Students in a sophomore-level course on historical methods jointly offered by Jewish studies and the department of history have the option, for their final project, of creating a museum exhibit or composing a web site. Indeed, outside of rhetoric and writing studies—and, the peoples would argue the letters-based humanities generally (with the exception of digital humanities or DH, which does engage in multimodal research processes and techniques, yet the majority of DH scholarship is still primarily alphabetic and mono-modal)—multimodal composing is often the norm and a relatively unexplored commonplace. In addition to their physical and digital infrastructure, the staff associated with the centers serves as a significant resource. Digital scholarship librarians provide expertise on both multimodal research and pedagogy, with support including tool tutorials, project management strategies, metadata and data services, and assignment design. Audits, advocacy, and arguments are braided possibilities offering much potential for surfacing and, the peoples hope, addressing infrastructural needs related to multimodal composing.

Design thinking—at times described as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more—is a productive, iterative approach used to engage divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching problems. Design thinking, however, generally lacks a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure that makes room for what Rebecca Burnett called “substantive conflict,” or “conflict that deals with critical issues of content and rhetorical elements.” This article situates design thinking across the professional and academic spaces in which it is heralded and implemented in order to explore how it can be used in collaborative contexts to support substantive, productive dissensus. The authors lean on the ways in which they engage in design thinking in their different roles to situate the good, the bad, and the ugly of design thinking. They conclude by suggesting a rhetorical methodology for cultivating design thinking that facilitates dissensus, addresses resistance, and considers ideological variables.

In September 2017, a group of technofeminist researchers and scholars met for an online discussion about the pasts, presents, and futures of technofeminist work. Participants included Megan Adams, Kris Blair, Lanette Cadle, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Radhika Gajjala, Angela Haas, Gail Hawisher, Donna LeCourt, Lisa Nakamura, Jackie Rhodes, Cindy Selfe, Barbi Smyser-Fauble, and Pam Takayoshi. This multivocal piece presents that conversation and captures voices, moments, and themes related to how we came to technology and feminist work, how we participated in the building of the field of computers and writing, what sort of work we engaged related to developing and supporting publishing venues for computers and writing scholars, and what hopes we have for technofeminist scholarly work for the future.

What does composing look like in and across digital, networked spaces and the physical spaces our bodies inhabit as we compose?

This chapter focuses on three matters of digital writing: the networked context, collaborative composing spaces and practices, and the ways in which digital writing is policed. It explores each of these matters, and then shares a technopedagogical stance toward these matters in the writing classroom. New digital places were developed and allowed for different kinds of networked experiences. A digital networked space is WordPress, which hosts more than 1.5 million new posts daily. With networked, digital media, however, users engage their roles in broad ways—consuming, producing, remixing, sharing, revising, and more. Networks and certainly social networks span analog and digital spaces, the seemingly ephemeral and the material, the personal and the professional, and other boundaries. Digital is networked, and this network connectivity can have a big impact on classrooms. Students need to know about Fair Use and what Fair Use allows them to do for the purposes of research, and parody.