Michael Schandorf | University of British Columbia (original) (raw)
Books by Michael Schandorf
COMMUNICATION AS GESTURE Media(tion), Meaning, & Movement, 2019
While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of in... more While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the 'carrier' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction.
Communication as Gesture traces the concept of communication from its roots in classical rhetoric to its integration in structural linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, integrating perspectives from contemporary rhetorical theory, relational psychology, interactional sociology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, multimodal semiotics, and more. Because so much of our contemporary world is lived with and through digital media technologies, the study of new media and social media provides a rich illustration of the constraints imposed by our reductive assumptions--and hints at the possibilities generated by rethinking them. The gesture theory of communication introduced presents a dimensional account of communication that is intuitively accessible and theoretically rich while overturning reductive assumptions of the linear character of interaction.
https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Communication-as-Gesture/?k=9781787565166
![Research paper thumbnail of A Gesture Theory of Communication [Dissertation]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/48868531/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of ... more Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of the study of communication and interaction in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics to develop a philosophy and theory of communication anchored in a pre-symbolic concept of gesture. This reevaluation of communication processes allows for the articulation of communication as dynamic interaction in spacetime, which allows attention to communicative agency and the relations among communicators, communications technologies, and the environments and ecologies in which they are necessarily situated. This, in turn, while drawing from assemblage theory, affect theory, embodied and distributed cognition, interactional sociology, and relational psychology, provides a novel conceptualization of agency in human and non-human forms, as well as the relations among them. The foregoing is anchored in a relational ontology that critiques many of the contemporary, taken-for-granted assumptions about character of ‘information’.
Papers by Michael Schandorf
How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? Th... more How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the onl...
![Research paper thumbnail of The Historical & Theoretical Foundations of the Investigation of Digital Media Interaction (or Digital Pragmatics) [draft]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/72946720/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragma... more This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragmatics, tying together linguistics, semiotics, information theory, cybernetics, functional approaches to communication, and, finally, multimodality theories. It includes an extensive review of pragmatic and interactional approaches to digital media communication, including digital paralinguistics and metacommunication, that, unlike other such reviews, is not bound by linguistic or sociolinguistic assumptions and constraints. The following represents the first chapter of a larger project that will approach the study of digital media from the perspective of gesture, also drawing from research in social cognition, spatial cognition, rhetorical theory, affect theory, and phatic communication. Comment is actively welcomed and will be appreciated tremendously.
Reimagining Communication: Meaning, 2020
The term 'paralanguage' was coined in the middle of the twentieth century in response to the prob... more The term 'paralanguage' was coined in the middle of the twentieth century in response to the problem of how to operationalize and investigate vocal signs and signals that have an impact on utterance meaning but which are not formally grammatical (eg, tone of voice, vocal inflection), and has also been used to characterize textual elements, such as expressive punctuation. For several reasons, 'paralanguage' has never been as popular as 'nonverbal communication', and has typically been subsumed within the latter. However, the vital place of 'paralinguistic' phenomena in human communication has become increasingly evident with the rise of digitally mediated textual interaction (cf emoticons, emoji, and other graphical interactional tools), the development of increasingly sophisticated and responsive voice-controlled interfaces and digital assistants, and even the gestural character of touchscreen technologies. Historically, the idea of 'paralanguage' has been treated with ambivalence, at best, because, in practice, separating language from paralanguage (and verbal from nonverbal) is far more difficult that it might at first seem. However, that very challenge makes the idea of 'paralanguage' a powerful tool for revealing taken for granted or unacknowledged theoretical assumptions about the nature of language, communication, interaction, and information, which carry important implications for communication ethics.
