Town Hall 2: Trajectories, Directions, Explorers, Homesteaders, and Indigenous Minds: Articulating New Configurations for Virtual Scholarship

Melanie Yergeau, Ohio State University, yergeau.1@osu.edu

A street sign that has a handicap symbol (person in wheelchair) facing toward the right and an arrow pointing to the left

Image description: A street sign that has a handicap symbol (person in wheelchair) facing toward the right and an arrow pointing to the left.

Town Hall 2 Abstract

Technology artifacts age poorly, yet underlying promises, concerns, and pedagogies endure in a variety of digital spaces. The development of literacy technology will not slow or stop. Six emergent scholars will speak at Town Hall 2, articulating new challenges and artifacts by reflecting on their conference experience. Their goal is to forecast possible futures of Computers and Writing research, teaching, and environments: the trajectories, directions, explorers, homesteaders, and indigenous populations that already reside in these spaces. What metaphors and practices are just now being articulated, and how might they develop in our immediate, middle, and long-term future prognostications? Town Hall 2 invites the audience to respond to these future visions and begin the conversation for our next Computers and Writing Conference.

 

My visioning: C&W and Disability Studies = BFFs (or something like that)

Many of the goals of Computers & Writing and Disability Studies intersect. When I think about the New London Group, the work of Gunther Kress, the work seen in Kairos -- or, OK: more realistically, when I think about the stuff everyone is doing at this conference, in this field, all the time, when I think about the emphasis on the sensorial and epistemological possibilities of multimodal composing, of the doors multimodal composing can potentially open for those who make meaning in what are considered "nontraditional" ways -- when I think about all of these things, the overlaps with Disability Studies seem so obvious. At root, I think, both areas of inquiry (C&W and DS) are concerned with access, with opening up possibilities.

So, in articulating my vision of the future of C&W, I'd like to focus on how disability studies can and does inform our work, and how we might extend this work in productive ways.  I'd really like to zoom in on a few core DS concepts and their overlaps (and points of departure) with similar C&W concepts, and use these distinctions to articulate where I think we're heading in the future.

There are three main points here that I'd like to discuss:

  1. Audience
  2. Designing and aesthetics
  3. Inclusivity

 

1. Audience.

I'd like to start off with an anecdote here. I attended the Disability Studies special interest group at 4Cs this year, the second time I'd attended it -- and it's a group of some really wonderful scholars committed to, in short, making the world a better, more inclusive place. But there was one incredibly tense moment of upset this time around. It all started when someone stated: "Those multimodal comp people. Argh!" And then suddenly, several people chimed in and began venting their frustrations -- inaccessible webtexts and inaccessible conference presentations, and so on.

At first, I felt really awkward, like I was dealing with divorced parents in a custody battle. But I quickly realized how right they were, how these frustrations were real and pertinent ones, frustrations that I've always felt but just haven't been able to really express.

Here's how I can best put it, I think: we want desperately to enter into the conversations happening in the multimodal comp world, but we often can't enter in -- because the form of these conversations are often inaccessible. How are deaf people, hard-of-hearing people, people with auditory processing disorders or other learning/communication disabilities supposed to "read" a video text when that text isn't captioned, or doesn't have a transcript? How are people with low vision supposed to "read" a text rendered in Flash when there's no alternative text or descriptive material, or no way to zoom in on the text and images being offered?

At root, this is really a question of audience -- to what extent are we considering disability, to what extent our we considering our many, marvelous colleagues when we're designing a webtext, designing a presentation, designing a syllabus?

Of course, no one text can be accessible to everybody everywhere -- but universal design is a process that needs to be engaged from the get-go if we're really to become more inclusive of the members in our community. And I do want to emphasize: we're already beginning to do that work, and many people have taken up this call toward accessibility. For example:

There are many more people that are doing this work, that I don't have time or space to mention. But these individuals, I think, are engaging some truly important questions.

 

2. Designing and aesthetics.

What I'd like to discuss here is very closely correlated with topic #1 about audience. But because C&W has taken up so much important work on designs and designing, I really feel that this needs to be discussed -- what Rob Imrie has called "design apartheid": the idea that many designs have behind them a normative understanding of aesthetics, such that beautiful buildings are meant for beautiful bodies, with wheelchair ramps being considered an eyesore, an add-on, something to be hidden in the back, or non-existent.

Tobin Siebers has moved design apartheid as a concept beyond the world of architecture, and has recently argued that, if we're to view disability as a crucial and necessary part of the human experience, we need to adopt a disability aesthetic. I feel that I see this move toward a disability aesthetic (and against design apartheid) happening in C&W circles, even if not in those terms explicitly. Work on universal design (and access, and accessibility, etc.) would be some important examples. My favorite example, though, is the 2002 Kairos special issue on disability, which is really concerned with our process of designing texts, what it is we consider "beautiful," and how these often normative ideas of beauty are correlated with what we consider a beautiful (read: nondisabled) audience. For those who haven't, I'd recommend reading Dunn and Dunn de Mers's piece from that issue, as well as Salvo's webtext and Brueggemann et al.'s webtext.

In terms of this conference: the question of aesthetics really came up for me during Town Hall 1. I didn't know it in that moment -- it actually clicked in my head after having conversations with Patrick Berry and Cindy Selfe. While viewing/listening to Dan Anderson's piece, I knew it was fantastic -- but I couldn't process many of the words he was saying. I'm autistic, and sometimes background noise, like music, can interfere with my ability to quickly process speech. I was thinking of raising my hand and saying, "What about providing captions or a transcript?" And then Multimodal Comp Melanie immediately (and unfortunately) thought, "Oh, silly me! That would ruin the beauty and point of the text."

And now that I really think this through -- and how I've made this argument about many of my own webtexts (e.g., I can't insert text here! That would kill the power of the image!) -- I realize how this mindset can contribute to the in/accessibility issues mentioned a moment ago. John Slatin wrote a great article in Computers and Composition about ALT tags and broader web accessibility issues, and he put it quite well when he said, "A Web experience designed to be rich and meaningful for people with disabilities is likely to be rich and meaningful for those without disabilities as well; however, the reverse is not necessarily true" (73).

An image of several computers on a very high desk, with tall stools. It's obvious from the image that only certain people with certain (read: valued) bodies can use these chairs.

Image description: An image of several computers on a very high desk, with tall stools. It's obvious from the image that only certain people with certain (read: valued) bodies can use these chairs.

 

3. Continuing to build more inclusive spaces.

How DS concepts can better inform how we work as teachers and scholars. I don't want to end on a sour/whiny/grad-student-critiquing-the-world note. But I do want to suggest that, while lots of people are doing lots of great and important work, there's a ways to go, and how we approach that particular path is going to be very, very important to our future.