RIT Faculty and international partners to present research on Engaged Storycraft at the 32nd

The SLSA conference will also feature RIT faculty and international partners from France and Italy on two panels exploring their latest research on Engaged Storycraft.

Engaged Storycraft: On Site (Panel)

This panel will explore emerging, interdisciplinary combinations of story and technical making today, working to evaluate emerging modes of story creation, technical craft, and multi-modal dissemination that engage readers, audiences, researchers, players, and publics in engaging, co-productive, critical ways. It asks after the role of ‘story’ as it is thoughtfully, if intuitively, combined with ‘craft,’ or with both residual and emerging media, techniques, literacies, and vernaculars. To the extent that story now appears to travel across media, disciplines, aesthetic modalities, and geographic and cultural sites with comparative ease, how can we take practice-based literary and creative media practices seriously in their capacity to explore and expand the variability and vernaculars of story ‘on site,’ as it were.

Presenters

A Story by a Native Son: Richard Wright's Contemplation of Blackness in Modern America      
Sharon Morgan Beckford-Foster (Rochester Institute of Technology; smbgsl@rit.edu)

Stories guiding play, Play building stories: Games for Learning and Engaged Storycraft
Owen Gottlieb (Rochester Institute of Technology; oagigm@rit.edu)

Engaged Storycraft: Unthought Technicalities (Panel)

Affordable, portable, networked digital technologies and the development of easy to use, non-specialist apps for collecting, editing, and metadata tagging are catalyzing today's expanding interests in the collection, dissemination, and study of oral , graphic, and digital narratives and mixed-reality story practices of many kinds. Combined with the networking potential of the World Wide Web and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other software tools, we seem to be entering a new phase of creating and thinking about storytelling, one that "pays close attention to the specific contexts and communities – the environments and social and cultural formations that produce and consume them, as well as the cultural uses to which narrative practices may be put” (Page and Thomas). To the extent that "story" indicates this difference, accommodating the multi-media – audio, visual, animated, video, textual, algorithmic, virtual and augmented reality, GPS-based – character of story practices and their modes of circulating today, what is the "unthought" (Farge) of these new tools and techniques of storytelling and the "infrastructural networks" on which they (and we) nonconsciously begin to rely?

Presentations:

Storying the “Micro-physics of Destruction” :  La Biblioteca Roja: Brevísima relacíon de la destrucción de los libros
Laura Shackelford (Rochester Institute of Technology; lxsgla@rit.edu)

Engaged Storycraft and Ethics in the Auto-Graphic Novel
Karen (Ren) VanMeenen (Rochester Institute of Technology; kmxgla@rit.edu)

Creating in the Digital Age: the Unthought of Tools
Odile Farge (University of Paris-8, France; ofarge@gmail.com)