Draft for "The Routledge Handbook of Digital Rhetoric & Writing" (2018): "Practices of digital ac... more Draft for "The Routledge Handbook of Digital Rhetoric & Writing" (2018): "Practices of digital activism demonstrate why contemporary rhetorical studies, and studies of digital rhetoric in particular, must move beyond the text and intertextuality (as much as hypertextuality), as well as beyond the individual actor, to understand distributed rhetorical processes of symbolic (inter-/co-)action. Focusing on the rhetoric of an individual, a text, or the rhetorical affordances of a medium (built upon and intertwined with uncritical assumptions about the constitution of information) misses entirely the distributed character of rhetorical praxis—which has always already been the case but is inescapable in a hypermediated world. The investigation of rhetorical processes – of what people in and as assemblages of actors and agents are doing in communication and/as interaction across places and media, and within or against the algorithmic rhythms of a political economy of corporate manipulation and state regulation – cannot be confined to the limitations of textual production and consumption if we hope to generate actionable understanding of those processes."
The emphasis in much of the present volume that any given actor (even the individual human being)... more The emphasis in much of the present volume that any given actor (even the individual human being) is always a nexus of interacting and nested systems, a multifarious assemblage of heterogeneous components, is certainly a step forward for understanding the complexities of the sociopolitical world. But without a clear means for drawing at least contingent borders around even ‘open’ systems and subsystems, the problems of analysis and interpretation can become impossibly vague with little hope of resolution. We would like to address this problem by reorienting the discussion from a focus on the agent—at whatever level of abstraction—to the forces that bind systems of agency together and move them to act. To do so we, like others (e.g. Bennett, 2005 and Connelly 2013), draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage theory, particularly as extended by DeLanda (2006; 2011). Additionally however, we also draw from American rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke’s (1969a; 1969b; 2003) theory of symbolic action in combination with sociological and social psychological understandings of motivation and intention, which then present two forms of what we consider to be primary binding or assembling ‘forces’ as Latour (2005) has used that term.
The theorization and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomen... more The theorization and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomena, and the intersection of the two are limited by an incommensurability between the conceptualisations of individual agency and the disciplining powers of social structures. We introduce a technosocial theory of agency that bridges the individual and the social through a reconceptualization of the conventional notion of intentionality. Drawing from recent theories of affect and embodiment, posthuman-influenced materialisms and realisms, postmodern critical theory, and critiques of network theory, we introduce a model for understanding sociopolitical action and dissent that accounts for individual human agency as a nexus of overlapping and often competing subjectivities, as well as both nonhuman technological agencies and assemblages of the two. The theoretical framework presented avoids the tendency of much critical theory, new materialist theory and speculative realisms to discount or dismiss human agency altogether, and the predilection of situationist technosocial research to ignore the constraints of technological systems of production and reproduction. This theory of agents (as actants) and agencies (as force vectors of action) is situated within an ecological model of competing systemic social logics dominated by the global-hegemonic capitalist code, in order to conceptualise the intertwined possibility spaces of individual and social resistance. The article introduces a conceptual framework to theorise resistances against the present global order and national suborders based on the type of agency, the order of dissent, the mode of labour, the logic of action and the level against which resistance is directed.
This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of n... more This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of new and social media to argue that the vital nonverbal functions of face to face communication are not absent from digital media, but that communicative functions typically enacted nonverbally are transposed into new spaces of interaction afforded by synchronous and near-synchronous textual media. Digital and social media text is conversational text that fulfills the phatic needs of typical social interaction: ‘keeping in touch’ does not in any way constitute a cultural regression but represents the fundamental ground of human cognition, which is inescapably both social and technologically dependent. An analysis of examples from the popular microblogging service Twitter serves to illustrate the gestural functions of digital media text, including the enactment of mediated social ‘spaces’. The closing section explores the theoretical implications for identity and agency of connecting embodied nonverbal communication to digital media communication that is all too often erroneously understood to be or implicitly approached as ‘disembodied’.
