Elizabeth Losh is a media theorist and digital rhetoric scholar, who is a professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary.
Elizabeth Losh is a media theorist and digital rhetoric scholar, who is a professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary.
Elizabeth Losh earned a Bachelor of Arts (magna cum laude) from Harvard University, a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, and a PhD in English with an emphasis in critical theory from University of California at Irvine. She was Director of Academic Programs, Sixth College at University of California at San Diego, where she also taught in Communication, Visual Arts, and the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts major. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience . [1]
Losh is a founding member of FemTechNet, [2] an international organization devoted to promoting collaborative research, pedagogy and online learning innovation in feminist art, media and science and technology studies. [3] In 2007, Losh was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Webblog prize. [4] Losh's main areas of contribution are in interrogating the assumptions embedded in the rhetorics of news, information and pedagogy in digital media platforms and projects, particularly within online cultures and where online cultures intersect with spaces like classrooms and institutions like journalism. [5]
Losh is the author of books including The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University, [6] a book that, as Times Higher Education reviewer Tara Brabazon writes, addresses "what happens when education is treated like a product and not a process" and asks "who speaks for the students?". [7] The London School of Economics Review of Books notes that Losh "effectively moves beyond the headlines and bestsellers that warn of literacy and attention crises among device-devoted youth, and those that dismiss the academy as a hopeless anachronism, to painstakingly deconstruct the 'rhetoric of crisis'". [8]
With Jonathan Alexander, Losh is the author of a guide to writing that introduces graphics as a means of doing pedagogy: Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. [9] Losh is also the author of the Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), [10] a work highly recommended by Immersive Journalism for being a book that "closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator" [11]
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Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
Computers and writing is a sub-field of college English studies about how computers and digital technologies affect literacy and the writing process. The range of inquiry in this field is broad including discussions on ethics when using computers in writing programs, how discourse can be produced through technologies, software development, and computer-aided literacy instruction. Some topics include hypertext theory, visual rhetoric, multimedia authoring, distance learning, digital rhetoric, usability studies, the patterns of online communities, how various media change reading and writing practices, textual conventions, and genres. Other topics examine social or critical issues in computer technology and literacy, such as the issues of the "digital divide", equitable access to computer-writing resources, and critical technological literacies. Many study by scientist such have shown that writing on computer is better than writing in a book
Digital rhetoric can be generally defined as communication that exists in the digital sphere. As such, digital rhetoric can be expressed in many different forms —including but not limited to text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of our contemporary society, there are no longer clear distinctions between digital and non-digital environments. This has led to an expansion of the scope of digital rhetoric as there is a need to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering the fields of computers and writing, composition studies, and digital rhetoric. It was established in 1996, and was the first academic journal to publish multimedia webtexts.
Tara Brabazon is the Australian Dean of Graduate Research and the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce and director of the Popular Culture Collective. She has previously held academic positions in the UK, New Zealand and Canada, won six teaching awards, published 20 books, written 250 refereed articles and contributed essays and opinion pieces on higher education and the arts. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2019.
Commonly called new media theory or media-centered theory of composition, stems from the rise of computers as word processing tools. Media theorists now also examine the rhetorical strengths and weakness of different media, and the implications these have for literacy, author, and reader.
Feminist theory in composition studies is the application of feminist theory to composition studies. It considers the influence of gender, language, and cultural studies on composition in order to challenge preexisting conventions.
Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular is a peer-reviewed online academic journal published by the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It was established in March 2005 and covers the digital humanities, publishing work that "cannot exist in print". Vectors is recognized as an experimental precursor to the digital humanities, producing and publishing a range of highly interactive works of multimedia scholarship. Comparing Vectors with more traditional digital humanities publications, Patrick Svensson notes that, "Vectors, on the other hand, is clearly invested in the digital as an expressive medium in an experimental and creative way". The journal no longer actively produces projects or provides support to journal contributors but does accept completed submissions on a rolling basis. The editors-in-chief are Tara McPherson of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Steve F. Anderson of the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television.
