4C’s reflection: Saturday

a continuation of my previous 3 posts:

Saturday:

O.02 Technologies of Writing: Rhetorics of Place

Jeff Rice‘s talk, “Spatial Identities: Writing Cities,“ was really engaging. He called into question the way Google Maps or MapQuest constructs our ideas of place, arguing that there is something more than just the map and the route. Place should also take into account various information databases that we have in our heads: databases of people, places, associations.

A great follow-up to his talk was Jenny Edbauer‘s (The Pennsylvania State University) talk “Dense Feelings: The Affective Metonymy of Local Places,“ in which she argued for a new way to think of feelings and place: that places are structured affectively. Places frame affect as structural in two ways, she said: 1) affect as metonymy (places stand in for a scattered body; i.e., neighborhoods orient people in an expansive place; affect simplifies a complex area); 2) affect as structural legitimization (place meanings are legitimized through affect). Great ideas for thinking about place.

Dennis Lynch (Michigan Technological University) then talked on “Feeling Indirectly: Writing to Discern,“ during which he asked how literally we should take the relationship between ethics, rhetoric, and place. I didn’t quite follow all of his talk, but he draw on Judith Butler’s work on ethics (which I should look into).

P.05 Negotiating Cyber Faces for Social Spaces: Constructions of Individuals Inside Online Communities

Three graduate students at Miami University-OH shared their research on online identity work. Wioleta Fedeczko shared her research on Hoodwink’d, a website community in which users have to solve riddles to join (it’s somewhat difficult, she says) and then can comment on other people’s sites in ways that only other Hoodwink’d members can see. Gina Patterson shared her research on working class queer folk and their online use, drawing from queer theory (Judith Butler: what forms of community have been created and what violence was done to create those communities?; Judith Halberstam: defines queer as non-normative). Abby Dubisar discussed her interviews with first-year students who used Facebook and who saw Facebook as part of the college experience (which is very interesting to me, as I went to undergraduate school just before Facebook, though it does make sense).