Author: Maria Novotny

Introducing Our Class: Digital Rhetoric in Health & Medicine In the Fall of 2017, the nine of us met in an undergraduate course titled “Digital Rhetoric in Health & Medicine” at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (UWO). For us students, all of whom are English majors, we found ourselves in many new and unfamiliar experiences. For instance, this was a new class, offered by a new English faculty member, and a course that focused on several unfamiliar fields of inquiry: digital rhetoric, surveillance studies, and wearable health technologies. All of these new experiences made it difficult to predict how such a…

For the past two years, much of my research has depended upon my collaboration with Elizabeth Horn-Walker, an art activist who founded the ART of Infertility. This art, oral history and portraiture project works to create embodied representations of infertility through art, poetry and storytelling. As a collaborative partnership, Elizabeth and I travel the country facilitating arts-based workshops and curating community-based art exhibits depicting diverse perspectives of infertility. At these workshops, we invite our participants to bring objects representative of their experiences with infertility. These instructions have resulted in a range of materials brought to workshops, including: ultrasound photos, syringes,…

During the Fall semester of 2014, a group of us took a graduate seminar on multimodal composing at Michigan State University (taught by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss). In the course, we read, discussed, and built on theories and practices in digital and visual rhetorics. In this blog post, we share one of our course assignments: a multimodal book review project that we hope will inspire further conversation and engagement with the DRC community. One of the tasks we faced in this course was immersing ourselves in past and current conversations around visual rhetoric and multimodal composing by focusing on themes of…