Revised Conference Proposal

Proposal (revised), University of Cincinnati Graduate Conference

Anxious Spaces: Constructing, Historicizing, and Contextualizing Images and Stories of Difference and Otherness

In her 1998 keynote address at the CCCC, Cynthia Selfe urged composition instructors to pay attention to the inextricable linkage between technology and literacy. Additionally, she joins Gail Hawisher, Brittney Moraski, and Melissa Pearson in their 2004 article in which they associate being literate in the information age with one’s ability to situate literacies of technology within “specific cultural, material, educational, and familial contexts.” Echoing this concern, many transnational feminists, such as Mary Queen, warn that technology is “often perceived, paradoxically, as a technology that connects us to others while it simultaneously remains disconnected from material reality.” These scholars agree that teaching our students how to pay critical attention to the issues generated by technology and their implications has become an ethical imperative for teachers. Therefore, in the teaching of writing about women across cultures, we and our students should be aware of how the media has helped construct the image of “the Other woman” while ignoring her lived material conditions. We should question: How can we utilize multimodal composition praxis to create a space beyond the binary of “self” and “Other” in the writing classroom? Although these concerns over technology are legitimate, I believe that incorporating a pedagogy of difference and otherness into the writing class via the creation of and the interaction with multimodal texts can result in a deeper understanding of the “Other woman.” My presentation introduces a web site that is constructed with these themes in mind. The web site is organized in a way that places images and stories about women across cultures within their historical contexts, encouraging students to acknowledge difference and find commonalities to relate to the “Other.” This provides a dialogical space in which the power structure is horizontal rather than hierarchal—a space where identities are negotiated and renegotiated with the “Other” on equal grounds. 

Equipment needs: Internet access, projector, and speakers should be on.