| Not So Fast: Curricular Identity
in Post-Disciplinary Media
Craig Stroupe
Abstract
While post-disciplinary “knowledge work” is widely
understood as transcending traditional categories of professional
and academic practice, this presentation considers the persistence—and,
indeed, the inevitability—of curricular identities in university-based
teaching and learning of New Media. Examining assignments
and completed student work from the University of Minnesota Duluth’s
Information Design program—including courses in “New
Media Writing,” “Web Design and Digital Culture,” and “Visual
Rhetoric and Culture”—I look specifically at the work
of graduate students in UMD’s English Studies program,
and how their emerging professional identities structure their
experience of the New Media, its tools, and the dominant ideology
of usability Web design.
While students from any major or program bring their own paradigmatic
contexts to the learning and teaching of New Media, English-studies
students tend to view the non-traditional procedures and effects
of New Media not simply as instrumental innovations, but as cultural
and historical challenges to the identities they have chosen to
mediate their future relations to economic and cultural capital. The
work of these students thus dramatizes the “vital task” that
Alan Liu, in his book The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and
the Culture of Information,” presents to the increasingly
marginalized profession of English Studies: “to inquire into
the aesthetic value—let us simply call it the literary—once
managed by ‘creative’ literature but now busily seeking
new management amid the ceaseless creation and re-creation of the
forms, styles, media, and institutions of postindustrial knowledge
work”.
Indeed, this presentation will consider these New Media projects
not simply as examples of student work, but as expressions of the
work of faculty in inter- or post-disciplinary fields like New
Media and Information Design, and as negotiations of the university’s
ongoing role in the larger social processes of producing and organizing
what is historically recognized as knowledge.
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