Book Review: Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication by Stuart A. Selber

Abstract

Stuart A. Selber’s new book, Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication, published in the midst of the global pandemic’s great shift to remote learning, explores the neglected topic of academic information and technology (IT). Selber defines academic IT as “centralized campus units responsible for planning, implementing, managing, and evaluating information technologies for institutional purposes” (p. xi). If academic IT units were a powerful force shaping local teaching and learning practices prior to 2020, they are even more so now. Our universities would simply not function at this historical moment without the technologies, policies, and people of academic IT. In arguing that writing and communication teachers should strategically engage with academic IT, Selber has done the field an important service, providing both grounds and methods for future pedagogical, administrative, and research projects that engage these powerful institutional entities. Overall, Selber approaches academic IT from a rhetorical and institutional perspective, arguing that teachers must understand academic IT units as particular local formations. The book both reflects and leverages Selber’s many years of engagement with academic IT at his home institution, Penn State University. Its central contribution is a three-part heuristic to guide teachers of writing and communication as they historicize, spatialize, and textualize academic IT units on their campus. The heuristic, Selber says, will help teachers to “order their thinking about what academic IT units Book Review