"We "live on the border." We are "crossroads beings." . . . I have chosen the concept of ecotone, then, to represent that place of meeting and tension between diverse and sometimes aspects of our lives. Underlying the familiar culture/nature dichotomy is instead a webbing of gender, race, politics, economics, and spirituality that preoccupies wayfaring humans on this planet."(Krall 4-6).
This web site is devoted to the mingled voices of feminist cybertechno-philosophers, composition theorists, writing center inhabitants, and poets. By thinking about and bringing together our technological journeys in the Michigan State University Writing Center and the theories informing, nagging, challenging these experiences, we hope to recreate a sense of the borders (intellectual, physical, linguistic, spiritual) we encountered and continue to encounter in our work with and thinkings about technology.
Writing Centers have often been located on the margins. By bringing technology into the writing center we were forced to re-examine our role and location within the institution and within the theoretical framework we tend to lean on. We wanted, in crafting this site, to bring together our musings, our journeys, our readings about technology and writing. Although we focus, for the most part, on hypertext, many of the ideas expressed in this site can be applied to other forms of technology.
Since we both proclaim ourselves feminists of one sort or another and since the work done by Ann Balsamo, Donna Haraway and Helene Cixous on technolgy, the body, and borders offered us an excellent starting place for thinking about the ways technology affects the culture of writing for us as individuals and for others in our position (student/ teacher/ thinker/ computer-player-with-er) these writings shape our outlooks and theorizings.
We have provided a map/index page for those of you who would like an overview. For your ease of navigation, at the bottom of each page are three icons you can click on to view the map page, view the bibliography, or read our author biographies.
