Preliminaries 
Research 
What is the function of composition? What are the functions that make composition happen? What is the role of the human in composition? What are the means and methods by which composition should be taught? On what scales or timelines can/should we best understand the ethical impact of what we do when we compose?
These are some of the questions that guide my research. Accordingly, I seek to examine instances of composing on an empirical level in order to develop theories that address these questions. I study the production of picture postcards and describe the material practices of multimodal design in a pre-digital era. I look at the composing that happens in writing centers and digital studios to better understand the role of those spaces. I ask questions about digital rhetoric in terms of production, scholarship, and pedagogy in order to take stock of how the field sees itself and what it does.
Across all these studies, what emerges is that the role of the nonhuman in the process of composition is so critical that the distinction of human/nonhuman becomes evidently too simple; it breaks down. We need a better vocabulary for describing the activity of composing, a vocabulary that accounts for the disparate, heterogeneous elements that gather and bring about instances of composing.
The human has always been a central figure in the field in large part because teaching has been our central concern: naturally, we see ourselves as teaching humans because it is the human who learns, and we have generally taken it as given that it is the human who composes. We’re thus left with questions about how we disentangle the human both from composing and from teaching.
Work has been done in the field to address these questions. For instance, actor network theory, as developed by Bruno Latour, has been overlaid with composition as a way of thinking about and blurring the binary of the human/nonhuman and of agency as being distributed across that false binary. The recent collection, Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, covers a lot of this ground.
I am more interested, however, in assemblage theory, not least because of the ways in which it allows us to see (1) parts and wholes interacting at scalable frames and (2) texts as both assembled and assembling. My current work is thus in developing a more comprehensive theory about the relationship between assemblage and composing and the methods derived thereof and by which we might better research and teach composing.