English 891I - S-Writing & Emerging Technolog

Designed as a survey of key issues, pedagogies, and cultural shifts in which writing and technology are embedded, this course seeks to examine how digitality, writ large, affects how we think about, produce, and theorize writing. The course will examine how digital technologies alter not only the form and materials of writing but also the role writing plays within new economies and how it participates within changing ideologies. The assumption behind the course is that the digital is inevitably a part of all our lives as teachers of writing but to employ it well in our teaching we must also understand how it functions within larger cultural structures to assess both is possibilities and limitations for our goals and hopes for writing. Thus, we will take up questions such as how the materials we write with influence our compositions, what composing means in an age of "info bots," algorithms, platforms, and AI; how our digital writing composes/expresses our identities; how we might leverage digitality for public spheres and social change; and how writing produces value for information capital in ways that might threaten the more socially just purposes we might hope it could serve. Our conversations will take us far from pedagogy but will always return to teaching and composing as forms of intervention into digital ecologies. The course should address the interests of students in digital humanities as well as rhetoric and composition, or others interested in teaching or writing with technology.

Open to Graduate students only.