The very conditions of digital rhetoric and writing are intricately woven into the epoch many are calling the Anthropocene, the contested name used to describe an age of environmental change and transformation.

Similar to arguments in rhetoric and composition that critique metaphorical treatments of ecology,

Techno-chauvinism describes the belief of a small group of fairly homogenous people located primarily in Silicon Valley that they are the best people to deploy a small set of algorithmic applications to administer human life.

Ellen Cushman

What came before the update does not matter, and we are encouraged to forget it entirely, because it is of no material consequence for the eternal present. Habitual updating reifies notions of digital sovereignty, drawing boundaries around both the space and time of identity.

Roxane: My hope is for the field to become more inclusive from top to bottom—who we see as authorities, how we teach our craft, the language we use to communicate, all of it. And, of course, as always, I hope more people within academia, recognize the importance of what we do.

To introduce our field to a broader audience, it is necessary to make connections between our field and the way people encounter it in their lives, the way they use it in their own communication. Even a simple email has elements of technical communication in it. When you strip away the jargon, there is a lot of common ground where people can connect with the work we do.

Derrida, Foucault, even Donna Haraway do not need any more citations. If you HAVE to cite them just to get your foot in the door, put them in the footnotes. Or just put them in parentheses at the end of a sentence. Save those in-sentence mentions for the people you want to SHINE on.

But in the most basic terms, cloud computing involves storing data in one place rather than another. A file may not be stored on your computer, but it exists somewhere. Maybe that somewhere is a server farm in North Carolina or maybe a server farm in Europe. Regardless, cloud computing, just like IRL, is language that dematerializes the digital. It metaphorically makes the digital less real through the cloud imagery that imagines data existing without physical infrastructure. The metaphor is another example of what IRL shows even more starkly: the language people still use has roots in early framings of the Internet and shifts the way we understand the digital in consequential—often negative—ways.

When you are on the internet, you are basically in the United States.

The internet was built by the U.S. military at the height of the Cold War and privatized into corporate America at the peak of anglophone neoliberal hegemony. Both of those things matter.

fiber pills

Sad too is his legacy at Berkeley, where he was known among students of the day as “that mad French leather queen who whips anyone who’ll let him at San Francisco gay bath houses.

children

Muñoz held out instead “the idea of hope” as “both a critical affect and a methodology.

Such incommensurable asymmetries were, moreover, “most graspable to us as a sense rather than a politic.”

, see Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and E.V. Walter’s Placeways

As that process occurs, I will recede into the background, and the community’s stories will circulate. Without this mindset, though, projects can quickly become settler colonialism in action.

Two, on extraction: The extractive nature of tech colonialism resides in the minerals that need to be mined to make the hardware for products, as well as the knowledge that comes through native pharmaceutical and technical traditions. In his work on the environmental history of computing, Nathan Ensmenger traces a periodic table of rare earth metals mined and incorporated into devices. Likewise, the anthropologist Cori Hayden’s work explores how U.S. pharmaceutical companies extract biological and botanical knowledge from the people of Mexico in order to create new drugs.

CiteBlackWomen

There is certainly much to critique here. Yet these critiques are not, in themselves, enough to dissuade me that there is something that we are all missing if we do not address it—much in the way that I believe we owe it to ourselves every time we elevate Heidegger in our theoretical wanderings that we also acknowledge the fact that he was a Nazi.

more pointedly by Kristin Arola’s question in her 2018 RSA talk: “is it an ethical obligation of OOO/PH/NM/AS [object-oriented ontology/post-humanism/new materialism/affect studies] to cite indigenous scholarship?”

In addition to questionable economic motives, the data center is being built on colonized lands and will use water pumped from the increasingly dry Rio Grande River. Facebook’s new location is just miles from the Isleta Pueblo, whose peoples have lived along the Rio Grande valley for generations. It is difficult to grasp the deep materiality of the Los Lunas data center, but to grease the wheels of the Facebook platform—to have a smooth user experience where we can connect with friends, like cat pictures, and post messages of protest and critique—data will travel via fiber optics cables to a series of buildings in the arid climate of New Mexico. In route, that data will get tangled up with land, water, and colonial histories. Technofeminist research on and practices with digital platforms can help to engage such an expansive, and admittedly fragmented, understanding of material infrastructure.

ttention to materiality, as Laura Micciche (2014) and many others have recognized, is a feminist project, as “all forms of matter, living and nonliving, are significant to sociocultural, political, as well as biological systems” (p. 491).