How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? Th... more How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the online interactions they enable through a reconsideration of the concept of space.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Jan 1, 2009
This short paper claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley had a structural influence on James Joyce's Uly... more This short paper claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley had a structural influence on James Joyce's Ulysses. The claim rests on a comparison of the tripartite structure of narrative voice in Ulysses, as argued by Hugh Kenner, with the narrative structure of Shelley's poem Alastor. Shelley's poem, besides the tripartite narrative voice, also features a romantic poet-hero very much in the Stephen Dedalus vein, who journey's across the ocean, spurning love along the way, to die alone and unknown. Correspondences are drawn between the "ghost" of the narrator's voice(s) in the two works, both implicitly and explicitly. Themes and images of ghosts, turbulent water, and drowning are, of course, both prevalent and complex is Ulysses. What this paper, unfortunately, does not call attention to are the images of and allusions involving turbulent water (an important component of Alastor) in the three appearances of the word "ghoststory" in Ulysses. The first, in Nestor, is accompanied by by direct allusions to Milton's "Lycidas." The second, in Scylla & Charybdis, is situated between "The devil and the deep sea" and a Hamlet reference, "List! List! O list!" calling attention to the ghost of the father, though the word "list" also refers to the lean of a ship. The third, in "Circe," comes from the mouth of a phantasmagorical mother/father figure ("BELLO: ...Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry...") trying to force from Bloom a "confession" of his crimes in a section with explicit and ironic allusions to Shelley's idea of poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" (in which Stephen and Bloom merge imagistically) and stage directions of "gurgling" and "puke" that recall the theme of drowning.
Talks by Michael Schandorf
Russian meddling’ in the US election continues to churn the US news cycle, and new revelations of... more Russian meddling’ in the US election continues to churn the US news cycle, and new revelations of connections between the White House and ‘Russian oligarchs’ seem to arise weekly. But the shared interests of Russian oligarchs and American oligarchs shouldn’t be all that surprising. What is apparently surprising to some about these stories, along with the ‘Paradise Papers’ and ‘Panama Papers’ leaks (Garside 2017), is what they reveal about the interconnectedness of global capital and the contemporary relation between global capital and the state.
Presented at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Conference 2015. Panel: Blinded ... more Presented at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Conference 2015. Panel: Blinded by the Like: Using New Media Philosophy to Challenge Students to Think Critically and Analytically about Social Media Use; Madison, Wisconsin; Saturday, April 18, 2015
The theorisation and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomen... more The theorisation and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomena, and the intersection of the two are limited by an incommensurability between the conceptualisations of individual agency and the disciplining powers of social structures. We present a theory of sociotechnological agency that bridges the individual and the social through a reconceptualization of the conventional notion of intentionality. Drawing from recent theories of affect and embodiment, posthuman-influenced materialisms and realisms, postmodern critical theory, and critiques of network theory, we present a model for understanding sociopolitical action and dissent that accounts for individual human agency as a nexus of overlapping and often competing subjectivities, as well as both nonhuman technological agencies and assemblages of the two. The model presented avoids the tendency of much critical theory, new materialist theory and speculative realisms to discount or dismiss human agency altogether, and the predilection of situationist technosocial research to ignore the constraints of technological systems of production and reproduction. This model of agents (as actants) and agencies (as force vectors of action) is situated within an ecological model of competing systemic social logics dominated by the global-hegemonic capitalist code in order to conceptualise the possibility space of individual and/or social resistance. (Prezi here: https://prezi.com/kjdflwhaedwl/agency-resistance-and-orders-of-dissent/)
COMMUNICATION AS GESTURE Media(tion), Meaning, & Movement, 2019
While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of in... more While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the 'carrier' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction.
