Author: Amelia Chesley

Earlier this year, a committee member asked me how I envisioned the future of work and labor systems given the many kinds of increasingly distributed, digitally mediated collaboration I had been studying for my dissertation. My answer in that moment stretched toward two very different extremes—one involving publicly-funded economic support for all, the other a more individualistic system of “meritocracy.” Either our society might move toward a system of universal/unconditional basic income (UBI) in the wake of increasing automation and more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems…  or… our systems of waged labor could unmoor even further from traditional corporate hierarchies, fully…

In this pre-conference workshop, Dr. Ashley Hall of Wright State University described her collaborative e-book project as a “radically traditional” assignment. After all, the primary content her students worked on wasn’t too different from the typical research essay assignment, including annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, drafts, and peer review work. These pieces covered fairly traditional first-year composition skills. The exciting part involved collecting all those research essays into a coherent whole and figuring out how to publish it as an ebook via the university’s online repository. The workshop was fairly open-ended and conversational, which was great. We the attendees introduced ourselves…

James Porter opened this year’s Computers and Writing conference with an address all about the relationships among the rhetoric, history, change, the modern university, and most specifically, the principles of techne and praxis. The rhetorical principle of techne, he reminds us, is not just “to make” but to make a difference, to change the world, to move toward Better Things. It is important to recognize that techne (the craft of making something beautiful and useful, as Porter defines it) is not everything, though it is many things. Rhetoric and making differences have always been more than one thing. We know…