Programmatic knowledge management: technology, literacy, and access in 21st-century writing programs

Growing out of research in Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Writing Program Administration, the articles in this dissertation explicitly seek to address changes in the practices and products of writing and writing studies wrought by the so-called “digital revolution” in communication technology, which has been ongoing in these fields since at least 1982 and the publication of the first Computers and Composition newsletter. After more than three decades of concentrated study, the problems posed by the communication revolution have been brought into clear relief by a succession of scholars, and the complex and semi-coordinated project of remediating ourselves, our discourses, and our disciplines is in many respects well underway. Nevertheless, significant challenges face multimodal pedagogy in the context of Writing Program Administration, challenges that take the form of entrenched conflict regarding the ownership and distribution of personal information and intellectual property. These articles examine problems at the level of the student, the teacher, and the program and argue for a new kind of Writing Program Administrator who uses multiliteracies to rethink how writing programs should produce and practice writing and the teaching of writing in the 21st-century

Performing Bristol: towards a cultural politics of creativity

This thesis examines the role of cultural creativity in urban belonging. It explores some of the people, places and organisations involved in producing and consuming Bristol as a creative city, to show that this performance is a contingent achievement. Drawing on the performance practices of spoken word, scripted theatre and Carnival in Bristol, the thesis argues that this instability of cultural creativity is played out through a dynamic of order and disorder. This is illustrated through the manner in which four elements of creative practice take place in Bristol. Firstly, ‘making’ is shown to occur through an emergent order that produces and maintains unstable spaces for creativity in the city. Secondly, such spaces for creativity are worked through by ‘circulating’ pasts that can be both a constraining and a productive force in contemporary belongings. Thirdly, this ambiguity of attachments is played out through acts of ‘expressing’ that both constitute and upset the subject. Fourthly, the ‘fragmenting’ of cultural activity is shown to be both product and producer of such precarious belonging. Taken together these creative movements point to the way culture is vital to building a social world from an individual one, but this is always a fragile construction. The ongoing necessity to belong, however fleetingly, must be balanced with the creative process of culture that is never straightforwardly affirmative. Culture’s tendency towards disorder might be productive but it also results in uncertainty. Without the stability of roles or the continuity of practices, a recurring implication of the order/disorder tension is the attempt to govern culture, to limit the scope of its creativity. The thesis draws out the potential and the constraints of such contingency to work towards a cultural politics of creativity. The creative tension in culture illustrates how people continue to work to belong, how they maintain attachments in the face of uncertainty

Mapping and Comparing Political Ideologies, Masculinity Ideologies, and Shame Ideologies

This study explored the relationships among political ideologies, masculinity ideologies, and shame ideologies within three online communities. Three different ideological communities, all on Reddit (a discussion-based social news website), were chosen based on previous research suggesting they differ in terms of their conceptualizations of gender and support for or rejection of feminism: r/TheRedPill, r/MensRights, and r/MensLib. This study uses a framework for understanding Ideologies as Complex Adaptive Systems (ICAS) as articulated by Thagard (2017), which uses Cognitive and Affective Maps (CAMs) as its primary tool of analysis. Using the postings on the Reddit sites as our raw data, we created CAMs to assist in comparing the conceptual and affective qualities of each community. We conducted the study in three phases: in Phase One, we used Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) methods and correlational analyses to create a set of general ideological CAMs for each community. We also constructed a set of CAMs depicting whom each group views as ingroups and outgroups in their creation of social identities. In Phase Two, we created a set of CAMs for each community’s dominant conception of gender. In Phase Three, we constructed a set of CAMs depicting each community’s relationship with the ideas of shame and injustice. The discussion section is organized into five main chapters. The first chapter contains reflections on the process of using CAMs, the next chapter is on the study’s limitations and future directions, and the final three are on the study findings’ empirical, theoretical, and clinical implications. The empirical implications of the study contribute to the following areas of research: the role of shame in ideology, the political construction of victimhood, and Ambivalent Sexism. In the theoretical implications chapter, I discuss the study’s potential contributions to theory development in the CAMs methodology. The final chapter offers reflections on the study\u27s clinical implications, especially related to gender identity development, sexual violence, and the role of ideology in emotion regulation

