Brandee Easter | Digital rhetoric

3.0 credits, Fall 2023 or Winter 2024

(Formerly WRIT 3001)

This course will provide the theoretical foundation for students in the digital writing concentration to become community-engaged professionals in the capstone Digital Authoring Practicum. This year’s course will do so through a focus on the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and ethics. In particular, we’ll think about sources, factors, consequences, and responses to “wicked problems” in digital authoring, including concerns about AI technologies, plagiarism, deepfakes, social injustice, harassment, misinformation, conspiracy, and more. These theoretical ethical considerations will provide students with resources for navigating the quickly changing, and sometimes precarious, landscapes of digital writing.

Course Objectives

Students will be able to:

• Understand rhetorical strategies and design techniques for digital writing
• Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities
• Analyze and discuss ethical issues affecting writers in a digital world
• Execute effective and ethical digital authoring projects
• Develop strategies for thinking about and researching complex problems in digital contexts

Required Texts

Mullaney, Peters, Hicks, and Philip, eds. Your Computer is on Fire. MIT Press, 2021.

Rice, Jenny. Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence. Ohio State University Press, 2020.

Trouble with enrollment? Fill out this form for the Writing Dept: https://www.yorku.ca/laps/writ/courses/permission-request-form/