Sarah T. Roberts (2016)

Duggan, 2014

Across all of these categories, questions emerge for us as technofeminist researchers regarding design (who designed the platform and who is it designed for? how does the platform functionality structure activity and opportunity on the platform?), policy (what are the rules and who defines/enforces them? how is the platform governed both officially and unofficially? who are the corporate stakeholders and decision makers?), and cultures (who participates on this platform and how? which voices or identities are discouraged or left out? how are platforms entangled with material, environmental, and other cultural practices?).

materiality (Reilly, 2004; Wajcman, 2004)

colonialism

What we need are theoretical and methodological approaches that allow us to intervene on the organization of social relations that are embedded in our digital technologies and that can foster a clearer understanding of how power relations are organized through technologies.

The rise of the platform—a bundled term that describes an economic model, a set of computational procedures, and a semi-public space from which to write and engage—has reconfigured the conditions of the web

All bodies eventually fail and potential sources of these failures are as numerous as cells emerging from self-replicating genes, and the prions and synapses comprising our neuromuscular structures

Drawing upon Adrienne Rich's 1987 "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," Peter Vandenberg et al. (2006) maintained that "many compositionists see the physical body as the place where theory is actualized. One's body defines a point of location relative to others, a sense of where from which one can act through language" (p. 12). When we exclude bodies from the design of social and virtual spaces—indeed, from the design of theory itself, from the design of genre and form and "what mode for what purpose"—we reflect and enforce able-bodied privilege

The motivation behind access, after all, is not simply that individuals can enter buildings, navigate websites, or get the class notes, for example, but that they can be part of the community.

Cultural rhetorics scholars study meaning-making practices and, sometimes, the things produced through those practices like baskets, books, dances, poems, web-sites, buildings, landscapes. In doing so, we ask particular kinds of questions, such as:

I offer this practice as one path to excavating important stories that can help to someday eradicate my—our—collective ignorance. Small and wholly insufficient as it is, I offer it here as a replicable practice of accountability and solidarity alongside the many contemporary movements for justice, from #BlackLivesMatter to #IdleNoMore, that have emerged in this moment that could use a whole lot more stories of white folks’ accountability and solidarity from our collective past. Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri tells us, “If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives” (qtd. in King 153). In that spirit, then, let’s learn more and tell more of these stories. And let’s use them to help more raced-white settler folks like me to fashion more considered selves out of the pain, the potential, and the all too-often unexplored options for solidarity waiting for us in our collective past. Such options can be unearthed, for instance, by dwelling in the “distance between memory” as represented in a strategic remembrance like The Fenians’ Progress “and history” as represented in the reality that the United Irishmen Patriot Edward Fitzgerald was far more admiring of the Haudenosaunee than the American colonies (Bruner 68).

The power of visiting and sharing tea is commonly overlooked, but if I have learned anything at all in my four decades on earth, visiting is a fundamental human activity and one that happens less and less. I value this visiting as much as I value the plant knowledge

So yes, I’m very critical of people who come forward to help without any idea of what it requires to be able to understand. At the bottom, the first right is the right to refuse. This is something I say to my students in the villages. I say, “I’m your enemy. I’m good and my parents were good but two generations do not undo thousands of years.”

Some people are feudally benevolent toward them and very philanthropic, but this doesn’t change anything. I’ve been teaching there for 30 years, but it began when I started asking myself, should I just be an expert in French theory?

But one thing I’ve never done is apply theory. Theorizing is a practice. It becomes internalized. You are changed in your thinking and that shows in your work. So that’s what happened.

Frequent complaint No. 2: Academics sometimes submit work riddled with grammatical and proofreading errors. A poorly proofread manuscript can cause editors and reviewers to question how careful you have been in conducting your research; if your writing is sloppy, perhaps your scholarship is as well. A meticulously polished manuscript leaves us confident in you and your work.

