Keynote: “Hashtag Feminism and Its Discontents” Presenter: Elizabeth Losh Review by Brandy Dieterle Dr. Elizabeth Losh was the keynote speaker on Friday. Her talk, titled “Hashtag Feminism and Its Discontents,” considered how a short string of words in the form of a hashtag can hold such power and value. While critics say they aren’t of much value at all, Losh argued they do in fact have value as they allow people to talk to people and machines to talk to machines. In essence, hashtags are metadata, and we need to be paying attention to them. Losh began her talk by…
Author: Brandy Dieterle
Brandy Dieterle
Brandy Dieterle is a doctoral student in the Texts & Technology program at the University of Central Florida (UCF). At UCF, Brandy has been a graduate student tutor in the University Writing Center and has taught first-year composition courses. As a teacher, Brandy encourages students to think of writing and literacy as both self representation and identity forming. Her research is focused on identity and self representation, gender identity and representation, multimodality and new media, and digital rhetoric.
My dissertation research uses queer rhetoric as a lens for analyzing and studying moments of queering gender norms on Instagram. I took a case study approach and analyzed Instagram posts by Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and their fans, and my ethical concerns about my research grew as I progressed through my writing and research. In particular, it became increasingly apparent that by the nature of studying photos posted to social media without directly contacting the original posters, I am imposing my own perspective and positionality with my readings of the photos. Furthermore, because I am doing a multimodal analysis, sharing…
As their time with the DRC draws to a close, the 2016-2017 DRC Fellows offer reflections on their time, what they’ve learned, and where they go from here. David Coad The DRC has been a wonderful experience of engaging in and promoting community in our scholarly world. I am using this post to share some things I’ve learned about digital community building—something I am interested in and something I believe is very key to the DRC, it’s purpose and success. I recently published an article in Computers and Composition about graduate students engaging in community building on Twitter at the 2015 Computers…
During the 2016 Computers & Writing Conference, the DRC participated in a roundtable discussion with Eric Detweiler for his podcast, Rhetoricity. Some of Eric’s motivation for this podcast, titled “Collaborating on Digital Rhetoric: A Roundtable,” included exploring the ways “digital rhetoric” is defined in the DRC and also the way collaboration informs and shapes the work the DRC does, especially given that DRC Fellows come from institutions across the country Those who participated were Dr. Naomi Silver, co-director of the DRC; DRC Fellows for the 2015-16 year Jenae Cohn, Brandy Dieterle, Paula Miller; and DRC Graduate Associate Adrienne Raw. What…