Doug Eyman

Writer-Machine Hybrids: The Role of AI in EAP Instruction

Across college campuses, teachers have long valued writing as a way to deepen students’ learning as well as to evaluate students’ knowledge. With the advent of readily available generative AI, how should faculty revise their definition of “writing” and their approaches to assigning writing? AI can be an amazingly powerful tool for non-native speakers, but it also requires students to develop significant AI literacies to use it effectively At this keynote, AI and Digital Rhetorics scholar Doug Eyman argues that writing continues to deserve a central place in post-secondary curricula—but that we must be willing to revise some common assumptions about what writing is and does.

Bio

Doug Eyman is Director of Writing and Rhetoric Programs at GMU. He teaches courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, web authoring, new media, and professional writing. His current research interests include the affordances and constraints of composing with AI/LLMs, new media scholarship, teaching in digital environments, and video games as sites of composition. With Dr. Nupoor Ranade, he is currently co-editing both a special issue of Computers and Composition on “Composing with AI” and an edited collection on AI in Writing Studies. 

Prior publications include Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Play/Write: Games, Writing, Digital Rhetoric (co-edited with Andrea Davis), and Games and Play in China and the Sinophone World (co-edited with Li Guo and Hongmei Sun, 2024). His scholarly work has been published in Enculturation, Pedagogy, Computers and Composition, and Technical Communication, as well as chapters in Digital Writing Research (2007), Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (2008), Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities (2015), Global Academic Publishing (2018), Playing with the Rules (2021), Editors in Writing (2022), and TextGenEd (2023), among others.

Eyman is the senior editor and publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an online journal that has been publishing peer-reviewed scholarship on computers and writing since 1996. 

John Ødemark

Epistemicide and Hybridity in Cross-Cultural Knowledge Translation

In recent times, scholars working in translation studies and the sociology of knowledge have introduced the concept of “epistemicide” – a term used to describe the eradication of knowledge that does not conform to the linguistic and epistemic protocols of the dominant knowledge paradigm, often traced back to the scientific revolution (Bennett 2007b; Price 2023: Santos 2016: 92, 152-3). Within this innovative area of study, the global spread of English academic writing has been characterized as a “predatory discourse” (Bennett 2007a). It is argued that translating academic knowledge from other languages into English involves more than a simple translation of meaning; it also entails reshaping knowledge in a specific style of writing and reasoning that contributes to the erasure of the culturally unique way of generating and organizing knowledge in the source language.

The notion of the “scientific revolution” plays a prominent part in this discourse on epistemicide. However, this is puzzling since the idea and its underlying “grand narrative” has long been contested by scholars in cultural history and the history of science who have turned their attention to hybridity and the interconnectedness of science, society, and politics (Daston 2017; Raj 2017; Shapin 1996; Latour 1993). My objective is to explore the relationship between “epistemicide” and “hybridity””. I understand hybridity as a paradigm that centres on the role of intermediaries or “go-betweens” working in hybrid contexts and consider it as a distinct perspective through which to examine situations where epistemicide (can) occur (Bhabha 1994; Schaffer et al 2010, Raj 2008).

My aim is certainly not to deny the occurrence of epistemicide, but to examine how it relates to the concept of hybridity and the implications of these paradigms for understanding interdisciplinarity and cross-cultural knowledge translation in contact zones were power is often asymmetrically distributed. I will do this by (i) relating the literature on “epistemicide” with the turn to translation and hybridity in the cultural history of science, (ii) revisiting a few select colonial contact zones where different notion of writing, textuality and knowledge have struggled for hegemony, and (iii) examining how humanistic and indigenous knowledge were inscribed in a WHO- report  on the cultural contexts of medical knowledge translation (Engebretsen et al 2022).

References

Bennett, K. (2007a) Epistemicide: The Tale of a Predatory Discourse. Translator. 13 (2), 151–169. doi:10.1080/13556509.2007.10799236.

Bennett, K. (2007b) Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalization. Social semiotics. 17 (2), 171–193. doi:10.1080/10350330701311470.

Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The location of culture. London, Routledge.

Daston, L. (2017) The History of Science and the History of Knowledge. Know. 1 (1), 131–154. doi:10.1086/691678.

Engebretsen, Eivind; Umachandran, Priya; Ødemark, John & Greenhalgh, Trish (2022). In what ways do cultural contexts influence the knowledge translation process for health decision-making and what are the implications for policy and practice? World Health Organization. Regional Office for Europe.

Latour, B. (1993) We have never been modern. New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Price, J. (2023) Translation and Epistemicide. Racialization of Languages in the Americas. Tucson, The University of Arizona Press.

Raj, Kapil. (2008) Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

Raj, K. (2017) Thinking Without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge. Journal of early modern history. 21 (5), 445–458. doi:10.1163/15700658-12342572.

Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicide. Boulder, Colo., Routledge.

Schaffer, S. (2009) The Brokered world: go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770-1820. Sagamore Beach, Ma, Science History Publishing, S. (1996) The scientific revolution. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Bio

John Ødemark is Professor of Cultural History with an emphasis on cultural encounters. His background is in Cultural History, Cultural Theory, and the History of Knowledge. His main research themes are epistemic and cultural translation, early modern cultural encounters, medical humanities, and the history of the human sciences. He is PI of the research project Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation funded by the Research Council of Norway. His latest book is the coedited volume The Sociology of Translation and the Politics of Sustainability-Explorations Across Cultures and Natures (Routledge 2024).