Disciplining identities: Feminism, new media, and 21st century research practices

This dissertation proposes a feminist approach to new media composition and research. The data includes ethnographic case studies of women in the field of computers and composition who study and produce new media. The interviews are videotaped technology life histories, and they serve two interconnected purposes. The first is to correlate the information gathered in the interviews with the women's academic work to explore the factors that contributed to (and sometimes frustrated) their professional work. Their approaches to feminism and new media informed the ethnographic methodology developed for analyzing and presenting the data. The result is a prototype or experimental text which presents the data as an interactive performative digital ethnography (available at: www.carrielamanna.com/digital-ethnography/start.html). The piece enacts the research practice described in chapter two; thus, within this dissertation, it serves as a an example and a site of analysis.;Chapter one grounds the ethnographic methods in feminist theory and claims that the future of feminist work in writing studies must explore new media as a research method. The majority of the chapter examines the connections such work can make with feminist film studies and feminist ethnography, and provides a brief history of feminist work in composition. The chapter then draws on this information to form the project's methodological and theoretical framework. Chapter two details the various methods and methodologies used to analyze the interview data and to compose the digital text, and ends by proposing a feminist new media research practice that allows for a recursive composing and reading practice for researchers, participants, and audiences. The final chapter uses the interview data to draw conclusions about women's current place in the field of computers and composition. The chapter ends with a call for increased emphasis on the feminist ethics that formed the foundation of computers and writing: valuing a multiplicity of voices and points-of-view; non-hierarchical mentoring practices; and, experimentation with new textual forms and research practices.