Some writers like to talk about writing more than they actually like to write. Others dine out for years on their topics—giving conference papers, writing journal articles, applying for grants—until they’ve all but lost interest in what they are supposed to be writing.

and Franny Howes was in the packed audience that responded to the presentations of these insightful panelists

here are coherent narratives and ones that eschew coherency.  Unruly narratives, unruly readings: why not?

and what she experienced are important in and of themselves, not merely as an example of feminist theory or a sociological trend

Brandt and Clinton argued for a shift in what is often called the New Literacy Studies

theoretical

explore

You might also have students listen to examples of audio essays from the NPR This I Believe series to emphasize the brevity of an audio narrative.

We shared our stories. I appeared (rather naively) somewhat reassured that, like theirs, my treatment would soon start.

The bad news was that they found cancer in my lungs and elsewhere.

Can we dance on crip theory's radical edge, chipping away at the concretized assumptions, values, and norms of captioning? What problems would be called out by a severe critique of captioning? What new assumptions and practices might develop? Or, to use a different metaphor, what new products would be created if we baked captioning into our video productions and pedagogies instead of treating it only as an add-on, afterthought, simple legal requirement, or technical problem?

Music as Rhetoric: Appealing to Logos, Pathos, and Ethos 

“Jesus Walks” by Kanye West

It should also be remembered that, while many people from marginalized groups may have limited verbal communication skills, they have developed other communication strategies. In recent years, the many possibilities of using visual and performative methods of data collection and representation have been discussed in qualitative social research.

(advertised to keep one’s gastrointestinal tract ready for anal sex)

The ahistorical and acultural bent of Lacanianism has consequences: it reduces gender inequality to a matter of language and culture, neglects socio-economic issues, and leaves women without any prospects for change

With regard to the family, we risk supporting and reinstating a domain, not of free and equal communicative action, but of male domination and female subordination.

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Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life.

Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour, which we will explore below.

Though the book is aimed toward scholars of queer theory, its strategy of reading accessible texts subversively gives it considerable appeal to scholars of rhetoric and writing interested in looking differently at key texts and debates. (Because the latter part of the book focuses more intently on the work of queer theory itself, this review will examine the first third of the book only, due to its widespread methodological applicability.)

Guilt can be just as disabling as arrogance, however. The political good which Spivak has done far outweighs the fact that she leads a well-heeled life in the States.

But she is far more reluctant to recognise the seed of truth in their point of view: that radical theory tends to grow unpleasantly narcissistic when deprived of a political outlet.

Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity.

Yet you’re also an activist involved in these schools for illiterate students, which would seem to have nothing to do with the world of high theory. Is there really a connection between these two worlds?

Remember, democracy is a political system, not necessarily an ethical system as such.

This is a kind of tribute to a lived life rather than encountering a great new text

A Bit About Me

(meaning)

As we listen to the voices of the two young women in the scene above, we can’t help but hear those voices as irrevocably belonging to those two young women.

Seeing and sensing Liberty and ourselves on screen seems to invoke not only our situated selves, but our selves themselves!

recently

The Foucauldian in me says there is no one site from which to struggle effectively. There have to be many, and they don't need to be reconciled with one another.

the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject.

I'm still thinking about subversive repetition, which is a category in Gender Trouble, but in the place of something like parody I would now emphasise the complex ways in which resignification works in political discourse.

I don't think that if we were all more dragged out gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive. There are restrictions in drag. In fact, I argued toward the end of the book that drag has its own melancholia.

Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal Differences called "Queer Theory".

I want to oppose racism as well, but I do think it is worth pausing to ask by what means.

That suggests that those lives closest to us are most precious and that others are less so.

It may well be that those who voted for Trump were not always forthcoming with pollsters, understanding that racism and misogyny were unacceptable public discourse.

Sociologists who distrust her strain of richly descriptive ethnography saw this as an unfortunate consequence of the ethnographer’s tendency to become ‘‘too close’’ to her subjects, to forgo rigor and skepticism in favor of taking at face ­value the accounts that subjects give of themselves.

Consider how much competition you have.

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the same things you expect your students to avoid.

return to the body

The conventions of new digital genres that are used for everyday discourse, as well as for special occasions, in average people’s lives Public rhetoric...represented or recorded through digital technology and disseminated via electronic distributed networks The emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the rhetorical interpretation of computer-generated media as objects of study Mathematical theories of communication from the field of information science, many of which attempt to quantify the amount of uncertainty in a given linguistic exchange or the likely paths through which messages travel. (48)

Alexander makes it very clear that sexual literacy is something more than just being informed about sex/uality.