Anne Teresa Demo

Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism

This essay examines the significance of landscape photography in the birth of environmentalism. In particular, this essay considers how Carleton Watkins’ 1860s photographs of Yosemite Valley created both a way of viewing the American landscape and a representational vocabulary for environmentalist claims to public preservation. In understanding these images as rhetorical, this essay offers a sustained exploration of the political and cultural effects of visual rhetoric. This exploration constitutes critical intervention in a number of discourses. Most obviously, this work is contributing to a growing literature in several disciplines that treats images as integral to politics. Additionally, this work is also adopting the cultural studies position of considering politics in its most encompassing sense and accounting for its multiple manifestations. Most importantly, in unearthing an episode in the history of the construction of pristine wilderness as the sublime object of environmentalism, this essay interrupts the mainstream environmental discourse that pays homage to the wilderness icon without paying heed to the political and cultural costs of such devotion.

Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics

Developing literature on late twentieth century U.S. immigration rhetoric has failed to attend adequately to the character of sovereignty claims in contemporary immigration politics. This essay demonstrates the centrality of sovereignty discourse by examining texts created by the state, specifically public affairs videos produced and distributed by a regional Media Services Office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) between 1992 and 2000. The author argues that border imagery featured in INS media functions metonymically as both a symbol and an index of U.S. sovereignty.

Hacking agency: Apps, autism, and neurodiversity

ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex relationship between agency and technology. I compare autism apps developed by Samsung and Toca Boca and show that while app marketing retains a human-centered notion of agency, user–app interactions distribute agency through a constellation of human and nonhuman actors. The divergence between marketing and use, as well as critiques about agency and technology within disability studies, motivates my argument for hacking agency. Whether in computer or knowledge networks, hacking is a critical process that exploits information silos for particular ends. In this essay, I seek to broaden notions of rhetorical capacity and challenge narrow approaches to intentionality so as to facilitate the attribution of agency across the neurological spectrum.