Presentation Materials

The materials below are provided in the spirit of open access and community knowledge building. If you choose to cite or share these works, I ask that you keep in mind that these materials are works in progress and/or forthcoming publications. 

"The Intractive Repercussions of Infrastructural Failure on the Digital Grammars of Creative Revolt"

Abstract for entire roundtable "A Grammar of Creativity: Rhetorical Contours of Revolt and the Praxis of Human Being":

What is the grammar of creativity? Who writes it? Who reads it? And who is allowed to revolt against it? In this question-driven session, the participants step back from the meeting’s theme—“Creativity in Revolt”—to interrogate the conditions under which creativity is possible, valuable, and legible. While all four participants agree that measures of imagination, invention, and ingenuity are necessary for acts of resistance, each of them carries a degree of skepticism toward the aesthetic judgements that subtend any determination of “creativity.” Given that this meeting’s Call for Papers invokes creativity to “rethink,” “reimagine,” and “echo” existing approaches to revolt, it behooves us to reflect critically both on how we construct our genealogies of collective action and on the criteria we use to historicize a particular act of insurgency within a tradition as “creative.” The participants in this session ultimately wonder about the forms of revolt that fail to be articulated as such, those that remain unnoticed, under appreciated, and thus decidedly “uncreative.” How might we attend to the full breadth and rich complexity of creativity so we can more effectively honor and articulate revolt in all its many iterations?

Each of the session’s four participants maintains their own entry point into this guiding inquiry, along with their own set of followup and scaffolded questions. Gavin P. Johnson, who studies cultural and digital rhetorics, opens the conversation by attending to the technologies of revolt across borders and in global contexts. Specifically, they ask what technological infrastructures--analog, digital, or otherwise--are needed to creatively coordinate, document, and (re)imagine transnational organizing? J, Logan Smilges pairs this interest in infrastructure with their own knowledge of critical disability studies and their commitment to disability justice, guiding the panel to interrogate the boundary between creativity and accessibility. Why can’t accommodations be read as aesthetic interventions? And whose labor remains invisible when the creativity of access remains unthinkable? Suban Nur. Cooley a scholar of cultural rhetorics and contemporary African refugee/migrant diaspora cultures, zooms in to note the spatiotemporal conditions that make creativity possible. In a moment of utter crisis, when police bust down the door or the guns start firing, creative revolt is not always feasible. How, then, do we understand the work people do to survive within a rubric of creativity? Where can we look to see patterns of creative revolt emerge when the conditions change? Finally, by expanding the question of space and place, Shewonda Leger asks, what is the role of gentrification in cultural identity when childhood cultural landmarks are disappearing? What kinds of creative revolt have migrant communities used to preserve cultural identity and landmarks? And how have underserved communities cultivated socioeconomic and cultural vitality when financial and language disadvantages often mark them as “unresourceful and uncreative?” Together, these participants dial in on a grammar of creativity to investigate and articulate the rhetorical contours of revolt and the praxis of human being.

"Coalition is not Collaboration, and Other Thoughts on Community-Building through Mobile Digital Pedagogies"

This presentation was given during the 2021 SIGDOC Hybrid Conference. This research presentation primarily contributes to SIGDOC’s interest in pedagogy and critical digital literacies as well as our increased attention to digital rhetorics and technical communication’s ethical, anti-racist, and coalitional possibilities. Building on the coalitional theories of scholars like Ceci Shelton and Natasha Jones, I argued for a coalitional praxis for digital media and technical communication courses wherein students and teachers purposefully engage difference as an aspect and asset of their digital composing processes and projects. In this brief presentation, I offer a localized example of the difference between traditional “collaborative learning” and “coalitional praxis.” I conclude by calling for larger-scaled research on coalitional praxis that commits to the local, embodied difference present in all learning contexts.

"Always the Horizon of Possibilities: Composing Coalitional Praxis in the Necropolitical University"

This talk was given at Texas Women's University (via Zoom) in September 2021 as the first event in the Endemic Crisis Speaker Series. In this talk, I shared research that seeks to intervene in the work of writing assessment, digital pedagogy, and critical university studies by developing and deploying a “coalitional praxis” based in Women of Color, queer, and trans rhetorics.