Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies

The onslaught of the digital age has rapidly redefined the parameters of virtually every aspect of daily life, and the world of academic scholarship is no exception. In English departments across American institutions of higher education, faculty members face an uphill battle in the struggle for professional recognition of their digital works. In Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work, author Catherine C. Braun calls for a shift in thinking about the professional methods and digital goals of the English studies discipline and its central texts.

Braun’s in-depth study documents English professors and the challenges they face in both career and classroom as they attempt to gain appropriate value for digital teaching and creation within their field, departments, and institutions. Braun proposes that to move English studies into the future, three main questions must be addressed. First, what counts as a text? How should we approach the reading of texts? Finally, how should we approach the production of texts? In addition to reconsidering the nature of texts in English studies, she calls for crucial changes in higher-education institutional procedures themselves, including new methods of evaluating digital scholarship on an even playing field with other forms of work during the processes for promotion and tenure.

With insightful expertise, Braun analyzes how the new age of digital scholarship not only complements the traditional values of the English studies discipline but also offers constructive challenges to old ideas about texts, methods, and knowledge production. Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work is the first volume to offer specific examination of the digital shift’s impact on English studies and provides the scaffold upon which productive conversations about the future of the field and digital pedagogy can be built.