Dustin Edwards

I write about rhetoric:

digital, environmental, material

  • I am an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. My research attends to the material, infrastructural, and, increasingly, geological dimensions of rhetoric. Lately, I have been working on finishing a book about the entangled damages of digital infrastructures and a few other projects about rhetoric's relationship to land, mining, and geology. I teach courses in rhetorical theory, professional writing, environmental rhetorics, and digital writing. As of August 2023, I also direct the SDSU Writing Center.

Hi, there.

Publications

(selected)

  • Edwards, Dustin, Bridget Gelms and Rich Shivener. “Infrastructural Storytelling: Narrating Climate (in)Justice in Technical and Professional Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, 2023.
  • 2023
  • Edwards, Dustin. “Critical Infrastructure Literacies and/as Ways of Relating in Big Data Ecologies.” Computers and Composition, vol. 61, 2021.
  • 2021
  • Edwards, Dustin. “Deep Circulation.” Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance Within and Beyond the Classroom, edited by Estee Beck and Les Hutchinson Campos. U of Colorado P. 2021.
  • 2021
  • Shivener, Rich, and Dustin Edwards. “The Environmental Unconscious of Digital Composing: Mapping Climate Change Rhetorics in Data Center Ecologies.” enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 32, 2020. http://enculturation.net/environmental_unconscious.
  • 2020
  • Edwards, Dustin. “Digital Rhetoric on a Damaged Planet: Storying Digital Damage as Inventive Response to the Anthropocene.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2020, 59–72. Honorable Mention for the 2020 Theresa J. Enos Anniversary Award.
  • 2020
  • 2019
  • Dieterle, Brandy, Dustin Edwards, and Paul Dan Martin. “Confronting Digital Aggression with an Ethics of Circulation.” Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression, Hate Speech, and Harassment, edited by Jessica Reyman and Erika Sparby. Routledge, 2019, pp. 197­–213. Collection won the 2020 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award.
  • 2019
  • Edwards, Dustin. “Circulation Gatekeepers: Unbundling the Platform Politics of YouTube’s Content ID.” Computers and Composition, vol. 47, 2018, pp. 61–74.
  • 2018
  • Edwards, Dustin, and Heather Lang. “Entanglements that Matter: A New Materialist Trace of #YesAllWomen.” Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke. Utah State UP, 2018, pp. 118–134.
  • 2018
  • 2017
  • Edwards, Dustin, and Enrique Paz. “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers.” Bad Ideas About Writing. Eds. Drew Loewe and Cheryl Ball. West Virginia University Digital Publishing Institute, 2017, pp. 64–70.
  • 2017

Edwards, Dustin. “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward a Typology of Transformative Work.” Computers and Composition, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, pp. 41–54.



  • 2016
  • 2024

My book articulates and performs a story-based approach that accounts for the entangled damages (ecological, climatic, colonial) of large-scale digital infrastructures. Following digital damage to two places in New Mexico (a Meta data center in Los Lunas and a copper mine in Grant County), the project examines how digital rhetoric is intimately woven to extractive industries. The stories of “the digital” told throughout the book unfold along multiple, often unexpected, threads: water rights, climate patterns, chronic illnesses, forced relocations, species extinctions, conditions of environmental racism, and much more. Yet, by posing the question of what happens after damage, the book also amplifies stories of refusal, resistance, and brilliant invention that insist this world can be otherwise. Forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.

Book

Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival

I am in the early stages of a project investigating the entangled relationship between rhetoric and geology. In this geo-rhetorical entanglement, geology imparts subterranean conditions for rhetorical capacities to surface: extracted minerals organize flows of capital, configure intimate geographies and spatial arrangements, and stake property claims through world ending processes. Accordingly, above the strata, material-discursive arguments (geological surveys and mineral claims) participate in the remaking of the earth in a loop that may seem intractable. Yet, by amplifying the ongoing ancestral work of the Apache Stronghold and their work to stop the decimation of Oak Flat, the project focuses on instances of refusal and resistance that scramble geo-rhetorical relations that once seemed overdetermined.

In-Process Project

Rhetorical Undergrounds: Reading the Earth, Writing the Earth

Examining the extractive frontier of “Lithium Valley” in Imperial Valley, California, the project places the region’s recent push to build lithium mines within a deeper history of promises made along the Salton Sea. From agriculture and tourism, to solar farms and, now, mining, the area surrounding the Salton Sea has oscillated between a colonial wasteland and a settler promise land. In tracking this settler colonial history and the material-discursive constructions of these promises, I argue that notions of justice and repair in digital economies must first attend to the extractive frontiers that make our digital worlds possible.

Extractive Frontiers and Lithium Futures: Tracking Settler Promises to the Salton Sea

In-Process Project

Spring 2023, SDSU, Graduate Course

Modern Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Spring 2022, SDSU

Nonprofit Professional Communication

Spring 2023, SDSU

Rhetoric of Sustainability

Spring 2019, UCF

Visual and Material Rhetorics

Fall 2022, SDSU

Digital Damage

Summer 2020, UCF, Graduate Course

Digital Rhetorics

Recent Teaching

Director, San Diego State University Writing Center

August 2023-present

University Writing Center

Graduate Programs

Administrative Work

Director, Writing & Rhetoric Graduate Programs, University of Central Florida

August 2019-August 2021

Wac/Wid: Business Writing and Communication

Assistant Director, Howe Writing Initiative, Miami University

August 2013-August 2015

Connect with me

Dustin W. Edwards, Ph.D.

San Diego State University 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-8080 dwedwards@sdsu.edu

connect with Me