Feminist Digital Humanities is a more recent development in the field of Digital Humanities, a project incorporating digital and computational methods as part of its research methodology. Feminist Digital Humanities has risen partly because of recent criticism of the propensity of Digital Humanities to further patriarchal or hegemonic discourses in the Academy. Women are rapidly dominating social media in order to educate people about feminist growth and contributions. Research proves the rapid growth of Feminist Digital Humanities started during the post-feminism era around from the 1980s to 1990s. Such feminists’ works provides examples through the text technology, social conditions of literature and rhetorical analysis. Feminist Digital Humanities is aimed to identify and explore women's sense of writing as well as to prove widespread of women's work in most of the digital archive.
Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
FemTechNet (FTN) is a feminist network of scholars, artists, and activists known for its feminist, decentralized pedagogy experiments. FemTechNet became the focus of various media outlets when it broadcast its efforts to "storm" Wikipedia under its "wikistorming" initiative. Beyond its 2013 Wikipedia project, FemTechNet has been described as "a new approach to collaborative learning", and a "feminist anti-MOOC."
Alexandra Jeanne "Alex" Juhasz is a feminist writer and theorist of media production.
The Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) is a faculty at University of Western Ontario, located in London, Ontario, Canada. The faculty offers programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels focusing on the advancement of knowledge in media, communications, and information technologies.
Laila Shereen Sakr, known by her moniker, VJ Um Amel, is an Egyptian–American digital media theorist and artist. She is the founder of the digital lab, R-Shief, Inc., an Annenberg Fellow, and Assistant Professor of Media Theory & Practice at University of California, Santa Barbara, where she founded the Wireframe digital media studio.
Jonathan Alexander is an American rhetorician and memoirist. He is Chancellor's Professor of English, Informatics, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His scholarly and creative work is situated at the intersections of digital culture, sexuality, and composition studies. For his work in cultural journalism and memoir, Tom Lutz, founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, has called him "one of our finest essayists."
The Fembot Collective is an international collective of feminist media activists, artists, producers, and scholars that publishes the academic journal Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Fembot has been a catalyst for multiple large scale feminist digital projects, providing the digital and social infrastructure for FemTechNet, publishing the podcast series Books Aren't Dead, and hosting collaborative hack-a-thons and Wikipedia edit-a-thons with Ms. magazine. Although having been funded and supported by multiple institutions including School of Journalism and Communication and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon., Fembot is concentrated in the University of Maryland currently.
Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists, but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all living beings and in all manner of experiences, and it redefines traditional delivery sites to include the non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes. An important distinction is made between "feminist rhetoric" and "rhetorical feminism": rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences define rhetorical appeals. Rhetorical feminism also values listening and silence as dynamic rhetorical practices.
Jacqueline D. Wernimont is an American academic who is the Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College. Her first book, Numbered Lives Life and Death in Quantum Media, was released by MIT Press in January 2019. It is the first book to map connections in feminist media history. She is the founding Director of Human Security Collaborator, a collaboration of interdisciplinary academics working on digital civil rights and big data.
Richard Holeton is an American writer and higher-education administrator. Holeton's creative works are foundational in the hypertext and electronic literature genres. As a writer, his most notable work is the hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, which has been recognized as an important early work of electronic literature and is included in the hypertext canon.
Cheryl Ball is an academic and scholar in rhetoric, composition, and publishing studies, and Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University. In the areas of scholarly and digital publishing, Ball is the executive director for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Editor-in-Chief for the Library Publishing Curriculum. Ball also serves as co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an open access, online journal dedicated to multimodal academic publishing, which she has edited since 2006. Ball's awards include Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Science Communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Service to the Field, and the Technology Innovator Award presented by the CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (7Cs). Her book, The New Work of Composing was the winner of the 2012 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her contributions to academic research span the areas of digital publishing, new media scholarship, and multimodal writing pedagogy.
