Video composition: Tracing multimodal assemblages

Video Composition: Tracing Multimodal Assemblages questions and complicates current approaches to integrating digital videography, and new media at large, within academic environments. Given the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies’ persistent desire, if not struggle, to take on alternative modes of composing, the project provides an exploration of the distinct affordances, composing practices and rhetorical principles of digital videography. In particular, the dissertation traces how videographic composing processes are taught, taken up, and even paved over within two distinct first year-writing classrooms.

In conducting grounded case studies of multimodal classrooms, the dissertation draws disciplinary and pedagogical commonplaces into conversation with actual sites of production to create productive questions, insights, and provocations. One such commonplace that the project challenges is the argument that “theories of rhetoric and process can travel across modalities” (Palmeri 153), whereby teaching alternative modes of writing does not necessarily “require new pedagogical approaches” (Shipka, Toward 107). Contrary to this commonplace, the empirical work of the dissertation shows that teaching generalizable rhetorical theories can often pave over the particulars of performing with new modes of composing—limiting student contact with different modes of composition. Recognizing this limitation, the project works to reveal the more distinctive processes, principles and practices of videographic composing, such as non-linear editing, that do not readily fall within larger rhetorical principles. Based upon the empirical work of the dissertation, the project argues that scholars, pedagogues and students can take on more persuasive relationships with composing technologies by acknowledging constitutive technological influences and shifting to accommodate the particularized processes and principles of disparate media.