The medium underlying our research, performance, and scholarship is inseparable from the nature of the research itself. The medium plays a part in determining the thoughts allowable, what is translatable or compressible. These mediums are changing. The changing nature of texts from print, poetic, iconographic, to online, with multimedia or multimedia dominant modes, sparks a change in the nature of humanities research and scholarship. This change ignites concurrent challenges and opportunities across our conference themes. The rapid and broad availability of mobile technologies introduces new issues of heritage and hegemony, and new interactions with indigenous cultures. These interactions and those that surround them raise vital questions of pedagogy and power in the classroom and teaching-learning relationships. We do not hope to answer these questions, but to bring new thoughts and communication to the table as we engage with old and new forms of textuality and media.

To this end, we will host a participatory, curated panel, between Peter Wallis (University of Washington) Nick Sousanis (University of Calgary, formerly Teachers College, Columbia University) and Jenae Cohn, (University of California, Davis). This unique team encompasses expertise from Educational Technologies and Psychologies (Peter Wallis) around how brains read and learn both in digital and embodied ways, particularly around metaphoric writing, research on the rhetoric of "loss“ of text in the shift from print to digital culture and the implications of these lingering "loss" accounts for teachers and scholars interested in 21st century literacies (Jenae Cohn) and the combined research and real experience of Nick Sousanis’s dissertation in comics medium, embodying its argument for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning. These varied perspectives will not speak at a remove from participants, but instead we will ask all participant-attendees to collaboratively engage with online text, group editing Google docs and creating live visuals of their thoughts on the topics presented.