Kairos

A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

ISSN 1521-2300

• Disputatio

  • Building Rhetorlist: A Call for Small, Meaningful Projects in Rhetoric & Composition

    Tim Lockridge

    

    This webtext focuses on Lockridge's production of Rhetorlist, an inventory of new books published in Rhetoric and Writing, Composition Studies, Technical Communication, and related disciplines. Tracing the histories and challenges of these disciplines' engagement with digital tools, Lockridge argues for an attention to small, meaningful projects of service to field, and offers strategies for the development of such projects.

  • Screen Reading: A Gallery of (Re)Imagined Interfaces

    Bethany Monea

    

    This webtext is a digital gallery of six (re)imagined interfaces, designed to de-familiarize and call attention to the material and aesthetic components of web design. By (re)imagining six everyday interfaces that commonly mediate online activity, the gallery offers space for viewers to question and explore issues of navigation, orientation, metaphor, language, embodiment, and infrastructure that undergird human-computer interaction.

  • Forgetting as a Function: When the Internet Wants to Remember, How Can We Learn to Forget?

    Sarah Welsh

    

    In this article, I propose a social process for digital forgetting (or promoting forgetfulness of media traces that should be relatively inconsequential) using one successful example from Twitter. One example is of course not exhaustive, but it was chosen as a representative model of the ways users are learning to forget. If our systems are not built to forget, we might consider how we can do so not (only) by combating technological functions, but by working with them.

• Topoi

  • Don’t Read the Comments: Women’s Rhetorical Strategies in the Comments Sections of News Articles

    Bailey Madison Poland

    

    The comments sections below online news articles are popularly regarded as hostile—but many scholars see comments sections as spaces that expand democratic discourse. This webtext complicates the tension between these two interpretations of the comments sections by examining women’s rhetorical strategies in response to gendered hostility that accompany articles covering feminism and women’s issues.

  • Persuasion, Procedure, and Planeswalkers: The Protocological Rhetoric of Magic: The Gathering

    Kevin Brock, Trevor C. Meyer, & Adam S. Lerner

    

    In this webtext, we explore how Magic and other complex analog systems operate rhetorically as activity networks. Our scrutiny of Magic’s protocols leads us to consider and compare the game’s anticipated activities (as described in its game rules and our social expectations, conventions, and norms involved in playing the game) with its realized expressions of those activities (as encountered when actually playing one or more iterations of the game itself).

  • Rhetoric's Outliers in Second Language Writing: A Corpus-Enabled Study

    Jay Jordan

    

    This webtext reports on initial corpus-based analysis of roughly 45 years' worth of scholarship in top-tier journals in the field of second language writing. Findings suggest that while “rhetoric” is variously inflected by specific, historical preoccupations of the field, articles throughout the corpus evince a sustained interest in deploying “rhetoric” as a label that names explicit pedagogical targets for multilingual student writers.

• Inventio

  • Weaving and Yarning Sovereign Relationships

    Aunty Lorraine Tye, Yoko Akama, Linda Elliott, Seth Keen, Faye McMillan, Mark McMillan, & Peter West

    

    This webtext pursues pluralities by exploring how text, video, and images can be braided to evoke sovereign relationships. Indigenous sovereignty is a significant premise of this work, animated through weaving and yarning – both a practice of Indigenous sovereignty and a graceful methodology that invites non-Indigenous and Indigenous sovereignties to strengthen and maintain sovereign relationships.

• Praxis

  • 'Stronger Together': Open Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, and Hillary Clinton's Rhetorical Appeal

    Julia Canzoneri, Brie Cronin, Iris Finkel, Melissa Harden, Wendy Hayden, Alex Kreichman, Dana Krugle, Sarah Parente, Rasha Reda, & Christina Yim

    

    Open Pedagogy relies on tools and collaboration to facilitate public discourse. Student projects are linked throughout the narrative, which were also collaboratively composed. As we will demonstrate, the inclusion of digital tools enabled students to engage with the rhetoric on a level appropriate for the times, creating our own kairotic moment.

  • What Reddit Has to Teach Us About Discourse Communities

    Ryan Shepherd

    

    This webtext provides one way to teach students how to enter a new discourse community; allowing them to then use what they’ve learned to enter new discourse communities after leaving their composition classes. The purpose is not to teach students a specific discourse so much as to teach them how to recognize and enter new discourse communities on their own.

• PraxisWiki

  • Connecting Writing Programs and Faculty with Disability Services

    Jay Dolmage, Melissa Helquist, & Tara Wood

  • A DIY Electronic Survey Device for Studying User Experience

    John T. Sherrill

  • Visualizing Suffering: Undergraduate Big Data and Humanities Research on Affect and Politics

    Astrid Giugni & Jessica Hines

• About Kairos

  Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. The journal reaches a wide audience -- currently 45,000 readers per month, hailing from Ascension Island to Zimbabwe (and from every top-level domain country code in between); our international readership typically runs about 4,000 readers per month. Kairos publishes bi-annually, in August and January, with occasional special issues in May. Our current acceptance rate for published articles is approximately 10%.

  Since its first issue in January of 1996, the mission of Kairos has been to publish scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media. Kairos is one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in English Studies, made so by its dedication to academic quality through the journal’s extensive peer-review and editorial production processes.

  We publish "webtexts," which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. Webtexts are scholarly examinations of topics related to technology in English Studies fields (e.g., rhetoric, composition, technical and professional communication, education, creative writing, language and literature) and related fields such as media studies, informatics, arts technology, and others. Besides scholarly webtexts, Kairos publishes teaching-with-technology narratives, reviews of print and digital media, extended interviews with leading scholars, interactive exchanges, "letters" to the editors, and news and announcements of interest.

  Because questions of copyright, intellectual property, and fair use often arise for scholars who wish to create digital publications, we have developed a statement of copyright that encourages authors to carefully consider their rights and responsibilities while advocating for a strengthening of fair use. Our copyright statement also provides authors with the opportunity to build upon and republish their work because we are committed to the continuing development of intellectual work and believe that authors should retain the rights to scholarly production.

  We invite you to share your views about Kairos, and we hope you'll consider submitting your work for our editorial review.

  
  

   —Douglas Eyman, Kairos Senior Editor/Publisher, kairosrtp@gmail.com. Virginia, USA.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Kairos Staff

  • Senior Editors

    • Douglas Eyman
    • Cheryl Ball

  • Editor

    • Michael J. Faris

  • Managing Editors

    • Christopher Andrews
    • Erin Kathleen Bahl

  • Praxis/Wiki
    & Topoi Editors

    • Tim Amidon
    • Elizabeth Fleitz
    • Kristi McDuffie

  • Disputatio Editors

    • Ashley Beardsley
    • Rick Wysocki

  • Reviews Editors

    • Ashanka Kumari
    • Jonathan Marine

  • Interviews Editors

    • Brandy Dieterle
    • Monica F. Jacobe

  • Communications Editors

    • Cameron Cavaliere
    • Vyshali Manivannan

  • Special Projects Editor

    • Traci Gardner
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