Current book project, which theorizes rhetoric in response to two broad and interrelated global issues—the era of humanity’s near-geological influence on the planet and the rapid circulation and connectivity enabled by networked digital technologies. 

These trends have made it increasingly important to be able to conceive of the planet in its entirety, something that humans can find challenging to do. As a discipline, rhetoric's interest in the connections between materiality and discourse make it uniquely situated to respond to this challenge because the challenge is both material (the scale of the planet itself generates the challenge) and discursive (the language we use to conceptualize the planet is sometimes limited). 

Being able to approach a planetary perspective is not just a conceptual/theoretical task but a practical and political one as well, something that is required to be able to address planetary concerns like global capitalism and climate collapse.

At Georgia Tech I help manage a lab space for members of the Writing and Communication Program to support technology use in their teaching and research.

Related Publications: 

• "Spatial Commitments and the Shifting Exigence of the Technology Lab" (with Andrew Dorkin and Sean DiLeonardi; in progress)

• "Oral Histories of Contingency in a Technology Lab" (with Andrew Nance, Malaka Friedman, and Zita Husing; in progress)

Custom Processing sketch designed to repurpose hand position data gathered with the Kinect into various forms of lines, dots, and other inscriptions.

Github Link: https://github.com/matthalm/kinect-write

Related Publications:

• "Transducing Embodied Inscription Practices with the Kinect" (2020)

• "Experiments in Transductive Writing and Rhetoric with the Kinect" (with Steven Smith; 2019)

Video produced for 2019 regional Carolina Rhetoric Conference, combining interviews with six rhetoric scholars on the topic of "Rhetoric's Keywords" to serve as keynote presentation.

Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/mhalm/crc2019