Communication as Gesture traces the concept of communication from its roots in classical rhetoric to its integration in structural linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, integrating perspectives from contemporary rhetorical theory, relational psychology, interactional sociology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, multimodal semiotics, and more. Because so much of our contemporary world is lived with and through digital media technologies, the study of new media and social media provides a rich illustration of the constraints imposed by our reductive assumptions--and hints at the possibilities generated by rethinking them. The gesture theory of communication introduced presents a dimensional account of communication that is intuitively accessible and theoretically rich while overturning reductive assumptions of the linear character of interaction.
https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Communication-as-Gesture/?k=9781787565166
Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of ... more Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of the study of communication and interaction in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics to develop a philosophy and theory of communication anchored in a pre-symbolic concept of gesture. This reevaluation of communication processes allows for the articulation of communication as dynamic interaction in spacetime, which allows attention to communicative agency and the relations among communicators, communications technologies, and the environments and ecologies in which they are necessarily situated. This, in turn, while drawing from assemblage theory, affect theory, embodied and distributed cognition, interactional sociology, and relational psychology, provides a novel conceptualization of agency in human and non-human forms, as well as the relations among them. The foregoing is anchored in a relational ontology that critiques many of the contemporary, taken-for-granted assumptions about character of ‘information’.
How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? Th... more How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the onl...
This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragma... more This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragmatics, tying together linguistics, semiotics, information theory, cybernetics, functional approaches to communication, and, finally, multimodality theories. It includes an extensive review of pragmatic and interactional approaches to digital media communication, including digital paralinguistics and metacommunication, that, unlike other such reviews, is not bound by linguistic or sociolinguistic assumptions and constraints. The following represents the first chapter of a larger project that will approach the study of digital media from the perspective of gesture, also drawing from research in social cognition, spatial cognition, rhetorical theory, affect theory, and phatic communication. Comment is actively welcomed and will be appreciated tremendously.
Reimagining Communication: Meaning, 2020
The term 'paralanguage' was coined in the middle of the twentieth century in response to the prob... more The term 'paralanguage' was coined in the middle of the twentieth century in response to the problem of how to operationalize and investigate vocal signs and signals that have an impact on utterance meaning but which are not formally grammatical (eg, tone of voice, vocal inflection), and has also been used to characterize textual elements, such as expressive punctuation. For several reasons, 'paralanguage' has never been as popular as 'nonverbal communication', and has typically been subsumed within the latter. However, the vital place of 'paralinguistic' phenomena in human communication has become increasingly evident with the rise of digitally mediated textual interaction (cf emoticons, emoji, and other graphical interactional tools), the development of increasingly sophisticated and responsive voice-controlled interfaces and digital assistants, and even the gestural character of touchscreen technologies. Historically, the idea of 'paralanguage' has been treated with ambivalence, at best, because, in practice, separating language from paralanguage (and verbal from nonverbal) is far more difficult that it might at first seem. However, that very challenge makes the idea of 'paralanguage' a powerful tool for revealing taken for granted or unacknowledged theoretical assumptions about the nature of language, communication, interaction, and information, which carry important implications for communication ethics.
Draft for "The Routledge Handbook of Digital Rhetoric & Writing" (2018): "Practices of digital ac... more Draft for "The Routledge Handbook of Digital Rhetoric & Writing" (2018): "Practices of digital activism demonstrate why contemporary rhetorical studies, and studies of digital rhetoric in particular, must move beyond the text and intertextuality (as much as hypertextuality), as well as beyond the individual actor, to understand distributed rhetorical processes of symbolic (inter-/co-)action. Focusing on the rhetoric of an individual, a text, or the rhetorical affordances of a medium (built upon and intertwined with uncritical assumptions about the constitution of information) misses entirely the distributed character of rhetorical praxis—which has always already been the case but is inescapable in a hypermediated world. The investigation of rhetorical processes – of what people in and as assemblages of actors and agents are doing in communication and/as interaction across places and media, and within or against the algorithmic rhythms of a political economy of corporate manipulation and state regulation – cannot be confined to the limitations of textual production and consumption if we hope to generate actionable understanding of those processes."
