What Monkeys Teach Us about Authorship:
Toward a Distributed Agency
in Digital Composing Practices

Using the monkey selfie issue as a case in point, this webtext seeks to problematize static views of authorship using postmodern and posthuman definitions, and to envision emergent pedagogical possibilities for teaching authorship and copyright. What monkeys teach us is not only a new entry point for furthering composition pedagogies, but also an alternative way of examining our assumptions about rhetoric and writing. Probing new affordances and circumstances in digital ecologies, our colleagues and students can work towards constantly shaping and reshaping the notion of authorship in flux.

Jialei Jiang is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she also teaches First-Year Composition (FYC) and research writing courses. Her research interests include digital rhetoric, new materialist theories, multimodal pedagogy, and comparative studies. Her works have appeared in Composition Studies, Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies, and edited collections. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores the potential of multimodal campaigns for teaching multimodal design and social advocacy in FYC.

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