profile productive of both regulatory and empowering identities?
-- What do texts from previous centuries or other cultures suggest as potentials for uses of media in identity formation?
-- What is ethically at stake in holding onto strictly alphabetic approaches to text production?
-- Does teaching with new media offer students ways of learning and knowing that embody queer theory?
-- How do differing kinds of non-linearity shape knowing and being?
-- How might the production of new media texts allow students to negotiate complex and often conflicting identities?
-- How might composing (for example) a visual argument instead of a research paper change the fabric of who we understand ourselves to be and what we believe we can achieve?
-- What teaching practices can help teachers who grew up in non-digitized compositions learn more about the textual practices of young people? Why should such teachers make the effort?

 

TENTATIVE TIMELINE
March 16, 2007        Abstract Acceptance
August 1, 2007        Full Manuscripts (20-30pp. )
November 15, 2007         Revisions
January 1, 2008        Text to publishers

 

QUESTIONS?
Please contact either editor:

Kristin Arola
Washington State University
arola@wsu.edu

Anne Frances Wysocki
Michigan Technological University
awysocki@mtu.edu

 

PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS TO:
Kristin Arola
Washington State University
arola@wsu.edu