Identifying New Audiences: Localizing Social Issues in Computing
Abstract: Audience is a foundational concept in the study and practice of writing. In this talk I present an overview of a lesson that assists students in identifying a key changemaker whom they will persuade to take a particular stance or action vis à vis a real-world technological issue. Often, when students are asked to address a changemaker in their writing, they gravitate toward people who occupy highly visible national and corporate positions of power: government officials, CEOs, venture capitalists, etc. While people in these positions do wield great influence in the fields of computing and data science, it is my belief that undergraduate students with backgrounds in computer science and informatics are also powerful changemakers and innovators in their communities. In this interactive lesson, I thus encourage students to consider the question of audience through a regional, community-oriented frame and to practice leveraging their local contexts and connections in the production of persuasive, socially engaged writing.
Bio: Siobhan Meï (she/her) is an educator, interdisciplinary literary scholar, and digital humanist. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Siobhan has over seven years of experience teaching writing, research methods, and social theory to undergraduates here at UMass Amherst. A scholar of Caribbean cultures and histories, Siobhan is the co-editor of the interview series Haiti in Translation and the co-founder of the digital humanities project Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History. Siobhan's dissertation "Refashioning History: Women as Sartorial Storytellers" is supported by a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in Women's Studies (now the Institute for Citizens & Scholars) and a 2020-2021 Research Associateship at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. Siobhan is currently a lecturer in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst where she teaches multiple sections of the Junior Year Writing course, "Social Issues in Computing."
Attend this talk by clicking here.
A password is required to enter this Zoom event. If you need this password, please see the event announcements on the college email lists or contact ataubman [at] cs.umass.edu (subject: Password%20-%20Carline%20Lemieux%20Talk) (Alex Taubman).