Abstract
This chapter describes the main gestures enacted in the study practices of lecturing and academic writing in view of establishing their media configurations. To describe the media configurations, I use the concept of sensorium as an analytic tool and I look at how senses are called for or downplayed in gestures of study. After having described how students use their sight, hearing and touch while taking part in the lecture, I move on to academic writing which gives rise to more abstract gestures of disassembling, assembling and interlacing. This chapter also gives an answer to the media question through the concept of mediatic displacement. Mediatic displacement is a media configuration which manages to cancel the effect of one medium by using another one against it, and, in a series of transcoding movements, to enact an educational suspension of the world.
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Notes
- 1.
It was not a genre of rhetorics, but it was a practice with its own name, delimited from others: ‘Der Name Vorlesung stammt aus dem MA und ist die Ubersetzung von praelectio. Ihre Aufgabe ist die fortlaufende Darstellung und Erklärung des Inhalts eines wissenschaftlichen Stoffes.' Kalivoda et al. (2001, p. 186). The lecture is not legere, not lectio, but praelectio.
- 2.
The kinds of academic writing performed in the hard sciences or mathematics demand different kinds of engagement and will not be tackled here. Tis is not meant to imply that educational experiences are not taking place in the scientific writing, rather that the gestures are somewhat different. To describe the gestures of study in the hard sciences would require a different book altogether.
- 3.
See for example https://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ReverseOutlines.html.
- 4.
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Marin, L. (2021). Mediality and Gestures of Thinking at the University. In: On the Possibility of a Digital University. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65976-9_3
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