Dear Colleagues and English Majors and Minors,

Just a reminder that Cynthia Selfe (Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, OSU) will be speaking on Thursday, September 27 from 5:00-6:30pm in McGuffey 322. Her talk, "Transnational Literate Lives" draws from extensive interviews with people from around the world and focuses on the cultural, linguistic, and communicative complexities of literacy in a global age.  Her talk is co-sponsored by the English Department, Interactive Media Studies, the Howe Center for Writing Excellence, the Humanities Center, and the School of Education, Health, and Society and is part of the 2012 Digital Expo.

Dr. Selfe's bio and abstract are below and a flyer for the Expo is attached.

Thanks, and apologies for cross-posting,
Heidi McKee

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Abstract
Transnational Literate Lives

It is difficult for many of us at this time in history to view, read, or listen to a news report without a deep sense of how rapidly the world is changing and how intimately our lives and the particular parts of the earth we inhabit—Oxford and Columbus and many other cities of the world—are connected to other places and other people around the globe. Given these understandings some scholars in literacy studies (e.g., Horner and Trimbur, 2002; Matsuda, 2006; and Canagarajah, 2002, 2007, among them) have been encouraging what Wendy Hesford (2006) calls the “global turn” (p. 787); to explore—with increased energy, focus, and understanding—the expanded possibilities of an “imagined global geography” (p. 788).  Learning to live gracefully in a global world and to understand its cultural, linguistic, and communicative complexities, however, is not a task to be underestimated, and not one for which those of us in the United States have historically been recognized.

But how do we come to understand the literacy practices of the growing population of individuals who feel at home in more than one culture and whose identifications, as Wan Shun Eva Lam (2004) notes, are “spread over multiple geographic territories” (p. 79)? How do we learn about these individuals, who typically speak multiple languages, often including variations of World Englishes, and maintain rich, active networks of friends, family members, and contacts around the globe?

In this session, using video narratives from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and working from her recent digital book Transnational Literate Lives (co-authored with Patrick Berry and Gail Hawisher), Cynthia Selfe focuses on the personal experiences of transnational students and what they tell us about teaching, learning, and educational efforts.


Bio
Cynthia Selfe is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, and the co-Founder, with Gail Hawisher of Computers and Composition Digital Press. In 1996, Selfe was recognized as an EDUCOM Medal award winner for innovative computer use in higher education—the first woman and the first English teacher ever to receive this award. In 2000, Selfe, with long-time collaborator Hawisher, was presented with the Outstanding Technology Innovator award by the CCCC Committee on Computers.

Selfe has served as the Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication; the Chair of the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English; and, with Hawisher, the co-editor of Computers and Composition: An International Journal.

Selfe has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books on computers in composition studies including Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers (Hampton Press, 2007), Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (with G. Hawisher, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Literacy and Technology in the 21st Century, the Perils of Not Paying Attention (SIU Press, 1999), Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States (with G. Hawisher, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (with A. Wysocki, J. Johnson Eilola, and G. Sirc; Utah State University Press, 2004), Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History (with G. Hawisher, P. LeBlanc, and C. Moran, Ablex, 1996).