RIDE Blog Carnival #2—Call for Entries

Paul Klee-styled carnival scene.

Extending from our October conversations and the prompts drafted in class on Monday, October 30, we have the following prompts to choose from for our RIDE Blog Carnival #2.

  1. Jenny Odell mentions (108) having a bodily response to Ellsworth Kelly’s painting, Blue Green Black Red, and through this experience finding out something new within each of the panels. Her immersive, drawn out attentiveness taught Odell that what she sees depends largely on how long she pays attention to it. With this in mind, what constitutes a bodily experience within Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies? What in your teaching, research, or other aspects of professional everyday life are you paying attention to such that it resonates with you to the point of having a bodily experience? In this context, address what are your “training apparatuses for attention” are, insofar as they are defined well enough to negotiate (and even repeat) with intention?
  2. Explore the concept of context across Han, Odell, and Jackson, and its connection to culture vis-à-vis technological ecologies in the age of hyperculture.
  3. Is it possible for digital spaces to further connect us to our bioregional communities—and be more deeply attentive to them—rather than merely distracting us? If so, how? And what/whose perspectives or frameworks might encourage both a return to material sites and a collaborative reclaiming of our attention? 
  4. With examples from the text illustrating the concept of care and community support, what does Odell mean by “local, flexible, and rhizomatic networks” (133), and how do people make these networks function to address issues in society and institutions? Are these network supports rooted in corporeality? How so? Are such supportive, connective structures comparable to rhetorical ecologies? How so?
  5. Tell the story of the last thing you repaired, drawing on recent readings to contextualize the act of repair (possibly in terms of community, attention, bioregion, deep listening, care, etc.).
  6. Write an entry that introduces dataism and its promises and/or pitfalls for a group of college first-year students. In so-doing, evaluate dataism as an emerging contemporary paradigm with relevance for rhetorics in digital environments, noting what you consider to warrant alarm, refusal, cautious adaptation, or outright enthusiasm (or any other number of possible responses).

An in-progress draft is due in your Google Folder by Monday, November 13; the entry deadline for posting is Friday, November 17. Approximate scope should be 800-1000 words, though this is, of course, negotiable, as some entries may be working with multimodal elements.