Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2024

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Williams, Bronwyn

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Rabin, Andrew

Committee Member

Rabin, Andrew

Committee Member

Johnson, Timothy

Committee Member

Buckley, Jessica

Author's Keywords

digital literacy; technology; corporate university; rhetoric; sociomaterialism

Abstract

The increased presence of disruptive digital technologies in academia has been a subject of multidisciplinary scholarly conversation and public speculation over the past few decades. Many literacy studies scholars have contributed to this discourse, examining topics like multimodal literacies and perceptions of agency among students. These scholars have noted with skepticism that such technologies may mask operations of power, surveillance, and control which serve the demands of an increasingly “corporate” or “neoliberal” university. Building upon this scholarship, my study contends that the evolving literacy environment of the digital university requires a closer examination of corporate-sponsored narratives and literacy practices implicating faculty in their daily work. This study adopts a socio-material literacy framework to explore the nuanced ways in which faculty create and share knowledge as they participate in new forms of multimodal literacy activity introduced by the COVID-19 lockdown. This perspective extends beyond human- (and student-) centric narratives of the digital, enabling my study to highlight the complex socio-cultural and material realities which faculty navigate as the nature and expectations of their work continue to change. Using methods derived v from posthumanism for interviewing objects, my study is grounded in the observation of a digital epistemic object—Microsoft Teams (“Teams)—and a co-emergent literacy practice—the Teams senate meeting—in the lives of faculty, both of which emerged in response to the COVID-19 lockdown. Findings reveal that a complex range of actors—from corporate-sponsored narratives which position faculty as “digital first responders” to aspects of the Teams interface like the camera feature—come together to shape how faculty literacy is imagined and enacted. Moreover, a range of power dynamics inherent in the deployment and adoption of Teams raise questions about the influence of private entities on academic practices, including the role of digital platforms in mediating corporate-driven forms of knowledge-making. Overall, my study calls for further critical inquiry into the assumptions and values underlying the integration of digital technologies into academic practices and a more holistic rather than siloed approach for comprehending the interconnected yet distinctive uptake of these new technologies among diverse academic stakeholders.

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