Hosted by the Sweetland Center for Writing, the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) is an online, community webspace by and for scholars and teachers working in computers and writing and digital rhetoric. It is also the home of an open access book series with the University of Michigan Press.
This past fall, the DRC welcomed its eleventh cohort of graduate student Fellows. The program aims to recognize graduate students around the country currently working in digital rhetoric who want practical experience in online publishing and website development. Fellows are selected on a yearly basis by the editors and board of the DRC, and receive an annual stipend of $500 as well as recognition on the DRC website.
DRC Fellows commit to attending monthly online team meetings to plan projects that extend the DRC website and its contributions to the community of scholars interested in computers and writing. They work independently and collaboratively to complete two projects within the year of their term.
Last year’s fellows augmented our website in several categories. Jiaxin Zhang and Alexandra Krasova contributed to our Hack & Yack series with a tool review on “Scrivener: the Go-To APP for Writing” and a digital narrative titled “Transformative Pedagogy and Decolonial Approach through Digital Storytelling”; Nitya Pandey and Laura Menard curated our 21st Blog Carnival on “Digital Rhetoric in the Age of Misinformation and AI Advancements”; and Jiaxin Zhang and Chris Turpin each added interviews to our DRC Talk series, one with former DRC Fellow and current associate professor at Texas Tech, Dr. Jason Tham, and the other with Hacking in the Humanities author and associate professor at Brock University, Dr. Aaron Mauro. The fellows also presented a hybrid roundtable on “Connecting Places: The Hybrid Practices of Graduate Students” at the 2023 Computers & Writing Conference at UC Davis, moderated by Sarah Akomoh. It was a lively and engaging year of conversations and collaborations, and we wish our 2022-2023 fellows well in their next endeavors!
Keep your eyes open for upcoming collaborative projects from our new fellows, including two new pedagogy-focused initiatives to grow our DRC Syllabus Repository and our Teaching and Learning Materials Collection - the former focused on Syllabi on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Writing and the latter on Social Media Themed Teaching and Learning Materials.
The 2023-2024 fellows are:
Saurabh Anand is a Rhetoric and Composition Studies Ph.D. student and an Assistant Writing Center Director in the Department of English at the University of Georgia. His cultural location is India, and his languages are Hindi, Punjabi, English, German, and Hungarian. His research interests include Writing Center Studies, World Englishes, and Second Language Writing. His work has appeared in the English Journal, College Composition and Communication, and the Community Literacy Journal.
Sarah Fischer (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English with a concentration in Rhetoric at Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation explores how multimodal composition and embodied composition come together through the practice of vlogging. She has taught FYC, public speaking, and digital literacy courses, including “Public Storytelling Through Video” and “Like, Comment, Subscribe: The Role of Social Media Influencers.”
Anuj Gupta, a PhD candidate embodies multiple roles at the University of Arizona – a UX researcher, a technical writing educator, and Data Science and Digital Scholarship Fellow. His research and teaching agenda focuses on designing, analyzing, testing, and deploying language technologies to create transformative learning experiences that promote social justice, inclusion, and empowerment for diverse audiences. He is currently working on his dissertation research where he is analysing the impact of AI technologies like large language models (LLM) on human communication, literacy, and emotions. He was recently awarded the Kairos Graduate Student Research Award and the CCCC Scholars for the Dream Award. His significant contributions can be found in journals including Composition Studies, ALRA, JSLAT, and the CWPA journal. Previously, Anuj helped build establishing one of India’s pioneering college-level writing programs at Ashoka University.
Luke Hernandez is an Art, Technology, and Emerging Communications PhD student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Luke research works lies in the intersection of video game studies, queer theory, and latine studies. His research projects include how digital media, particularly digital games, represent and impact marginalized communities. Luke is also an Aquarius and can be found on Twitter: @Histokaloka.
Alexandra Krasova is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics and a Teaching Associate in the English Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Being a multilingual speaker, Alexandra focuses her research on multilingual students’ digital storytelling and explores their translanguaging practices as well as their multilingual identities construction. Alexandra is a Fulbright Scholar Alumna, who was teaching Russian language at the Critical Languages program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for three years and currently volunteers for the Kathleen Jones White Writing Center. Being a Former Wikipedia CCCC Fellow and a current Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Fellow, Alexandra educates her students on Digital Writing, Literacy, Rhetoric and Composition.
Alex Mashny is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. His research interests include technical communication, digital and cultural rhetorics, embodiment, and circulation studies.
