What’s New at the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative?
We hope that you are having a great start to the academic year! We’re excited to share some updates on what has been happening and what’s coming up at the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC)!
Announcements
We’ve welcomed four new DRC Advisory Board members this summer: Janine Butler, Nupoor Ranade, Jason Tham, and Ja’La Wourman! We’re thrilled to introduce these new advisory board members along with our current board members: Antonio Byrd, Douglas Eyman, Laura Gonazales, Derek Mueller, and Jentery Sayers. You can learn more about each of the advisory board members on our under the “Board Members” page in our menu.
- Janine Butler is an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf whose scholarship and teaching focus on accessible technologies, inclusive multimodal communication, and digital rhetoric.
- Nupoor Ranade is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Technical and Professional Communication at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the rhetorics of new technologies and how these rhetorics contribute to existing and emerging theories and methods in digital rhetoric.
- Jason Tham is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University, as well as the author of several books on design thinking. His teaching and scholarship expand on user experience, information design, and instructional design, and he was a Sweetland DRC Fellow from 2017-19.
- Ja’La Wourman is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University where her scholarship and courses focus on digital rhetoric, Black design, and professional and technical communication. Her research is published in several technical communication and composition journals and she previously served as the digital media editor for the Computers and Composition Digital Press.
We’re excited to continue working alongside our advisory board members to connect with current and former DRC graduate Fellows as well as share resources with the DRC community!
The 22nd Blog Carnival, “Digital Literacy, Multimodality, and the Writing Center” is now live! DRC Fellows Saraubh Ahnand and Sarah Fischer brought together seven writers who reflect on how digital technologies have impacted writing centers in Blog Carnival 22. What resulted is seven unique yet interconnected blog posts that serve as starting points to collectively think about ways that digital literacies and writing center studies could evolve the future of writing center epistemologies, research areas, and practices.
Additionally, new Writing for Social Media-themed Teaching and Learning Materials are now available! These materials include both activities and writing prompts that were curated by one of the 2023-24 DRC Fellows, Sarah Fischer. We asked teacher-scholars to share activities that they’ve used in their classrooms such as: storytelling on social media, social media and textual analysis, and multimodal debate activities among others.
We are also excited to share that the DRC has recently updated its Syllabus Repository with syllabi on artificial intelligence for composition, digital rhetoric, and tech comm classes! This is a great collection of resources for educators looking to integrate AI in their classes. This collection was curated by two of the 2023-24 DRC Fellows, Alex Mashny and Anuj Gupta.
Featured Posts
From Academia to Amazon Interview: One of our graduate fellows, Anuj Gupta, interviewed Dr. Julie Christen, a Learning Experience Designer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can find the interview along with insights about how rhetoric, composition, and technical communication students may transfer their skills to industry contexts on our website.
Promoting Global Understanding and Multicultural Communication Through Arts-Based Research in ESL Classrooms. DRC Fellow Alexandra Krasova shares arts-based practices that multilingual students use in digital storytelling. This blog post shares two students’ stories, as well as how instructors may use multimodal tools to promote global understanding and ensure multicultural communication.
Digital Pedagogy and Pentiment (2022): Playing with Critical Art History. Another one of the 2023-24 DRC Fellows, Luke Hernandez, analyzes the video game, Pentiment, through a games of color teaching philosophy to explore how race, class, and gender are portrayed through an art history and video game context.
Stay Tuned
We’re excited to soon announce our upcoming cohort of graduate fellows for the 2024-25 year! We received a strong number of applications this year and look forward to welcoming the new Fellows and showcasing their projects and ideas on the website!
If you have any other ideas for contributing to the DRC through teaching materials or conference reviews, blog posts for our Blog Carnivals, or reflecting on digital tools and approaches to teaching and research in our Hack & Yack series, please email us at drcfellows@umich.edu and let us know! We would love to hear from you!
Follow us @sweetlandDRC on X and on Instagram to stay up to date with digital rhetoric news and events!
