Category: English 467: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology
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Presidents, Star Wars, and Harry Potter: Convergence
It’s been a while since I’ve given serious thought to the convergence of media, but Henry Jenkins strikes me as someone with a pretty good understanding of it. Jenkins points out right away that “people today talk about divergence rather than convergence, but (Ithiel de Sola) Pool understood that they…
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Decentering medical authority (and other topics) in Lisa Nakamura’s “Digitizing Race”
I was so excited to find Lisa Nakamura’s chapter entitled “Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction on the Web.” Nakamura examines how pregnant women portray themselves (or ask others to portray them) on sites where cartoonish “dollies,” or avatars, are used to represent community members. She notes that the…
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On (dis)ability
Of the readings we did for this week (cited below), the one I found most helpful was Jason Palmeri’s article on technical communication pedagogy. In addition to offering a new perspective on disability studies, Palmeri provided constructive ways to help others learn about this field as well. After providing several…
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Discussion questions
Here are discussion questions for use in thinking about Bray (See previous post). Question #1: How can technology help us understand culture? Contextualization for Question #1: Bray suggests that technology “shapes and transmits ideological traditions” (2) and produces women (15) (or people, to take a broader approach). I believe she…
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Technology, Gender, and Cyberfeminism
In her riveting book Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, Francesca Bray introduces “gynotechnics,” which is “a way of organizing materials from more varied sources into new patterns, providing a new perspective on gender and its place in the social order as well as a way…
Erin Anne Clark 