The emphasis in much of the present volume that any given actor (even the individual human being)... more The emphasis in much of the present volume that any given actor (even the individual human being) is always a nexus of interacting and nested systems, a multifarious assemblage of heterogeneous components, is certainly a step forward for understanding the complexities of the sociopolitical world. But without a clear means for drawing at least contingent borders around even ‘open’ systems and subsystems, the problems of analysis and interpretation can become impossibly vague with little hope of resolution. We would like to address this problem by reorienting the discussion from a focus on the agent—at whatever level of abstraction—to the forces that bind systems of agency together and move them to act. To do so we, like others (e.g. Bennett, 2005 and Connelly 2013), draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage theory, particularly as extended by DeLanda (2006; 2011). Additionally however, we also draw from American rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke’s (1969a; 1969b; 2003) theory of symbolic action in combination with sociological and social psychological understandings of motivation and intention, which then present two forms of what we consider to be primary binding or assembling ‘forces’ as Latour (2005) has used that term.
The theorization and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomen... more The theorization and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomena, and the intersection of the two are limited by an incommensurability between the conceptualisations of individual agency and the disciplining powers of social structures. We introduce a technosocial theory of agency that bridges the individual and the social through a reconceptualization of the conventional notion of intentionality. Drawing from recent theories of affect and embodiment, posthuman-influenced materialisms and realisms, postmodern critical theory, and critiques of network theory, we introduce a model for understanding sociopolitical action and dissent that accounts for individual human agency as a nexus of overlapping and often competing subjectivities, as well as both nonhuman technological agencies and assemblages of the two. The theoretical framework presented avoids the tendency of much critical theory, new materialist theory and speculative realisms to discount or dismiss human agency altogether, and the predilection of situationist technosocial research to ignore the constraints of technological systems of production and reproduction. This theory of agents (as actants) and agencies (as force vectors of action) is situated within an ecological model of competing systemic social logics dominated by the global-hegemonic capitalist code, in order to conceptualise the intertwined possibility spaces of individual and social resistance. The article introduces a conceptual framework to theorise resistances against the present global order and national suborders based on the type of agency, the order of dissent, the mode of labour, the logic of action and the level against which resistance is directed.
This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of n... more This article draws an analogy between physical nonverbal gesture and the textual conventions of new and social media to argue that the vital nonverbal functions of face to face communication are not absent from digital media, but that communicative functions typically enacted nonverbally are transposed into new spaces of interaction afforded by synchronous and near-synchronous textual media. Digital and social media text is conversational text that fulfills the phatic needs of typical social interaction: ‘keeping in touch’ does not in any way constitute a cultural regression but represents the fundamental ground of human cognition, which is inescapably both social and technologically dependent. An analysis of examples from the popular microblogging service Twitter serves to illustrate the gestural functions of digital media text, including the enactment of mediated social ‘spaces’. The closing section explores the theoretical implications for identity and agency of connecting embodied nonverbal communication to digital media communication that is all too often erroneously understood to be or implicitly approached as ‘disembodied’.
How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? Th... more How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the online interactions they enable through a reconsideration of the concept of space.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Jan 1, 2009
This short paper claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley had a structural influence on James Joyce's Uly... more This short paper claims that Percy Bysshe Shelley had a structural influence on James Joyce's Ulysses. The claim rests on a comparison of the tripartite structure of narrative voice in Ulysses, as argued by Hugh Kenner, with the narrative structure of Shelley's poem Alastor. Shelley's poem, besides the tripartite narrative voice, also features a romantic poet-hero very much in the Stephen Dedalus vein, who journey's across the ocean, spurning love along the way, to die alone and unknown. Correspondences are drawn between the "ghost" of the narrator's voice(s) in the two works, both implicitly and explicitly. Themes and images of ghosts, turbulent water, and drowning are, of course, both prevalent and complex is Ulysses. What this paper, unfortunately, does not call attention to are the images of and allusions involving turbulent water (an important component of Alastor) in the three appearances of the word "ghoststory" in Ulysses. The first, in Nestor, is accompanied by by direct allusions to Milton's "Lycidas." The second, in Scylla & Charybdis, is situated between "The devil and the deep sea" and a Hamlet reference, "List! List! O list!" calling attention to the ghost of the father, though the word "list" also refers to the lean of a ship. The third, in "Circe," comes from the mouth of a phantasmagorical mother/father figure ("BELLO: ...Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry...") trying to force from Bloom a "confession" of his crimes in a section with explicit and ironic allusions to Shelley's idea of poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" (in which Stephen and Bloom merge imagistically) and stage directions of "gurgling" and "puke" that recall the theme of drowning.
