Service
Three kinds of work: a journal, a profession, a war.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
I started as an assistant editor at Kairos while I was a graduate student, and worked with Cheryl Ball and Doug Eyman and the editorial staff for thirteen years, moving from assistant to advanced assistant to associate editor and finally to editor of Topoi, the section that publishes the journal’s feature-length work. Kairos publishes webtexts, with arguments made as much in design and code as in prose, and editing a webtext operates as a sustained conversation with an author about what constraints constitute digital argument. I co-edited the journal’s 2010 “dot mil” special issue on rhetoric, technology, and the military with Alexis Hart. Kairos helped teach me much of what I know about scholarly editing and publishing.
Intellectual Property Caucus and Committee, CCCC
The Intellectual Property Caucus is where my field argues about who owns student writing, what open access costs and allows, and what publishers can require of authors. I co-chaired the Caucus from 2011 to 2013 and again from 2024 to 2025, and served on the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee from 2013 until 2016, chairing it in its final months before CCCC’s governance restructure eliminated the committee. I authored several updates for the CCCC-IP Annual on the defeat of the Research Works Act, on Elsevier’s demands that scholars take down their own research, on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s white paper on statutory damages for infringement, and on Elsevier’s search for new revenue as universities walked away from big-deal contracts.
National Military Academy of Afghanistan
In early 2011 I deployed from West Point to Afghanistan as a civilian academic mentor, helping to develop postsecondary writing curricula and mentoring the Afghan instructors who would teach them. General David Petraeus presented me with the Commander’s Award for Excellence that year, and I received the Commander’s Award for Civilian Service at the conclusion of my time in theater; the work itself is documented in a Memorandum for Record. I have written about it since in more scholarly terms in “Digital Literacy Instruction in Afghanistan,” in Digital Rhetoric and Global Literacies (IGI Global, 2014). The deployment’s work negotiated the difficult relations between coercion and persuasion, and those are the relations I take most care in representing.
Memorandum for Record and award citations (PDF) | Read the chapter (PDF)
I’ve also co-chaired the CCCC Task Force on Veterans, served an elected term on the CCCC Nominating Committee, and co-chaired the committee that brought the Computers and Writing Conference to Pullman in 2014.