Materiality, Craft, Identity, and Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing Pedagogy

Abstract

Too often in Rhetoric and Composition, multimodal writing (an expansive practice of opening up the media and modes with which writers might work) is reduced to digital writing. “Reworking Digital Writing” argues that the opportunities and insights of digital writing should encourage us to turn our attention to all kinds of nondigital materials that have not traditionally been considered part of composing—including the materials that are already familiar to crafters and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers). Further, I argue that the material, technical, rhetorical, economic, and social dimensions of DIY craft provide a coherent framework for teaching multimodal writing in ways that encourage students to engage in the work of writing in ways that can make more apparent the composing activities and processes of writing and make more concrete the kinds of work that composed objects can do. Through this approach to composing, I argue that we can help students experience the very real ways in which writing can reshape our subjectivities and build new kinds of worlds with others. To that end, I examine DIY craft histories, theories, and practices to develop a new pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal writing.