Author: Jialei Jiang

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…

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…

On November 08th, “Wikipedia-based Education” teaching circle at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) organized a Zoom webinar on teaching with Wikipedia. Teaching circles at IUP are small groups of instructors and faculty who meet together to explore new pedagogical approaches and to address issues in teaching. The theme of this webinar was “Critical Approaches to Wikipedia-based Writing Pedagogy,” which explored ways to cultivate students’ critical literacy and critical thinking through teaching. Led by Dr. Matthew Vetter, five writing teachers attended the meeting, including Wenqi Cui, Lara Hauer, Jialei Jiang, Oksana Moroz, and Jiawei Xing. In this webtext, DRC fellow Jialei…

We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. –Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari My way of seeing the world has always been relational and ontological. My experience with art and design can be traced back to my childhood years, when I begin to learn how to draw and paint (see my recent drawings below). As is the case with written composition, I perceive artistic composition as both a social and material practice, actualizing in Karen Barad’s words, the “intra-action” between matter and meaning, between desire…