Sources of Regional Resilience in the Danish ICT Sector

In this paper the use of the term “resilience” is discussed and a definition for use in quantitative studies of industrial evolution is suggested. Resilience is the ability of an industry in a region to exploit the possibilities arising from external events and adapt to thrive under new selection environments. An econometric analysis is undertaken to uncover the effects of the change in selection environment that the ICT industry faced from the burst of the ICT bubble in the year 2000. It is shown that some characteristics of regional industry structure are associated with growth over the whole period while other characteristics have varying effects pre and post burst. Special attention is given to the responsiveness of growth to the evolution of sales of ICT goods and services in Denmark and it is found that the industry structures that restrain growth also are the ones, which make the regional industry better able to exploit changes in sales at the national level.Resilience; Business cycle; ICT sector; Regional growth

Inventing Network Composition: Mobilizing Rhetorical Invention and Social Media for Digital Pedagogy

Inventing Network Composition: Mobilizing Rhetorical Invention and Social Media for Digital Pedagogy investigates how students learn through writing and invention in digital social networks. Pursuing a primary research question of How do student composers invent within networked social media environments?, the dissertation examines how social media and digital writing tools can help students to learn, connect, and share generatively. The core theoretical contribution that this dissertation offers is a theory of network composition, which is a mode of invention that composers engage in social media environments that is intensely social, that is structured by a digital interface, that is interactive and participatory, and that incorporates linguistic, visual, sonic, and other multimodal communication forms. Network composition manifests most notably in network composition pedagogy, which organically locates the work of composing, as well as the disciplinary work of rhetoric and composition, within networked social media environments. This dissertation revisits and updates disciplinary exigencies related to rhetorical invention in digital networks, social media use in the writing classroom, and digital participation as a mode for learning. The dissertation offers an updated approach to invention called network-emergent rhetorical invention that approaches invention as a distributed emergence arising from a network of actants that includes humans, hardware, technologies, interfaces, communities, cultures, software, and infrastructures. It also features an IRB-approved qualitative case study that finds social media to support learning ecology formation, distributed expertise, rhetorical invention, digital and social media literacy development, rhetoric and writing skills formation, and digital citizenship activities. The dissertation additionally examines challenges for social media use in the writing classroom, considering how accessibility, digital aggression, digital discrimination, and data/privacy challenges can and should be navigated. The dissertation closes by speculating about futures for network composition and considering what is at stake for the future of learning, interaction, and participation in digital networks

Justifying Existence: Positioning Autism in a World of Capitalist Expectation

In Glen Finland’s memoir Next Stop, a mother confronts the decades-old American parenting ritual of helping a child to obtain their first job. Finland’s experience with her first two sons proved relatively typical; the same cannot be said for her third son, who was diagnosed at a young age as being on the ASD spectrum. David Finland’s challenges in obtaining employment are very different from those of his older brothers, as are the expectations placed on him within the larger cultural conversation he’s a part of. The rise of the disabilities studies movement in the 1980’s coincided with a massive surge in literature concerning autism. Memoirs produced by writers confronting autism demonstrate complications with cultural expectations attached to adulthood, specifically those regarding self-sufficiency normally associated with obtaining employment. This ethos is called into question within the disabilities studies movement. The presence of disabled (or differently abled) individuals in a society clouds cultural expectations, begging questions to be asked regarding how independent an autistic individual can be expected to be and in which ways a person with autism can or should contribute to the fulfillment of their own needs. Capitalism privileges the neurotypical mind, and every child with autism faces an adult life affected by the condition. My research examines the attitudes and ideologies surrounding the manner in which autistic individuals achieve various degrees of self-sufficiency through entering the workforce, presenting the argument that malleable social environments are capable of structuring and supporting the “pushing back” of limits imposed by autism, fostering the cultivation of a more self-sufficient individual

Building participatory counternarratives: Pedagogical interventions through digital placemaking

Places are filled with stories, with histories that shape how people understand the nature of a place. Places are unique sets of trajectories – each with a story – coming into contact. However, just as much as places are defined by their histories, they are also shaped by the histories that are forgotten, or far too often, actively suppressed through dominant narratives. After all, dominant media of spatial, public memory – for example, plaques and public monuments – often reproduce dominant narratives of a place, narratives created by the powerful. This project examines how digital placemaking can be deployed through locative technologies to push back on dominant spatial narratives and make places more polyvocal in consequential ways. In particular, through a project at Clemson University, we examine how locative storytelling applications can help students intervene in traditional narratives of place to engage with social justice and alternative histories