My Concept in 90, “The Trouble with ALS,” threads the boundary between the personal and public. As a genre, it operates somewhere between personal narrative and public service announcement–never quite revealing the whole story, never quite making an argument for anything in particular.
Initially, I planned to extend this work into the Final Project by asking either a pedagogical question (What are the implications of producing work I might not want to encourage in the writing classroom? Are there classroom applications I might exploit) or a multimodal question (What are the affordances and constraints of practicing multimodal composing on the personal/public boundary?).
Now, I think I want to extend this work by trying to answer an ethical question. In the video text I ask, is it wise to value control of ourselves so highly when control of others is so obviously wrong? Recent work on embodied composing suggests that this question is not only about the material body (the person) but the body of material we (re)use in the (re)designing of composing. What kind of control does the composing process encourage or discourage? Are there ethical gains/losses re: the personal that occur in multimodal composing that might be absent or overlooked in alphabetic text?
I’ll follow up on this primarily by taking advantage of my richest resource–other composers. My colleagues who have produced Concepts in 90 that draw on the personal (personal either because their material references a topic or theme that is personally significant to them or draws on a past experience or explicitly reveals something about the author) might be willing participants. Tomorrow I’ll clarify what questions or prompts to use that will help me get started.