I co-facilitated a short writing workshop at C&W 2016 on body modification, deep embodiment pedagogy, and collaborative writing.

There wasn’t really a transcript for this talk, but the description in the program is below.

Modding the I: An Approach to Dis/Connected Publics

Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Rochester, NY
May 21, 2016

The individual body is never alone in the navigation of experience, undergoing continual, simultaneous co-composition by its environments, relational subject positions, and partial perspective. We risk losing sight of this in digital spaces, where networked activism—in keeping with the panoptic injunction to affectively maintain disenfranchised populations as less- or not-human—may appear to rhetorically frame marginalized groups as separate or disparate, leading those communities to be viewed from outside and within as exclusive or exclusionary. As a lack of understanding and empathy precludes entry into or productive participation in these communities, I invite the audience to collaboratively, collectively examine the structures of feeling and social distance pertaining to networked activism. This interactive writing workshop will use tattoo transfers, movement, and augmented reality to destabilize assumptions about bodies and trigger affective responses intended to harness rhetorical empathy to move our online affective publics from dis/connection to collaboration and collectivity.