Research Collaborations

The Department of Writing Studies partners with a variety of groups and centers to work on collaborative research projects related to the writing studies discipline.

Refusing disposability: Racial and disability justice toward another world

COVID-19 amplifies vulnerabilities that render disabled, Black, Indigenous, and other bodies “disposable” and “sacrificable.” Thinking alongside disability and racial justice activists, this three-year interdisciplinary workshop examines intersectional analyses, public histories, and transformative praxis as a form of counter-knowledge that contends that #NoBodyIsDisposable. This knowledge will be disseminated by creating new University of Minnesota courses and an open-access public-facing curriculum, ultimately aiming to further the interrogation of, and resistance to, the causes and consequences of disposability. Team members: Rachel Presley (Writing Studies; Communication Studies); Jennifer EunJung Row (French & Italian); Angela Carter (Disability Resource Center); Jigna Desai (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; Program in Asian American Studies); Erin Durban (Anthropology); Nathan Stenberg (Theatre Arts & Dance); Jessica Horvath Williams (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)

Addressing Collaborative Writing: Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) Grant on Collaborative Writing 

Joe Moses, Senior Lecturer in Writing Studies, received an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop grant from College of Liberal Arts to explore the topic of Collaborative Writing. Members of the team include Cristina Lopez, Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services (LATIS); Daniel Emery, Writing Across the Curriculum; Eduardo Nevarez, Writing Studies; Matthew Luskey, Writing Across the Curriculum. This grant has allowed the team to explore broad considerations of collaborative writing including how to address power differences, equity and diversity, and uses of technology. The team offered workshops to address collaborative writing design, collaborative writing instruction, and review and reflection on collaborative writing. 

Participating in Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Partnerships

Writing Studies scholars continue to investigate the pedagogical development of cross-cultural competency as part of global virtual collaboration in conjunction with the international Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Partnership project. Undergraduates in WRIT 3562 sections taught by graduate instructors Brandi Fuglsby and Chakrika Veeramoothoo have the opportunity to collaborate with peers in Italy and Spain as part of their instructions and usability test components of the course. Graduate and undergraduate students in WRIT 4562: International Professional Communication manage global virtual teams of University of Trieste (Italy) students throughout a five-week translation assignment.

Emerging Technologies Research Collaboratory

The Emerging Technologies Research Collaboratory (ETRC) is an open collaboration and research space for emerging technology-related initiatives, projects, and ideas stemming from the burgeoning interest in wearables and other mobile digital devices and their impact on users and their work. The ETRC represents an incubator for bold ideas, an environment where participants explore emerging technologies and share empirical direction for investigating the challenges and opportunities these technologies represent. Formerly called the Wearables Research Collaboratory (WRC), they updated their name in fall 2018 to reflect the evolving focus of the group and the changing landscape of wearable and mobile digital technologies.

Virtual Reality & Oratorical Performance

Reconstructing Sites of Ancient Greek Oratorical Performance in Virtual Reality is part of a long-term study to catalog and classify structures from the late Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods (ca. 500-100 BCE) that staged performances of political and legal oratory. Richard Graff, a writing studies professor, is working with the University of Minnesota's Interactive Visualization Lab (IV/LAB) and collaborators at Pennsylvania State University to visualize ancient rhetoric. Specifically, this project uses virtual reality to visualize ancient rhetoric as situated verbal performances in the hopes of better understanding how the physical settings of these performances structured and constrained the interactions that took place in them.

In the early stages of the project, visualizing 3D models of Greek-speaking sites life-size in virtual reality using a large, head-tracked stereoscopic display has already proven to be useful in evaluating the accuracy of site reconstructions. Current work includes animated real-time simulation of oral performance, acoustical simulation, and more. More information about the project can be found on the IV/LAB website.

Hennepin County Library Usability Testing

Professor Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch's class, Usability and Human Factors in Technical Communication (WRIT 4501), has an ongoing collaboration with the Hennepin County Library to user test the library’s website. "It's been eye-opening for us," said Hennepin County senior librarian Amy Luedtke, "and exciting to watch the user tests and listen to the test subjects think out loud." WRIT 4501 students also benefit from the experience of working with the needs and situation of a real-world client.

OpenNotes Research Project

During the fall 2014 semester, Dr. Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and a team of Writing Studies students collaborated with Dr. Craig Weinert, MD, to conduct interviews with hospitalized patients regarding the sharing of doctors' progress notes (OpenNotes) at the University of Minnesota Medical Center (UMMC). Students interviewed patients about what they understood about their condition from the notes, what they liked or disliked about the notes, and how they felt reading about themselves as patients. Preliminary results indicated that patients strongly favored receiving the notes, citing reasons such as having a reference of the hospital stay, feeling more assured of the care they were receiving, and feeling more involved in their care. Read more about the project.

'WRIT VID' Project

In 2012, a team of graduate students, instructors and staff, led by Professor Lee-Ann Kastman Bruech received a grant from the College of Liberal Arts to develop instructional video modules to enhance our undergraduate course, Technical and Professional Writing (WRIT 3562W). The goals of the project were to determine how to help students better understand how to use and critically evaluate writing technologies, and how we can better reach and engage online students in the class. In collaboration with CLA’s Office of Information Technology, the team created multiple instructional videos on topics such as plagiarism, peer review, and Gantt charts. Watch the videos on YouTube or read more about "'WRIT-VID' Project: Incorporating Multimodal Components into Text-Only Online Writing Instruction."