Speaker: Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Professor, Associate Chair, Director of Graduate Programs,Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University

When: 11:00AM ~ 11:50AM, April 2, 2018

Where: Morgan Library Event Hall

Contact: Kelly McKenna (kelly.mckenna@colostate.edu)

Abstract:In our personal, public, and professional lives, we are always already implicated in issues of intellectual property. From the copyrights held on the texts we read and teach with, to the digital rights management in place on the digital tools we use, to the institutional practices and policies that live underneath our work, we live and work in a culture of intellectual property.
When we craft teaching materials that include visuals, audio, and video, we implicate ourselves in copyright issues. When we ask students to create any fixed document, we are asking them to produce intellectual property. Multimodal composing is fundamentally tied to the production and use of copyright-protected intellectual property (Herrington, 2010; Rife, 2008; Rife, DeVoss, & Slattery, 2011; Westbrook, 2006, 2009).
To appropriately attend to dynamics of intellectual property, we have attend to legal issues and cases; to statutes, codes, and exemptions; and to official policies and governmental regulations. “Attending to” is deeply contextual; sometimes it means being aware of. Other times, it means engaging with and resisting. Attending to requires our attention to the context of cultural, technological, and historical considerations.

Bio:"Dànielle Nicole DeVoss is a professor of Professional Writing and Director of the Graduate Programs in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. Her research interests include digital-visual rhetorics; social and cultural entrepreneurship; innovation and creativity; and intellectual property issues in digital space. Her work has most recently appeared in College English; Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture; and the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.DeVoss co-edited (with Heidi McKee) Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007, Hampton Press), which won the 2007 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. She also co-edited (with Heidi McKee and Dickie Selfe) Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009), the first title to be published by Computers and Composition Digital Press, the first digital press in the U.S. with a university press imprint. The book is available at: http://ccdigitalpress.org/tes/. Some of her other books include Because Digital Writing Matters (the National Writing Project, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks, 2010); Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation (with Heidi McKee, 2013); Cultures of Copyright (with Martine Courant Rife, 2014); Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms (with C.S. Wyatt, 2017)."