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Digital Media and Composition Visiting Scholar Talk
Friday, 29 February 2008
Noon-1:30pm
"Rhetoric, Composition, Literacy and the Job Market: Finding Where You Belong," an Informal lunch with RCL graduate students and faculty (please RSVP to wilkins.8@osu.edu). (Denney 311)
This informal conversation will focus on successful tactics and strategies for seeking jobs in the broadly related arenas of rhetoric, composition, and literacy as well as in the more focused field of digital media studies.
2:30-3:30pm
Formal talk, "Jean Cocteau, Queerness, Multimedia" (Denney 311)
This talk explores the representation of queerness through multimedia and asks: What does multimedia offer us in the figuring of queerness? How might we compose in a multimediated queerness? What/where/how is the queer[ed] body figured in/through multimedia? What are the limits of the knowable and knowably queer in multimediated spaces? This presentation reflects on such questions by bringing together theoretical musing, analysis of the work of Jean Cocteau, and digital performance art.
Biography: Jonathan Alexander is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as Campus Writing Coorindator. Jonathan's work focuses primarily on the use of emerging communications technologies in the teaching of writing and in shifting conceptions of what writing, composing, and authoring mean. Jonathan also works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what it means to "compose queerly" as well as what theories of sexuality, particularly queer theory, have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies.
He is the co-editor of two collections, Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (Harrington Park Press, 2004), and Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (Hampton Press, 2005); the co-author of a textbook about teaching writing with computer technologies, Argument Now (Longman, 2005); and the author of Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web (Hampton Press, 2005), which examines how tech-savvy youth represent themselves and their electronic literacy practices on the Web. Jonathan is twice the recipient of the Ellen Nold Award (2003, 2005) for the best articles in the field of Computers and Composition Studies. Forthcoming work includes the following books: Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy (Utah State University Press, March 2008); and Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies (Sage), co-written with Deborah Meem and Michelle Gibson.
