Georgia Southern University

Faculty Member, Writing and Linguistics

Writing Program Coordinator

CLASS

About

I live in rural south-east Georgia, in the midst of cotton fields, and enjoy a ceramics studio that I created last year, one I never imagined possible. 

Ten years ago, when I moved here, my interests were in literacy studies, in the curious morphings happening in basic concepts of reading and writing, the ways the internet and other technologies shifted a writer's relation to alphabetic text, in the degree to which aging played a role in digital migrations.  I studied aging on a post doc fellowship to figure out the challenges writing faculty might face with shifting technologies; I studied visual design through the back door--ceramics--learning different debates about form and function, that complicated distinction, in the shape of a vessel's wall.

In some similar time frame, in the midst of the Bush administration's curious fear rhetorics, I became fascinated with the question of risk assessment, with the strategies individuals brought to the negotiation of the nation-state's administration's framings. 

The Bush years also brought to light an extensive set of memories from childhood, growing up in South Africa in the midst of the apartheid regime.  As a result, I became more curious about surveillance studies, global rhetorics of security, and have, in the past year, been working on two manuscripts--one about the childhood framings in South Africa, nation-state identity constructions, ceramics (land/framings), and aging, the other about surveillance studies as they intersect with literacy studies in new media. 

For the second of these two projects, I currently play with data base driven social networking sites, and our strategies for approaching them in the midst of our histories and memories of surveillance within multiple regime frameworks.  I'm interested in the degree to which we shape and train docile bodies, accepting of surveillance, the degree to which  resistance happens, reflecting/refracting various framings.

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