Qualifying Exams: Your Brain in 5 Questions
My biggest preoccupation during the first half of this semester has been preparing for my qualifying exams. I take them in the middle of October (the weekend before I go to Meaningful Play), and have been devoted to ironing out the questions I will answer. Coming up with the five questions below has been at times difficult, and other times relatively simple. But, after writing these out, I feel really conident in the next step — my dissertation process. My biggest fear has been getting to this point and not having a clear idea of where I wanted to go as I moved forward. Between my drive, my wife’s encouragement and support, and Liza’s tutelage, I feel far better about this whole process than I could have ever expected coming in.
These questions still have to be approved by Liza and the PhD Advisory Council at ODU. But I think this is a fairly good distillation of the final questions — and a pretty good picture of what my brain looks like now. Liza and the Council will pick three of these for me to answer.
Interaction Design and English Studies
Thanks to the epistemic instabilities traced by postmodern theorists like Derrida and Foucault, English Studies has for decades found itself at the intersection of whether or not there is a way to overcome the semiotic slippages that seem inherent in language, communication, and representation. Explain how this slippage is not an obstacle, but an opportunity in Hart-Davidson’s (2001) argument that the persistence, iterability, and inexhaustible adaptability of language mirrors the work performed by technical communicators as they transition to designing systems rather than documenting them. Connect your discussion to Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s (2005) synthesis of articulation and symbolic analytic work.
Primary Area of Specialization (Technical Communication)
In actor-network theory, Latour (1999) argues that “Action is simply not a property of humans;” instead, action is a property emerging from an assembly of actors within a network (p. 182). Assembling the network imposes an instance of “translation,” which Latour defines as a “displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original [network]” (p. 178). How can this concept from actor-network theory be integrated with Cooper and Reiman’s (2003) distinction between concept, representation, and implementation in the design of an interactive system? Be sure to include a discussion of Norman’s (2004) narrative model used in designing interactions between people and objects.
Secondary Area of Specialization (Game Design and Cultural Studies)
With digital technologies, the lines between authors and readers, between creators and consumers, are blurred because intellectual property is always situated within a “kludge” of information, people, and groups (Jenkins, 2006). In other words, there are no longer clear lines between consumers and producers in information economies. With respect to computer games, this means Cultural Studies scholars often concern themselves with the “precarious labour” (Kuchlich, 2005), or “co-creation” (Banks & Deuze, 2009; Postigo, 2007 & 2008), that occurs as players assume creative roles in the design and development processes of games. What are the ramifications of the “moral economies” (Green & Jenkins, 2009) that arise from co-creative networks, and what are the implications for game design?
Methodology: Networks | Agency | Participation
In Network (2008), Clay Spinuzzi highlights agency as one of the key differences between activity theory (AT) and actor network theory (ANT): “Since actor-networks assume symmetry between humans and nonhumans, they deemphasize human cognition, volition, and ingenuity (Latour, 1996b)… In contrast… Activity theory’s account is asymmetrical. Cables don’t have interests – they are tools meant to mediate human communication or objects to be transformed through sedulous human labor” (p. 44). This points to a question of whether or not agency is a quality imbued in a particular subject, rather than a dynamic process supported by relationships in a network. If we adopt the latter assumption, what implications does this have for finding linkages between AT and ANT methodologies? Discussing the theories of Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) and Latour (1999), explain what the implications might be for researching participatory cultures and the ways agency might be both enabled and constrained.
Contributing to the Field
The creative and symbolic-analytic work that occurs in participatory cultures points to significant overlap among the concerns of technical communicators, interaction and experience designers, and Cultural Studies scholars. In an age of “distributed work” (Spinuzzi, 2007), there’s a need to account for the political economies that develop within, around, and from the collaborative practices that often characterize participatory cultures. How does the study of agency in technical communication link theories of interaction design with the questions concerning “moral economies” (Green & Jenkins, 2009) currently occupying many Cultural Studies scholars?


Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth‘s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.
Smythe was a Canadian-born scholar who worked as an economist in a number of government agencies in the United States in the early 2oth century. He was vocal about his socio-political stances, which often left him at odds with authorities, including difficulties getting published when he turned to teaching at the University of Illinois during the 1950s. See his