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Digital Rhetoric: Technofeminism
English 491


Next offered: Spring 2022
Last offered: Spring 2021 (syllabus)

Overview

This upper-division rhetoric course is about the social significance of the ways digital texts are composed and circulated. The digital spaces in which we spend so much of our time are rhetorical all the way down, from their content and communities to the underlying code, protocols, policies, laws, and even hardware that governs digital distribution. It matters how our digital worlds are written and who does the writing.

In Spring 2021, we focused our exploration of digital rhetoric through the lens of technofeminism, attending the histories and futures of intersectional feminism in digital and digitally mediated spaces. We will consider the power of the rhetorical choices already made for us as well as the possibilities of our own agency online.


Class Meetings
Class meetings will alternate between small-group discussions that reflect on and respond to our class readings; peer review and draft workshops for short essays and digital experiments; and full-class discussions that tie together the broader analytical framework of the course and the various digital experiments and assignments.


Learning Outcomes

Students will learn to analyze their relationship to and agency within technological platforms, rhetorically analyze digital communities, and create feminist work with a variety of tools.
Background image is of a DEC PDP-11/34 minicomputer, data drive storage cabinet, modem, a covered typewriter, and DECwriter terminal under a window with mustard yellow curtains open to show a sunny day. The photo was taken circa 1984 in the basement playroom of my childhood home.