The Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative is proud to announce Laura Gonzales as the winner of the 2016 Sweetland/UM Press Book Prize for her book Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach us about Digital Writing and Rhetoric. Gonzales is currently Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas-El Paso and a former Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Graduate Fellow. During her tenure as a DRC Graduate Fellow, Gonzales coordinated our fifth blog carnival, “Beyond a ‘Single Language, Single Modality’ Approach to Writing.”
Gonzales’s book, Sites of Translation, bridges research in multimodal composition with work that advocates for the value of linguistic diversity in and outside of writing classrooms. It blends these frameworks through situated ethnographies illustrating how multilingual communicators leverage digital and nondigital modes in order to showcase the affordances of combining languages and modes simultaneously. The book expands work in multimodal composition to further consider the value of linguistic diversity.
Members of the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Board praised Sites of Translation for triangulating multilingualism, digital rhetoric, and technical communication in a creative and methodologically nuanced way, and for addressing important research and pedagogical questions. One Board member noted, “I especially appreciated the ways in which Gonzales has crafted a text that is at once polyvocal and accessibly written.” Other praise includes “this project triangulates multilingualism, digital rhetoric, and technical communication very well and as such will make a strong contribution to the field; I would expect substantial citation of this work,” and “this is a smart project, and I really look forward to seeing it live (digitally) (mediated) in the world.”
The UM Press/Sweetland Publication Prize in Digital Rhetoric, which is funded by the Sweetland Center for Writing, is awarded annually to an innovative and important born-digital or substantially digitally enhanced book-length project that displays critical and rigorous engagement in the field of digital rhetoric. The prize is open to scholars of all ranks and comprises a $5000 award and an advance contract for publication in the Sweetland Digital Collaborative Book Series.
