American currents: Anti-textbook update
The anti-textbook I am writing is called American Currents: Re-presencing culture and communication in a postdigital age. A more descriptive outline can be found here. More generally, it covers:
- Theory:
- American cultural studies and why the book extends beyond that field to the postdigital
- philological-cultural approach to the code of language
- language as cultural grid reference
- mapping passages through this projected co-ordinate system
- collaborative ‘re-presencing’ of the traces of passages…
- … to ‘re-presence’ new perspectives vis-a-vis the messes of the present
- Practice:
- topoi, ways, structure (e.g. “progress”, wiki culture, computational thinking)
- resource-ful structures (e.g. decolonizing UX, dialogue)
- examples of student work
- dialogic interviews
- extensive bibliography
Problem the book addresses: postdigital culture where it turns human traits into disabilities.
The book’s response: participatory approaches, which co-individuate the psychic, social, and technical, are both sustainable and generative.
Theory/Approaches (sample): Raymond Williams; Bernard Stiegler; Paul Ricoeur; Hans Georg Gadamer; Clifford Geertz; Gregory Bateson; Joseph Weizenbaum; Alexander North Whitehead; Christopher Alexander; Douglas Engelbart; Ivan Illich; Donna Harraway; Peter Goodyear; Neworked Learning Editorial Collective (NLEC); Kat Holmes.
What the book does: expands the key words approach from American studies to effect practice in individual and collective dialogic interpretation and experience of following the traces of artifacts, including texts, expanding a “patterns that connect” approach to process reality in the cultural work to heal mismatch among networks – such as assemblages of humans and the tools they choose to use – by re-presencing them.
Why the book matters: guides out of entropic passivity to the possibility of becoming through collective individuation.
More on the anti-textbook here. I am interested in publisher recommendations as my faculty publisher is changing copyright policies.
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