Logging On - In This Issue
Michael J. Faris, Editor
Welcome to our Fall 2022 issue. We're excited by the seven webtexts in this issue, which explore a range of topics through a variety of modes and approaches. This issue has two Topoi webtexts. In "Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count," Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland provide a three-part podcast-style miniseries that explores how podcasting lends itself to scholarly knowledge-making and communication. They situate podcasts in terms of other web 2.0 technologies (especially blogging), explore the affordances of podcasts as scholarly publishing, and discuss some of the barriers to podcasting for academics. This webtext is accompanied by an appendix that shares our peer review process for this webtext: Kairos Managing Editor Erin Kathleen Bahl facilitated a synchronous, audio-recorded conversation amongst reviewers. As Erin explains in the webtext's appendix, our goals were to experiment with the modalities and styles of peer review and, by sharing this with readers/listeners, to make the peer review process more transparent. The second Topoi webtext, "Reading for the Weaver: Amplifying Tribal Women's Literacies through Material Rhetoric," by Nancy Small with Riyaz Bhat, shares Small's methodological examination of a Central Asian rug woven about 50 years ago by a woman in the Baloch tribe. Drawing on principles of storytelling, Small explores new possibilities for re-reading and listening across cultures, time, and spaces.
While McGregor and Copeland push for modality and genre shifts in publishing practices, and Small argues for methodological boundary shifting, our Disputatio webtext in this issue challenges generic boundaries as well: In "The Winograd Matrix," Richard Holeton provides a social-satirical interactive fiction about a gaming-industry couple in a near-future, post-pandemic world of BioScanners and roving gangs. Created with Twine, this webtext adapts the choose-your-own-adventure narrative style by offering readers choices that are grammatically-based rather than action-centered (that is, when offered a grammatically ambigous sentence, you get to decide what it means!).
This issue also has two Interviews webtexts. In "Hope Is a Practice: Reflections on Graduate Labor, White Saviorism, and Coping in the Peri-Academy," Anna Zeemont, Jesse Rice-Evans, and Andréa Stella engage in a collaborative self-interview about being white, disabled, femme graduate students. This interview is far-reaching, exploring the inherent ableism and whiteness of higher education. Zeemont, Rice-Evans, and Stella also share many resources related to disability, racism, activism, and higher education. Emma Kostopolus interviews Annika Konrad about her work in disability studies and rhetoric, particularly in response to her concept of access fatigue, which Konrad wrote about in her 2021 College English article. Kostopolus also used Twine to create this webtext, and purposefully designed the navigation in ways to "neuroqueer" the reading experience and the genre of the interview.
We close out the issue with two Reviews webtexts. Khadiedra Billingsley and Kathleen Lewis review Bridging the Multimodal Gap: From Theory to Practice, edited by Santosh Khadka and J. C. Lee; and Shantam Goyal reviews Politics and Pedagogy in the "Post-Truth" Era: Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis, by Derek R. Ford.
