Lucy Johnson, Ph.D.

Dr. Lucy Johnson joins UWEC as the department digital literacy specialist, focusing on digital literacies from a cultural rhetorics perspective, examining the ways in which the design of communication symbols and structures influences language, users, and subsequent access to and understandings of technology. Teaching in both the Blugold seminar as well as the Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Culture major, in both her research and teaching, Dr. Johnson aims to investigate the following:

1. Who are writing technologies and electronic platforms designed for? How is that user identity constructed?
2. What constitutes digital literacies and who do we think of when we envision the outcomes of such concepts?
3. In what ways does 21st century digital literacy move beyond electronic platforms to invite the body or “digits” as literacy agents?
4. What ideologies and values are communicated through platform, symbol, and interface design?
5. In what ways does digital literacy perpetuate globalized communication practices that infringe on cultural values?
6. What does ethical cross-cultural communication design look like?