Russian meddling’ in the US election continues to churn the US news cycle, and new revelations of... more Russian meddling’ in the US election continues to churn the US news cycle, and new revelations of connections between the White House and ‘Russian oligarchs’ seem to arise weekly. But the shared interests of Russian oligarchs and American oligarchs shouldn’t be all that surprising. What is apparently surprising to some about these stories, along with the ‘Paradise Papers’ and ‘Panama Papers’ leaks (Garside 2017), is what they reveal about the interconnectedness of global capital and the contemporary relation between global capital and the state.
Presented at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Conference 2015. Panel: Blinded ... more Presented at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Conference 2015. Panel: Blinded by the Like: Using New Media Philosophy to Challenge Students to Think Critically and Analytically about Social Media Use; Madison, Wisconsin; Saturday, April 18, 2015
The theorisation and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomen... more The theorisation and understanding of contemporary social movements, socio-technological phenomena, and the intersection of the two are limited by an incommensurability between the conceptualisations of individual agency and the disciplining powers of social structures. We present a theory of sociotechnological agency that bridges the individual and the social through a reconceptualization of the conventional notion of intentionality. Drawing from recent theories of affect and embodiment, posthuman-influenced materialisms and realisms, postmodern critical theory, and critiques of network theory, we present a model for understanding sociopolitical action and dissent that accounts for individual human agency as a nexus of overlapping and often competing subjectivities, as well as both nonhuman technological agencies and assemblages of the two. The model presented avoids the tendency of much critical theory, new materialist theory and speculative realisms to discount or dismiss human agency altogether, and the predilection of situationist technosocial research to ignore the constraints of technological systems of production and reproduction. This model of agents (as actants) and agencies (as force vectors of action) is situated within an ecological model of competing systemic social logics dominated by the global-hegemonic capitalist code in order to conceptualise the possibility space of individual and/or social resistance. (Prezi here: https://prezi.com/kjdflwhaedwl/agency-resistance-and-orders-of-dissent/)
This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragma... more This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragmatics, tying together linguistics, semiotics, information theory, cybernetics, functional approaches to communication, and, finally, multimodality theories. It includes an extensive review of pragmatic and interactional approaches to digital media communication, including digital paralinguistics and metacommunication, that, unlike other such reviews, is not bound by linguistic or sociolinguistic assumptions and constraints. [An updated version of this review is available in my dissertation, and a more less final version in my book, "Communication as Gestures: Media(tion), Meaning, & Movement.]
This section of WRDS 350 is a blended (or 'flipped') class. Tuesdays are mostly your time to use ... more This section of WRDS 350 is a blended (or 'flipped') class. Tuesdays are mostly your time to use for weekly class readings, coursework, collaborative activities, office hours consultations, and preparation for in-class discussion on Thursdays. Exceptions to this general rule, such as specific in-class Tuesday workshops, are specified in the course schedule below (and on Canvas). Thursday's in-class discussions are not lectures; they are seminar-style discussions based on the class readings, and students will be expected to be prepared for and to contribute to those discussions. This means having, at a bare minimum, read and considered at least one of the week's assigned readings well enough to talk and ask questions about it). The coursework is designed and structured to promote those expectations, but gives you many options for, and quite a lot of control over, how you approach your learning in this course. Project-based Course: There are no tests or quizzes in this course. This section of WRDS 350 is designed to help us learn together actively by doing. This a project-based course comprising two, multi-part and interdependent projects: 1) a Situating Project in which you will be introduced to the study of academic discourse through investigation of the writing and communication practices of professionals in your chosen field of study, and 2) a Research Project that you will design and carry out in order learn something of your choice more focused and specific about the discursive practices of your chosen field of study, and about discourse studies and scholarly discourse (academic writing and communication) more generally.
WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on th... more WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on their existing knowledge of academic research and writing practices by studying specific features of scholarly writing relevant to their own interests and disciplines. As practices of generating knowledge, all scholarly discourse is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas-a communal process of discursive inquiry, more about questions than answers. Different disciplines and fields of inquiry ask different kinds of questions in different ways for different reasons and with different objectives. They also formulate their questions, responses, and arguments differently (though sometimes in superficially similar forms/genres): different fields of inquiry have different assumptions and expectations about what constitutes knowledge, what evidence is relevant and of value, and what sources of evidence and information are credible. Forms of discourse and communication are forms of thinking. The aim of this course is introduce you to disciplinary discourses-including, importantly, those of your own chosen field or major-as communicative practices, and therefor as differential knowledge making practices: ways of thinking. You are not a newcomer to scholarly practice, but how familiar are you, really, with your discipline's discursive practices? What does it mean to write or speak (or think) like a 'sociologist'? An 'economist'? A 'psychologist'? A 'computer scientist'? A 'literary scholar'? The aim of the course is to introduce you to the analytic frameworks used by researchers interested in the examination of disciplinary discourses, in order to become a more effective communicator in your own field, and to get a clearer idea of how that relates to rest of scholarly knowledge making practices.
WRDS 150 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, s... more WRDS 150 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, such as particular academic disciplines and research fields. You will begin to participate in scholarly conversations within those communities by performing the actions of apprentice academic researchers, scholarly communicators, and peer-reviewers. You will also produce work in several scholarly genres and familiarize yourself with the conventions of communication of specific academic disciplines. In doing so, you will begin to develop your own scholarly identity as a member of academic research communities. To that end, the course is organized into three broad, overlapping stages of 'learn/acquire', 'practice', and 'produce'. The course is heavier on lectures and coursework at the beginning as we learn new ideas and acquire new tools. The second phase involves practicing using those tools and integrating our concepts. Finally, by the end of the semester, coursework will be almost entirely about your own research projects.
WRDS 150 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, s... more WRDS 150 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, such as particular academic disciplines and research fields. You will begin to participate in scholarly conversations within those communities by performing the actions of apprentice academic researchers, scholarly communicators, and peer-reviewers. You will also produce work in several scholarly genres and familiarize yourself with the conventions of communication of specific academic disciplines. In doing so, you will begin to develop your own scholarly identity as a member of academic research communities. To that end, the course is organized into three broad, overlapping stages of 'learn/acquire', 'practice', and 'produce'. The course is heavier on lectures and coursework at the beginning as we learn new ideas and acquire new tools. The second phase involves practicing using those tools and integrating our concepts. Finally, by the end of the semester, coursework will be almost entirely about your own research projects. Course Theme: It's No Game: The Idea of Competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world-and there will always be far more "losers" than "winners". Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to "us versus them" thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called "the ultimate disease of cooperation." To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines.
