My Ph.D. dissertation's title is The Feminine Margin: The Re-Imagining of One Professor’s Rhetorical Pedagogy—A Curriculum Project. Here is my Abstract:
Writing pedagogy uses techniques that institutionalize dichotomous thinking rather than work against it. Cartesian duality has helped to create the marginalization of people, environments, and animals inherent in Western thought. Writing pedagogy uses a writing process that reinforces the hierarchical structure of Self/Other, Author/Reader, and Teacher/Student. This structure, in conjunction with capitalism, prioritizes the self and financial gain while diminishing and objectifying the other. The thought process behind the objectification and monetization of the other created the unsustainable business and life practices behind global warming, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. A reframing of pedagogical writing practices can fight dichotomous thinking by re-imagining student writers as counter-capitalism content creators. Changing student perceptions from isolation to a transmodern, humanitarian, and feminist ethics of care model uses a self-reflexive ethnography to form a pedagogy of writing that challenges dichotomous thought—by focusing on transparency in my teaching practice, the utilization of liminality through images, the use of technology to publish student work, and both instructor and student self-reflection as a part of the writing and communication process. This practice has lead me to a theory of resistance and influence that I have titled The Resistance Hurricane, a definition of digital rhetoric that includes humanitarian and feminist objectives that I have titled Electric Rhetoric, and a definition for the digitally mediated product of that rhetoric that I call Electric Blooms or electracy after Gregory Ulmer’s term for digital media.
Writing pedagogy uses techniques that institutionalize dichotomous thinking rather than work against it. Cartesian duality has helped to create the marginalization of people, environments, and animals inherent in Western thought. Writing pedagogy uses a writing process that reinforces the hierarchical structure of Self/Other, Author/Reader, and Teacher/Student. This structure, in conjunction with capitalism, prioritizes the self and financial gain while diminishing and objectifying the other. The thought process behind the objectification and monetization of the other created the unsustainable business and life practices behind global warming, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. A reframing of pedagogical writing practices can fight dichotomous thinking by re-imagining student writers as counter-capitalism content creators. Changing student perceptions from isolation to a transmodern, humanitarian, and feminist ethics of care model uses a self-reflexive ethnography to form a pedagogy of writing that challenges dichotomous thought—by focusing on transparency in my teaching practice, the utilization of liminality through images, the use of technology to publish student work, and both instructor and student self-reflection as a part of the writing and communication process. This practice has lead me to a theory of resistance and influence that I have titled The Resistance Hurricane, a definition of digital rhetoric that includes humanitarian and feminist objectives that I have titled Electric Rhetoric, and a definition for the digitally mediated product of that rhetoric that I call Electric Blooms or electracy after Gregory Ulmer’s term for digital media.
I recently published a chapter in the book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat. It is an essay titled "Creating Cultural Sensitivity in the Writing Classroom with Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously" The book came out in late 2019. The book chapter is based on teaching Edwidge Danticat's work Create Dangerously and incorporating both activist literature and introspective assignments in the classroom.
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Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat focuses on the theme of Artist as Activist.Here is a quote from my book chapter about this book: "Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously can create a dialogue for our students between writing and global citizenship. The artist’s life work is in many ways to bear witness to the world and what humanity is doing with it and to it--to find a truth that public spaces may strive to hide. The question at the heart of Danticat’s writing focuses on what people in power do to marginalized peoples and with marginalized things. What better way to do this than by using writing as a form of witnessing?" (This is from the first page of Chapter 14).
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I have a chapter published in Women of Florida Fiction. It is a reworked version of the How to Leave Hialeah Essay. The chapter is entitled "On Haunted Shores" and is being published in Women of Florida Fiction. The book is coming out towards the end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015.
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I wrote a paper on the novel How to Leave Hialeah. How to Leave Hialeah is a collection of short stories about being Hispanic and female--a hybrid entity living within a dominant American paradigm.
I presented this paper at the 2013 FCEA conference in Ybor City. |
I recently created a LibGuides about Social Presence for UCF @ http://guides.ucf.edu/c.php?g=79391&p=511591
"Social Presence is a term used to describe the feeling of interpersonal connection in online asynchronous environments. This collection of sources introduces the theoretical underpinnings of this theory, discusses the effects of social presence in a variety of learning environments, and suggests practical methods for increasing social presence in online classrooms" (Alvarez).
I recently presented "Social Presence: You Can't Cuddle a Computer" at the Social Media Symposium August of 2014.
"Social Presence is a term used to describe the feeling of interpersonal connection in online asynchronous environments. This collection of sources introduces the theoretical underpinnings of this theory, discusses the effects of social presence in a variety of learning environments, and suggests practical methods for increasing social presence in online classrooms" (Alvarez).
I recently presented "Social Presence: You Can't Cuddle a Computer" at the Social Media Symposium August of 2014.
I have two published book reviews in the Rhizomes online journal.
Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds by Camila Alvarez in Rhizomes: Issue 22 Anna Munster, Materializing New Media by Camila Alvarez in Rhizomes: Issue 20 |
My master's dissertation was a look at Henry Jame's "The Middle Years" a short
story that functions as a discussion of authorial intention and its ephemeral nature. |
I've done several presentations for Education Talent Search about Learning Styles, Writing College Essays, and Writing Scholarship Essays.
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