Research Agenda
In the general sense, the overall thread of privacy and surveillance rhetorics underpins my scholarship. I focus on how different technological programs and practices appropriate humans through invasive, and often invisible, data collection. I also focus on the social and technological practices that resist privacy invasions that occur through surveillance. Such practices include embodying anonymity in online social spaces, using encrypted communications, and collaborative doxing of institutions for the benefit of public knowledge and transparency. Samples of my recent research questions are:
Research Persona Curriculum:
Many writing professors (and professors in other fields even) require their students to use existing social media accounts or create new ones in order to participate as a member of their class. However, there is often a lack of analysis of the risk and methods of account persona management accompanying this pedagogical requirement. My research persona curriculum seeks to implement a strategy for teaching students how to create and navigate in social media as digital rhetoricians and professional writers. My methodology requires that students locate themselves inside each social media space by inhabiting an identity as a community member and as a researcher. Once they situate themselves within the location, they are positioned to look critically—strategically—at how the interactions between people, institutions, and corporate identities produce cultural ideologies through their own participation in that space’s discursive production. I argue that this critical and strategic social media engagement meets the criteria Liza Potts and Alice Daer propose educators provide for students in digital humanities classes.
To get this project started, I will petition for IRB approval to survey MSU students on their social media use as students, researchers, and future/current professionals. Once I conduct this survey, I plan to apply the information I gather to my classroom practice in professional writing courses. Together with my students, I hope to collectively determine what these research personas will look like as online identities based upon what my students need them to be.
Piracy Pedagogy:
By considering academic texts as property, we writing professors assume they are “owned” by an individual or an institution. In many ways, this positions our students in discursive opposition to what they know about knowledge. Students come to the university interacting with texts in ways more reflective of their social relationships. For some, those interactions reflect communal modes of communication such as file-sharing and piracy. It is not terribly difficult to see that many students do not understand what it means to cite authors of texts and give credit where “credit is due”. Their worlds are that of speech (where we rarely site discourse origins) and hyperlinks. Yet, the institution expects them to come ready to interact under the presupposition that citation is a given—a presupposition that is as political as it is institutional. Rather than assuming the professorial role of upholding this presupposition, I ask: what happens to our source texts when we view them as property of the commons? Could we give students space to design a citation practice that works for them? Could we explore what new forms of writing emerge when we shake loose the institutional forms that control academic discourse?
I am collaborating with Dànielle DeVoss for this piracy pedagogy project and look forward to updating you all on it as we progress!
- In what ways do mobile apps secretly surveil our children?
- Do we consent to surveillance by agreeing to online Terms and Conditions, and how might that consent violate consensual agreement?
- How can anonymity affect online relationships?
- Is doxing a criminal offence or a more networked form of activism?
- Can lulz and memes turn irreverent internet speech into physically viral discursive change?
Research Persona Curriculum:
Many writing professors (and professors in other fields even) require their students to use existing social media accounts or create new ones in order to participate as a member of their class. However, there is often a lack of analysis of the risk and methods of account persona management accompanying this pedagogical requirement. My research persona curriculum seeks to implement a strategy for teaching students how to create and navigate in social media as digital rhetoricians and professional writers. My methodology requires that students locate themselves inside each social media space by inhabiting an identity as a community member and as a researcher. Once they situate themselves within the location, they are positioned to look critically—strategically—at how the interactions between people, institutions, and corporate identities produce cultural ideologies through their own participation in that space’s discursive production. I argue that this critical and strategic social media engagement meets the criteria Liza Potts and Alice Daer propose educators provide for students in digital humanities classes.
To get this project started, I will petition for IRB approval to survey MSU students on their social media use as students, researchers, and future/current professionals. Once I conduct this survey, I plan to apply the information I gather to my classroom practice in professional writing courses. Together with my students, I hope to collectively determine what these research personas will look like as online identities based upon what my students need them to be.
Piracy Pedagogy:
By considering academic texts as property, we writing professors assume they are “owned” by an individual or an institution. In many ways, this positions our students in discursive opposition to what they know about knowledge. Students come to the university interacting with texts in ways more reflective of their social relationships. For some, those interactions reflect communal modes of communication such as file-sharing and piracy. It is not terribly difficult to see that many students do not understand what it means to cite authors of texts and give credit where “credit is due”. Their worlds are that of speech (where we rarely site discourse origins) and hyperlinks. Yet, the institution expects them to come ready to interact under the presupposition that citation is a given—a presupposition that is as political as it is institutional. Rather than assuming the professorial role of upholding this presupposition, I ask: what happens to our source texts when we view them as property of the commons? Could we give students space to design a citation practice that works for them? Could we explore what new forms of writing emerge when we shake loose the institutional forms that control academic discourse?
I am collaborating with Dànielle DeVoss for this piracy pedagogy project and look forward to updating you all on it as we progress!