Rhetoric and Communication in the Time of COVID-19: A Global Pandemic and Digital Rhetoric as Praxis Editors: Jialei Jiang and Soyeon Lee The COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic is not simply a scientific or health crisis, but a phenomenon of global significance that cuts across social, political, cultural, bioenvironmental, and ethical domains. The crisis has spurred multi-disciplinary conversations in both academic and public spheres, ranging from viral modernity (Peters, Jandrić, and McLaren, 2020) and open science (Kupferschmidt, 2020), to post-truth conditions (Fuller, 2020) and misinformation (Mian & Khan, 2020). Also worth mentioning is the urgency to protect ethnic minority populations…
Author: Soyeon Lee
Jialei Jiang, Soyeon Lee
Soyeon Lee teaches writing courses at Houston Community College and works as a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and Pedagogy in the English department at the University of Houston.
The 2016 Blog Carnival of Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative presented reflections on the emergent maker movement and its creative combination with writing pedagogy in the field of rhetoric and composition. This Blog Carnival was productive in demonstrating how making processes and writing processes can be converged in similar or dissimilar ways (Arellano; Shivers-McNair) and how the integration of the maker movement in writing courses could promote students’ material agency (Melo). Synthesizing multiple blogs, this blog carnival illustrated that students can be invited not only to engage in the DIY culture in the form of multimodal projects but also to develop…
My engagement in digital rhetorics started with an unexpected event. Living in Houston, one of the most vulnerable cities near the Gulf of Mexico in climate change, I came to be interested in environmental activism and digital communications. While experiencing almost annual floods since 2015, many migrant communities in Houston have had less access not only to material resources but also to civic information needed for the recovery process. This information gap and inequality, however, also led newly arrived migrants to negotiating creative ways of digital literacies. My current research explores how digital technologies, particularly, non-U.S.-based social media networks give…