#comptheory

In honor of the last week (and two days) of the quarter ... it’s the final countdown! :-)

We conclude where we began ... 

The central question that shapes this course, “what is composition studies,” guides our thinking, our composing, and our discussions this quarter. As we move forward, we’ll see that how it’s been defined and the trends that have helped to define it, shape how we view and understand writing and composing. Thus, for this opening post, I want you to do some quick-n-dirty research to try and define composition studies and composing. Who seem to be some important theorists or figures shaping the field? How do they define it? What are some trends that you see? How has composing, the way it’s done and the way its defined, progressed with technology and digitality?

The above paragraph was the one that opened your responses within your CompNotebook, and we are coming back around to some of those questions for your last composing. Your last readings, in a lot of ways, do a similar thing by circling us back to issues, trends, and questions we’ve been exploring for nine weeks. So to conclude please take some time rereading what you wrote in that opening response and then reflect over what you’ve learned since then. Write a response that explains/explores/defines how you now understand composition studies -- what it is, what it represents, and where we might be headed in the future. 

In connection with the readings for Tuesday, this week’s Music Monday comes from the 90s group, The Fugees’, which was Lauren Hills’ group before she went solo. The song, a remake of “Killing Me Softly,” is a clear statement of strength and continued evolution, and at the time, it was proof a female led hip-hop group could dominate a male-dominated genre such as hip-hop. Also, the message behind the lyrics ... incredibly powerful, a testament to the idea of the power of language. 

Enjoy! 

In order to examine the concept of a digital witness, we examined several pieces that used digital technologies to convey the truth of what occurred at the sites of various geopolitical events. These works included Dronestagram by James Bridle, Bellingcat, Clouds Over Sidra and Left to Die. In “Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance”, Nishat Awan describes distant places not solely as being distant in terms of their location, but also of the material conditions that repel us from them. The above artworks figure witnessing at a distance by providing audiences with photographs and videos that document events as they happen in real time and tie them to specific geographic locations and times. Through this medium, they provide a digital construction of the space and fragments of events that occurred in these locations that can only be accessed remotely by outsiders. The result aims to provide an objective depiction of the truth by using geolocation and time stamps attached to technologies that are deemed neutral and therefore not obfuscated by the agendas of political parties that have stakes in the region. Topoligically, these remote and inaccessible places become near and immediate, and people who interact with these media feel as if they are witnessing event first hand or access to first hand evidence of the truth.

The last couple readings have directly and indirectly related to language, and one of the readings over the weekend, speaks to a student’s right their home language.

A few years ago, a scholar in rhet/comp blogged in response to the question, “is academic writing white?”  In other words, she was wondering whether or not writing in/for the academy favored a “white” language. She concluded that while it began that way, it isn’t any more and she used Adam Banks’ CCCC Address as a pivotal example of how it’s not. We might argue that both pieces suggest otherwise for what it means to write inside the academy today. However, it is, of course, not that simple. And that’s what I want us to think on and respond to for this post. 

And whatever happens, keep experimenting what what you want to say and how you want to say it. -- Carman Kynard 

These ideas—funk, flight, and freedom—speak to the role I believe composition and communication can play in the academy—to who we be; to how we go about the work we do; and to what work we see ourselves having come here to do. -- Adam Banks

In a way, what I want you to do builds on our digital journey because it moved around the ways in which language/words can be and are perceived of and used. And it definitely connects to the conversation we’ve been having. 

So using all of this, plus the two readings as context, please create a spoken text using your own, home language in response to a time you felt marginalized  in an academic setting. It could be because of your language; it could be because of your gender; it could be because of the color of your skin; it could be because of who you are as a person. The words you use to create this text should be natural for you, they should represent who you are as a writer, but more importantly, as a person. 

Also, because of the genre I’m asking you to compose, we will be sharing these in class on Tuesday, 

After the interview with Yancey, please do 2 things in your Comp Notebooks: (1) a reflection exploring what you learned, impressions, connections, and so on and (2) a list of quotes/ideas from her that you’ll most likely be using in your Keyword Article.