Adam Banks
2:00 pm | Clark Hall Room 206
From texts to techne, from technological artifacts to discourses on science and technology, from participation and innovation to critique and resistance, from FUNK to the sermon and the need for a Black digital hermeneutic, we'll explore how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually constitutive relationships that endure between humans and their technologies.
Why can a rhetorical approach be an interdisciplinary hub for humanistic inquiry into technology and tech issues? Exactly what is a "Black digital rhetoric"? How do Black engagements with digital technologies illuminate—and trouble—tensions between liberatory possibilities and ongoing oppressions?
In his talk, Adam Banks will use these questions, explorations, and provocations to share reflections on scholarship, teaching and pedagogy and his efforts to take intellectual work off campus and into local communities.
Registration requested. Register .
About the Speaker:
A committed teacher, midnight believer, and a slow jam in a Hip Hop world, Dr. Adam Banks is Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Professor of Education and African and African American Studies (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He serves as the Faculty Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and as an affiliate faculty member of the program in Science, Technology and Society. Prior to arriving at Stanford he served on the faculty of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky and the Syracuse University Writing Program. In addition to these academic appointments he served as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas, and jointly with Andrea Lunsford as the Inaugural Rocky Gooch Visiting Professors for the Bread Loaf School of English. He is a former national chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the founder of the Smitherman/Villanueva Scholarly Writing Retreat, designed for emerging scholars of color working on their first book in areas related to rhetoric, composition, language and literacy. He is the author of Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age and Race, Rhetoric and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, which was awarded the Computers and Composition 2007 Best Book Award. His most recent book is a collaborative effort with Keith Gilyard, On African American Rhetoric, and is currently working on his fourth book, under advance contract with Routledge, titled Black Intranets: Dimensions of African American Digital Rhetoric.