Author: Neil Simpkins

On the recording, there’s a heavy thunk, then the sound of objects scattering. I had just asked my interviewee to describe the tools she used to write, and like many of the folks I’d talked to before her, she started by talking to me about which tools she used to plan, then pulled out what she carried around with her to help illustrate her process. After describing how she uses Excel sheets to create a “consolidated syllabus” and Google Calendar on her phone to track classes, doctors’ appointments, and her fiance’s schedule, Kristen described how she used a paper planner…

Paula Miller In the 1970s, freelance journalist Ralph Lee Smith referred to the internet as an “electronic highway,” and through the 90s, we called the internet the “information superhighway,” a place to link humans with knowledge on just about every topic imaginable. Since those exciting early moments, the ways we conceive of the internet has shifted, and while that information component is still strong, we’re living in an era of community-driven digispace, with human-centric tools (the writing studies tree, rhetmap) and meeting places (Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat) that are empty without their communities driving them. There are even those digital phenomena…

In our CFP for the Cripping Digital Writing and Technology Blog Carnival, we asked writers to explore how the disability studies key term “cripping” could be explored and implemented in digital rhetoric and technology. We were very lucky to get a wide slate of practical, pedagogical, and theoretical posts that challenged the ways we teach, write, and move through the world. Here’s a round up of the posts from this blog carnival. In our first post titled “Remediating Disability: Articulating an Arts-based Pedagogy to Crip The Work of Composition,” Maria Novotny explored how multimodal, community-based arts pedagogy “destabilize assumptions and…

In disability studies, “cripping” is both an embraced and contested practice that describes the processes involved in resisting “compulsory able-bodiness” (McRuer 2006). To “crip” a concept or space involves a decentering of the able bodymind (Price 2011), the normative structures of time (Kafer 2013), and as we would like writers to explore, the normative experiences and uses of technology. We’re excited to host a blog carnival that seeks posts that participate in–or critique–a cripping of digital rhetoric and technology. Posts for this carnival can explore a wide variety of topics related to cripping digital rhetoric and writing. For scholars concerned…