Our Blog Carnival 24 comes at a time when the learning and well-being of many students are impacted by the enforcement of anti-DEI policies and growing restrictions on how educators, tutors, administrators, leaders, and directors can attend to the varied ways students learn, belong, and thrive within a globalized, multicultural, inclusive, and habitable world. While grappling with these challenges, GenAI technologies have emerged simultaneously as an uncontainable disruptive force, leaving many of us wondering whether to refuse them or to engage with them critically and thoughtfully. Against this backdrop, the contributions we have published demonstrate that our valued authors have forged their own paths to address these political and technological realities. While acting individually, utilizing whatever is available to them, they have collectively engaged in a justice-oriented, human-centered multimodal praxis across teaching, tutoring, writing center administration, faculty training, and advocacy.
Our hope is that Blog Carnival 24 highlights the urgency of a social justice turn grounded in human-centered praxis, one that can catalyze collective action to address persistent challenges and sustain the field’s core values and commitments. As organizers and editors of this Blog Carnival, we position ourselves as participants in this collective effort. We see Blog Carnival 24 as an example that concretizes the most recent call articulated by the current and past editors of Computers and Composition in “Legacies, Commitments, and New Challenges: The Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Interviews Three Generations of Computers and Composition Editors” (Alalem et al., 2026). Specifically, this call urged the next generation of scholars to look beyond the classroom and consider writing technologies to address the urgent “wicked problems” of our polarized world. Grounded in a “people first” approach, the editors pointed us to multimodality as a means to advance cross-cultural communication; they inspired us to anchor this Carnival in multimodality as one possibility from which different forms of justice can be cultivated.
When we first circulated the Call for Proposals (CFP), we did not quite know what to expect. But reading through the submissions, it became clear that multimodality catalyzes unlimited forms of justice beyond imagination, as evident in the 15 blog posts we have published. This makes it one of the largest Blog Carnivals in the history of the DRC—in fact, it is the largest in number of posts since Blog Carnival 15, Multimodal Design & Social Advocacy, organized by Jialei Jiang and Jason Tham back in 2019. That both of these carnivals share a record 15 posts and a resonant theme is no coincidence: it shows just how cyclical our field’s commitments are, and how urgently themes of social advocacy have re-emerged in tandem with multimodal pedagogy to meet the demands of our current moment.
As we have observed, multimodality has been leveraged as a pedagogical practice to promote accessibility and engage students with learning differences. In “On Creative Permission: Offering Multimodal Choice in First-Year Writing,” Molly Ryan’s approach embodies how a Universal Design for Learning approach looks like in the first-year writing classroom as the author provides students multiple options to approach their projects and engage differently with course assignments. While Molly’s effort primarily centers on giving students’ choice to decide the modes and modalities they would like to make meaning with, Brady Hall in “Multimodal Reading as Valid Academic Practice” draws our attention to the need to “legitimiz[e]multimodal reading as a valid academic practice” that fosters accessibility, honors diverse reader experiences, and promotes inclusive discourse. Shifting to accessible design that addresses the needs of the audience, Shuvro Das, in “Teaching Access: Multimodal Pedagogy as Social Justice in Technical Communication,” reveals how he built his “curriculum around access as a design responsibility from the first draft. Students don’t add accessibility features after creating content. They begin every project by mapping potential barriers and exclusions.” Nevertheless, multimodality emerged not only as an accessible approach to writing and reading instruction but also to asynchronous writing center tutoring as Emmy Ammirati reveals in “Multimodality as Praxis: Coconstructing the Asynchronous Learning Space.” Emmy supports neurodivergent tutees through “Asynchronous screen-capture videos, layered with written comments and visual organizers, [which]unfold in real time for the tutor composing the feedback and the student experiencing it.”
