By the end of this month, I will finish my two-year stint as WAC director at UB. As I am now in Media Study, I don’t anticipate running a “writing program” again. Before that, for seven years I was the WPA in the UB English department and spent three years running a graduate certificate professional […]
Category: Rhetoric/Composition
As WAC director, I’ve been putting materials together internally on our CMS to aid instructors and faculty in this transition. Along the way I’ve been adding stuff into the site that I’ve seen shared by others. With that thought in mind, I’ve set up a page on this website where I am posting the support […]
There’s this old Steven Wright line that goes something like, “I used to say I wanted to own the world but then I wondered ‘where would I put it all?’” That seems apropos here. To clarify, in higher ed circles the idiom “to own writing” would appear to mean claiming sole disciplinary-intellectual authority and control […]
Ok, we’ll see if these two topics are actually just one. I’m going to start with “assessment numbers as quasi-objects.” So quasi-objects is a concept I/we get from Serres and Latour. Without going too far down that path, it’s an understanding that actors do not reside simply on one side or other of the object/subject […]
Jonathan Alexander, Karen Lunsford and Carl Whithaus have a new article in Written Communication, “Toward Wayfinding: a Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences.” I think it’s a great article, and I’m planning to share it with my WAC colleagues. It provides a useful overview of important ideas in the field and adds wayfinding to that list. […]
Though there are some ongoing conversations about the notion of a post-digital world (including Justin Hodgson’s Post Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic and Mike Flatt’s discussion of post-digital poetics), I’m starting here with the mildly disturbing corporate speak of Accenture on how to be competitive in the post-digital world. Accenture identifies five elements of […]
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jonathon Kramnick offers an analysis of the contemporary academic job market in English in comparison with its state 20 years ago (coincidentally when I was first on the job market). This can be put in the context of statistics on the awarding of phds from the NSF. This chart shows […]
From the summer of 2010 through the summer of 2017, I served as the director of composition at UB. In the last year I’ve gone back to being a rank and file professor in the department. I’ve been thinking about writing this reflection for a little while but wanted to mark the occasion of a […]
Being somewhat in between projects right now, I’ve started working on an article that, at least at this point, begins with exploring the value of DeLanda’s assemblage theory for rhetoric and composition. DeLanda often comes up on this blog and has been an important thinker for me for 10-15 years at least. His earlier works […]
So there’s a fairly good chance you know more about Casey Neistat that I do. He’s something of a YouTube sensation with over 9 million subscribers. He also had an HBO series (I guess you’d call it). In my “copious spare time,” I’ve been hunting around, trying to catch up on the world of digital […]
Alex Reid 