University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate Student, English
PhD Candidate, Center for Writing Studies
Thesis Title: Life, Learning, and Literacy on the Social Network: Digital Participatory Culture
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Gail Hawisher
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About
My research and teaching interests include digital literacies, new media and identity, and multimodal composition.
My dissertation, “Life, Learning, and Literacy on the Social Network: Digital Participatory Culture,” examines the self-sponsored literacy practices of individuals who use social network sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace) for identity representation. I argue that the literate activity in which individuals engage on social network sites is ubiquitous, purposeful, and plays a prominent role in their daily literacy practices. Centered on qualitative case studies of graduate and undergraduate students, my research uses data from online texts, video screen capture, and in-depth interviews to trace literate activity that moves between different sites and crosses online/offline boundaries. I consider the ways that research participants represent themselves for different communities of practice in online spaces and how these interactions connect to their offline lives. I also trace the ways that these individuals strategically work with and against the structures of the sites themselves to manage their online data, looking at not only privacy settings, but also at how participants use the sites to archive aspects of daily life. Through this project, I argue that the activities that individuals engage in on social network sites represent important literacy practices in the twenty-first century, and a consideration of the role of social network sites in students’ literate lives is crucial for writing researchers and educators.
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