A bevy of scholarship within both the sciences and the humanities have surveyed the implications presented by recent research into the human's brain's astounding and only recently-realized levels of neuroplasticicy. The brain, the body of research suggests, is not a static entity that exists in fixed and stationary configuration, but rather is malleable, changeable, pliant … Continue reading Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
In her article published just a few weeks ago in Enculturation, Bonnie Tucker lays out a theory of what she refers to as technocapitalist disability rhetoric. Technocapitalist disability rhetoric (what I'll call TCDR), in Tucker's conception, is a familiar representation trope in which technology and engineering corporations utilize depictions of disability in an attempt to associate their … Continue reading Wired Utopia: Expanding Technocapitalist Disability Rhetorics
What's the most important world issue for our society to address in 2017? I posed this question to my first-year writing students a month or so ago, and we've since brainstormed, drafted and revised six-page research papers proposing solutions to a variety of diverse answers. We've now re-worked those papers into a public humanities digital … Continue reading Sparking Change Public Humanities Project
