PDF version Abstract In this article, we document how Twitter is embedded within the U.S.-Mexico border and used to reorganize the oppressive conditions perpetuated by the border’s sociopolitical history. We do so through a mixed-methods case-study of three polarized, yet tangled, activist movements on Twitter, each of which responded to Trump’s border wall plans and… Continue reading Building an Infrastructural Praxis: Understanding Twitter’s Embeddedness in the U.S.-Mexico Border

Video Transcript —————————————— “I don’t like how he treated my son on one of his blogs,” wrote a friend’s mom on a Facebook post about me in 2017. I stared at the post, unsure what she meant by the comment. I knew her son for years and consider him a good friend of mine, even… Continue reading On Being an Activist in your Hometown

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis,… Continue reading #CripTheVote: Disability Activism, Social Media, and the Campaign for Communal Visibility

Increasingly, academics across the disciplines rely on Twitter to share their research. Scholars in fields ranging from climate science (Katharine Hayhoe) to history (Kevin Kruse) use the platform to make their work available beyond “classrooms, journals, and the occasional book” (Pettit 2018). Yet the uptick in academic tweeting has received pushback from other scholars. Gordon… Continue reading Review of Social Writing/Social Media:Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies by Megan Von Bergen

“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed… Continue reading Visualizing Street Harassment: Mapping the ’10 Hours of Walking’ Street Harassment Meme by Rebecca Hayes

Despite the significant role digital technology has played in social movements, including the political protests in Iran last year, many still doubt the ability of these technologies to foster civic engagement and social change. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell claims the enthusiasm for social media is “outsized,” and… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction by Brian Bailie & Collette Caton

This article deals primarily with the issue(s) of student engagement and technology by examining two YouTube videos, both posted by professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch. A critical examination of such texts is both academically revealing and pedagogically useful. By foregrounding the complex interplay of cultural attitudes towards technology, progress, and the purpose(s) of education,… Continue reading Digital (Dis)engagement: Politics, Technology, Writing by Michael D. Donnelly

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new… Continue reading Viral Advocacy: Networking Labor Organizing in Higher Education by Kevin Mahoney