Moreover, multimodality proves effective for cultivating inclusive pedagogical practices for students whose preferences for participation and collaboration are non-normative. Experimenting with silence as a valid pedagogical mode, Leigh Bennett in “When the Teacher Stops Talking: A Human-Centered Experiment with Classroom Silence” demonstrates that “intentional moments of silence can disrupt classroom routines and familiar participation rhythms, revealing who usually speaks, who waits, and how authority takes shape.” In “Scooby Doo, Who Are You?: Scaffolding Collaboration Through Narrative Tropes,” Kathryn Burt uses the 5-Man Band narrative tropes as “an accessible means of opening conversations about collaboration and labor equity,” making sure diverse students develop vocabulary “to address group conflict, recognize invisible labor, and collaborate with equity and mutual appreciation in mind.”
In a different vein, multimodality and critical analysis were utilized as a pedagogical practice to foster critical awareness, linguistic justice, identity representation, and accessible design. To counter AI linguistic flattening, Jainab Tabassum Banu, in “Against Linguistic Flattening: Translingual Multimodality in the Age of AI,” relies on a remix project to encourage students to incorporate their own unique expression styles and non-standard linguistic varieties while simultaneously engaging them with conversations to develop critical awareness about ethical persuasion. Similarly, to resist identity bracketing and standardization associated with traditional academic writing and amplified by the emergence of GenAI, Toluwani Odedeyi in “Centering Lived Experiences in Multimodal Writing and Digital Literacy Pedagogy,” invites students to draw on their own personal experiences when composing and to remediate their alphabetic writing into public-facing multimodal projects. Regarding accessible design, Gideon Kwawukumey, in “From Studio Remixing to Classroom Remixing: How Research Posters Can Teach Semiotic Border-Crossing for Social Justice,” draws our attention to how a semiotics-focused approach to multimodality and remix can “help students see that meaning is always designed, situated, and shaped by available semiotic resources.”
Some contributors turned to stand-alone multimodal projects combined with critical analysis to develop students’ critical, ethical, and cultural awareness while honoring their identities, communities, and authentic voices. Shelby Ramsey, in “Starting with Voice: How Language Awareness Shapes Multimodal Composing,” began her course by developing students’ critical language and identity awareness through critical reading and literacy narratives, revealing how such awareness “shows up later, often through students’ willingness to take up community-based, socially consequential topics” when creating their multimodal projects. Teaching at a Hispanic Serving Institution, Julia Hetttiger, in “Multimodal, Multilingual Praxis in the First Year Composition Classroom: Reflections on Promoting Social and Linguistic Justice Via Rhetorical Translation,” invites students to “build connections between their everyday multimodal compositions to their heritage, histories, and language of choice to illustrate their rich writing/translating abilities without the use of AI/machine translation.” In “Sonic Digital Humanities as Human-Centered Praxis,” José Manuel Flores and Elizabeth Escobedo draw our attention to Border Soundscapes as “a human-centered practice connecting environments, experiences, and communities across borders” in which “sound reveals how places are lived rather than merely mapped,” enabling students to cultivate embodied, relational, contextual, and ethical awareness.
Finally, we were delighted to receive and publish contributions that explore multimodal praxis beyond classroom teaching and student tutoring, particularly in faculty training, writing center administration, and advocacy practices in digital spaces. In “Multimodal Approaches to Faculty Development Spaces,” Rebecca Taylor delineates the persistent resistance and dismissal faculty members display when it comes to the adoption and integration of multimodal pedagogies, addressing questions of authority, agency, and legitimacy, and equally important, proposing a model for a multimodal writing workshop for disciplinary faculty members who incorporate writing into their courses. Shifting to “Design as Praxis: Multimodal Composition in Writing Center Administration,” Kamila Albert concludes, “As a director, I have found multimodal design to be the most useful conceptual framework for navigating the complexity of administrative praxis,” highlighting, “At a time when stakeholders are looking to generative AI for student support, a design mindset is our best defense of human-centered values.” In “From Digital Content to Academic Confidence: My Rhetorical Journey,” Samia Mehbub, on the other hand, shows that multimodality is central to her advocacy practices as a content creator, drawing our attention that “Rhetoric is also a multimodal and ethical practice that shapes identity, fosters connection, and boosts mental health based on different situations.”
We thank all of our scholars for their engagement with our project and commend them on the work they are doing in their classrooms, institutions, communities, and beyond. We hope you enjoy reading as much as we did!
