Editors: Jialei Jiang and Jason Tham Introduction The recent return to virtue ethics and social equity in the interconnected fields of digital rhetoric, multimodal composition, and technical communication prompts researchers and practitioners to rethink multimodal design beyond the cultivation of technical skills. Instead, last year has seen a surge of scholarly interest in exploring and strengthening the nexus between design practices and ethical commitments. In Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues, Jared S. Colton and Steve Holmes (2018) expand our understanding of ethics and ethical dispositions in digital media as situated in specific social interactions and as shaped by particular rhetorical…
Author: Jason Tham
Jason Tham, Jialei Jiang
Jason is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota––Twin Cities. His current research focuses on making and design thinking in writing pedagogy, multimodality, and emerging technologies such as wearables and mixed reality.
The Nexus of Multimodal Design and Social Advocacy Traditionally, there is an emphasis on the use of design to teach technological skills in visual studies and technical communication. However, this narrow definition of design as technology-driven has been critiqued for its oversight of the need to cultivate students’ “conceptual, theoretical, and even practical knowledge” (Northcut & Brumberger, 2010, p. 463). Moving beyond the framing of design as merely a knack or skill, a growing body of scholarship has begun to acknowledge the significance of design in enacting social justice for both teaching and research. For instance, following the call for…
Online forums including mailing groups or listservs can be spaces where rising scholars like graduate students and junior scholars learn about the spirit of the field and contribute their emerging perspectives. Following a series of events on a major disciplinary listserv that made some graduate students feel disempowered, a group of young scholars decided to take back the forum and formed their own public channel, nextGEN. In this webtext, DRC Fellows Angela Glotfelter and Jason Tham share an interview with members of the nextGEN listserv start-up team where they share their motivations, missions, and observations about graduate student voices in…
Acknowledgement We thank all contributors of the 14th Blog Carnival––Jim Brown, Amber Buck, Amelia Chesley, Sergio Figueiredo, Jennifer Juszkiewicz, Kim Lacey, Megan McIntyre, Derek Mueller, Scott Sundvall, and Sara West––for their perspectives and engaging discussion on the states of digital rhetorics. Just before the end of summer, we shared a CFP calling for critical reflections that would help update our understanding of digital rhetorics. We are excited to curate ten blog posts that have made plausible attempts to revisit digital rhetorics’ pasts, examine its current influence, and speculate possible futures. DRC’S First Blog Carnival In an effort to account for…