ASTU 101 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, s... more ASTU 101 will introduce you to the ethical knowledge-making practices of scholarly communities, such as particular academic disciplines and research fields. You will begin to participate in scholarly conversations within those communities by performing the actions of apprentice academic researchers, scholarly communicators, and peer-reviewers. You will also produce work in several scholarly genres and familiarize yourself with the conventions of communication of specific academic disciplines. In doing so, you will begin to develop your own scholarly identity as a member of academic research communities. To that end, the course is organized into three broad, overlapping stages of 'learn/acquire', 'practice', and 'produce'. The course is heavier on lectures and coursework at the beginning as we learn new ideas and acquire new tools. The second phase involves practicing using those tools and integrating our concepts. Finally, by the end of the semester, coursework will be almost entirely about your own research projects. Course Theme: It's No Game: The Idea of Competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world-and there will always be far more "losers" than "winners". Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to "us versus them" thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called "the ultimate disease of cooperation." To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines.
It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often ta... more It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Ne... more The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on th... more WRDS 350 is an advanced scholarly research and writing course that allows students to build on their existing knowledge of academic research and writing practices by studying specific features of scholarly writing relevant to their own interests and disciplines. As practices of generating knowledge, all scholarly discourse is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas-a communal process of discursive inquiry, more about questions than answers. But different disciplines and fields of inquiry ask different kinds of questions in different ways for different reasons and with different objectives. They also formulate their questions, responses, and arguments differently (though sometimes in superficially similar forms/genres): different fields of inquiry have different assumptions and expectations about what constitutes knowledge, what evidence is relevant and of value, and what sources of evidence and information are credible. Forms of discourse and communication are forms of thinking.
It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and ... more It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and writing that focuses on the concept of competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and ... more It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and writing that explores the concept of competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world: there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and ... more It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and writing that focuses on the concept of competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and ... more It’s No Game: The Idea of Competition is an introduction to academic and scholarly discourse and writing that focuses on the concept of competition. The idea of competition is so fundamental that we often take it for granted as a natural good. Nearly every aspect of our lives involves competition: we compete in school, we compete for jobs, we compete at work, we compete socially, we compete in games and sports for fun, and when we are not competing ourselves we spend much of our
time enjoying watching others compete. But our obsession with competition has several potential complications. A world divided into winners and losers, for example, is an inherently inequitable world – and there will always be far more “losers” than “winners”. Competition also has a variety of interesting relationships with our inescapable need for cooperation and social cohesion. Attempting to disentangle cooperation from competition, in fact, can undermine both sides of this pair: a
lack of either can lead to unproductive stasis, and worse. But a complete integration of cooperation and competition can lead to “us versus them” thinking and even war, which US rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “the ultimate disease of cooperation.” To better understand the idea of competition, we will examine the ways that it has been investigated and
conceptualized in different academic disciplines. For example, competition is fundamental to Business, Economics, and Political Science. But, because of its inescapable role in human society, competition is also an important topic in Psychology, in Anthropology, in Sociology, and even in the study and practice of Education. In this class, we will explore the ways that competition has been investigated in some of this recent research and scholarship, and students will complete research projects of their own contributing to that scholarly conversation.
Media, Culture, & Communication examines contemporary U.S. American media and culture from a crit... more Media, Culture, & Communication examines contemporary U.S. American media and culture from a critical‐theoretical standpoint while examining popular social practices with particular attention to their influence on individual and collective identities. Outcome: Students will learn critical cultural theories and reflect upon the influences of contemporary cultural texts and practices with an eye for their economic, social, and political influence on individual and collective identities. TEXTBOOKS All reading materials will be provided on Sakai, or otherwise, as needed. REQUIREMENTS AND GRADES Media, Culture & Communication is a seminar/workshop‐style class. There is nothing to memorize. There are no quizzes. There are no tests: no midterm, no final exam. Your performance will not be evaluated, and your grade in this course will not be based, on your ability to regurgitate arbitrary facts or definitions from the course materials and lectures. (There will be very little " lecturing, " in any case.) Your grade will ultimately be based on the effort you demonstrate in engaging with the ideas we will be confronting this semester. Your engagement and contribution will have a decisive impact on the success of the course as a whole. This means three things: 1) you must attend class, 2) you must be prepared, and 3) you must actively participate both in class and online. Individual grades will be computed as follows:
