Tuning in to Soundwriting
About the Contributors
Kati Fargo Ahern (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Cortland, where she teaches in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric program. She conducts research in writing theory and sonic rhetoric with a focus on soundscape pedagogy and rhetorical approaches to understanding soundscapes. Her work has appeared in such journals as Composition Studies, the Journal of Basic Writing, and Computers and Composition. When Kati was little, she listened exclusively to 1950s and '60s music on the radio—so much so that she was in high school before she realized the radio had any other stations!
Dev K. Bose (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona, affiliating as assistant director in the Writing Program, faculty in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English program, and faculty fellow for the Disability Cultural Center. He researches rhetorical privilege and access pertaining to technology and invisible disabilities. His work has appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, the Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, enculturation, Technoculture, Currents in Teaching and Learning, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Growing up during the 1990s hardcore metal and punk scene in Los Angeles, Dev recalls taping songs off the radio and filtering them through a cheap four-track to learn bass lines by ear.
Courtney S. Danforth (she/her) will always stop and listen to "My Sharona" when scanning the dial.
Eric Detweiler (he/him) is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches courses on rhetoric, writing, sound, and digital media. His work focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy as well as digital rhetoric and sound studies and has appeared in such journals as Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and enculturation. He also hosts and produces a podcast called Rhetoricity, serves as the editor of enculturation's sonic projects section, and creates other audio oddities. When he was three or four, he was buckled into his car seat in the back of his mom's Chevette when Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" came on the radio. He has a strangely distinct memory of the opening drum and bass parts being the coolest thing he'd ever heard.
Michael J. Faris (he/him) is an associate professor in the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University where, as assistant chair of the English Department, he coadministers the First-Year Writing Program. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Kairos, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Composition Forum. He has fond memories of listening to Paul Harvey, the local Trading Post in southern Iowa, and Iowa State basketball games on the radio as a kid.
Angelia Giannone (she/her) works as a technical writer and scrum master for a software engineering company. Angelia holds an MA in rhetoric and composition from the University of Arizona, where she primarily studied game design and digital media, in addition to a BS in professional and technical writing from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She enjoys dancing to music with her dogs.
Mathew Gomes (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at Santa Clara University. His research has also been published in Assessing Writing, the Journal of Writing Assessment, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity (WAC Clearinghouse, 2018). He recently recovered a Panasonic RQ-V60 from the center console of his Honda Civic and uses it to listen to sports radio while cooking dinner.
Prairie Markussen (she/her) will soon graduate from the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English PhD program at the University of Arizona and is interested in how to reimagine first-year composition with students at the helm of their learning process as cocreators of the curriculum. Her research interests also include translation pedagogy, translingual pedagogy, critical pedagogies, composition theory, and creative writing pedagogy. She is also a poet and has published in places like Atticus Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Weave. Prairie spent a lot of time in junior high recording classic rock songs off the radio and making the best mixtapes.
Kyle D. Stedman (he/him) is an associate professor of English at Rockford University, where he directs the writing center and teaches first-year composition, professional communication, sonic rhetoric, and creative nonfiction. His audio production can be heard in Soundwriting Pedagogies, Composition Forum, Technoculture, Harlot, Memoir Magazine, and Currents in Electronic Literacy. In middle school, he edited the collections Hyper Tape I-IV, which were really just rad songs he taped from the radio.
Jonathan W. Stone (he/him) is an assistant professor of writing & rhetoric studies at the University of Utah. His current project, Listening to the Lomax Archive, investigates the careers of John and Alan Lomax during the Great Depression, with focus on field recordings made for and stored by the Library of Congress's Folklife Archive. The book is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. Generally, Jon is interested in the mythologies and orthodoxies that surround the notion of technological advance, particularly as such narratives reveal the tensions and rhetorics at the intersection of "traditional" and "progressive" ways of thinking and being. He was once a host on a college radio station in Tucson, Arizona. And by once, he means it was literally just the one time: two magic hours in late December 1996.
Heidi Wallace (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Arizona. She earned her MA in literature from SUNY Buffalo State College. Her interests include poetics, film, aesthetics, gender studies, and African American literature. She has coauthored a chapter in the book David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and is a contributor to the Oxford Bibliographies resource on James Merrill. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the poetics of the image in twentieth-century American literature. She fondly remembers dancing to the music of the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls when the school bus driver let her choose the radio station for an afternoon.
Sean Zdenek (he/him) is an associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. His research interests include web accessibility, disability studies, sound studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism. Sean’s book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015), received the 2017 Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Sean's most vivid memories of radio were formed in the 1980s, at the dawn of the music video era, when listening to music as a teenager in southern California was radically transformed by MTV.
Image Credit
HϵαvϵN, KαTrIn0. (2018, July 7). Surviving [Photograph]. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/28Q77xw