SUPPORTING TEACHER-WRITERS ENGAGEMENT WITH TROUBLESOME KNOWLEDGE: EVIDENCE OF TRANSFER IN WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Writing Across the Curriculum has typically been discussed in terms of curricular or pedagogical transformation. While it helped to transform teaching from lecture-centered classrooms into more student-centered pedagogies, less is known about how those transformations happen and what impact those transformations have on teachers. More recently, teaching for transfer and threshold concepts have become pervasive WAC pedagogies that aim for transformation. But what does it take to truly change how we think about something? Through two detailed case studies, this project explores the experiences of two faculty participants in two WAC-focused professional development programs that aim to impact how faculty think about teaching, writing, and teaching writing. ECU's WAC Academy and Advanced WAC Academy were created with ideas from the National Writing Project and teaching for transfer. Using multiple rounds of coding in conjunction with rhetorical analysis, I examine various textual artifacts from Pearl (nursing) and Conor (criminal justice), two earlycareer instructors who participated in the same professional development events in different years. I follow them as they engage new ideas through thinking activities that were intended to disrupt entrenched ways of knowing that come with disciplinary expertise, to see how their doing, thinking, and writing in this particular WAC PD impacted how they approach the teaching of writing. After offering threshold concepts for WAC that emerged from the cases, I argue that WAC PD may benefit from a more networked approach, and that WAC PD, overall, should engage faculty with more troublesome constructs in order to promote more meaningful learning experiences

The available means of imagination : personal narrative, public rhetoric, and circulation.

This dissertation examines the digital circulation of personal narratives by non-celebrity individuals that become part of larger public and political debates. I posit the “available means of imagination” to describe the ways that narratives – cultural, fictional, and personal – influence our ability to understand the many facets of a given public debate before tracing the interactions among narrative, emotion, and circulation in a series of case studies using new materialist methods. I argue that emotion plays a key role in structures of participation of social media and in how we subsequently engage with contemporary political issues, especially with regards to what we choose to circulate. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, including three case studies. Chapter 1 offers an overview of rhetorical approaches to the public debate, circulation – digital or otherwise – and narrative. The second chapter, which covers Liza Long’s article “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” establishes the relationship between emotion and circulation, arguing that Long’s post traveled widely because of the wide range of emotions it evoked. Chapter 3 analyzes the circulation of the story of Savannah Dietrich, a teenage sexual assault victim who violated a court order by posting the names of her underage attackers on Twitter, via its uptake into preexisting ideologics, demonstrating the ways rhetors may adapt another’s personal narrative to serve as evidence of their own claims while also having their own interpretations of the story mitigated by their worldviews. Chapter 4 examines the case of GamerGate, a movement purportedly devoted to ethics in games journalism which began with programmer Eron Gjoni’s blog post about his relationship and break-up with game designer Zoe Quinn. This case provides further insights into how a personal narrative may be interpreted to fit a preexisting world view, as well as demonstrating how competing narratives develop surrounding the same event, including accounts of the motivations of participants, critiques of opponents, and moves to bolster the ethos of the group with which the rhetor identifies

Sharing the digital public sphere? Facebook and the politics of immigration

This project critically examines 'Sharing' on Facebook, that which is central to the operation of the site and has been celebrated as a democratic panacea. By exploring the spatial, deliberative and informational features of sharing I attempt to locate the effective operation of a heralded Digital Public Sphere. Drawing upon data gathered on the Facebook Pages of three major British political parties between January 2015 and May 2016, I examine the space, speech and news manifested by an assemblage of actors sharing immigration, a particularly contentious topic dominating recent British politics. Mapping the relations between platform, users, parties and media actors intertwined across the substance and form of the issue, I reveal how tension between the ideological and economic demands of the platform interacts with user desire and a wider political climate to directly scupper the progressive, deliberative ideals celebrated in the branding of sharing. Through formal and substantive analysis of the 'articulation' of immigration, I show how the platform becomes fertile ground for the growth of right-wing populism. However, by taking a relational approach I problematise the portrayal of social media as a Deus ex Machina that conveniently explains unforeseen political events. I argue that narratives rooted in technological determinism neglect the sociotechnical qualities of contemporary life, where human and non-human agency are entangled in the production of consequences that blur the online/offline divide. Taking up agonistic critiques of ‘post-democracy’, I draw from the data a context that reflects a crisis in democratic representation - one not determined by technological change but in constant creative and productive engagement with it. Bridging empirical data with social and political theory reveals why practice emerges in ways that challenge the idealised branding of connected publics, yet at the same time unsettle attempts to reductively assign responsibility for their perceived failures

Technology and Democracy: Understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making

Drawing from many disciplines, the report adopts a behavioural psychology perspective to argue that “social media changes people’s political behaviour”. Four pressure points are identified and analysed in detail: the attention economy; choice architectures; algorithmic content curation; and mis/disinformation. Policy implications are outlined in detail.JRC.H.1-Knowledge for Policy: Concepts and Method