Please contact facilitator Woo Yeom at auden@mail.utexas.edu if you have questions about or are planning to attend this roundtable.


One of the most interesting outcomes of the Internet has been the creation of mediated social networks occupied by individuals of every imaginable race, creed, color, and national origin. The past thirty years have witnessed the evolution of diverse, highly specialized online social networks from simple text-only electronic bulletin boards, listserves and usenets, accelerating in the last few years with the creation of centrally administered, and often commercially driven, virtual neighborhoods, online communities, cyber-salons, cyber-commons, community networks. This diverse ecology of alternative identities and communities continues to be deciphered by those both in the humanities and social sciences in interesting ways. This roundtable hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourse as both researchers and instructors in the CWRL.

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We will first examine the construction of “cyber-nicities” in larger social networking websites like "friendster.com" and "thefacebook.com," as well as websites designed for specific ethnicities such as "arablounge.com," "alllooksame.com," and "irishfriends.com." We will discuss ways in which ethnicities are constructed in these sites, both as exclusive in-groups and as inclusive diasporic multi-ethnic communities. With regard to the politics of identity in cyberspace, many questions come to mind: How are we to understand virtual identities? Does the online world bring something new to the identity formation process? Do online groups and communities shape the identities of their members? What is the link between virtual communities and the wider post-traditional social universe? These questions intrigue us as researchers.

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But what are the pedagogical implications of such inquiries? While these sites provide rich case studies of the formation and socialization of ethnic identities, within larger communities or in apposition to them, the inherent risks to both the students’ privacy and the instructor’s professionalism and authority create serious obstacles to using these sites in the classroom, to say nothing of the essentially voyeuristic activity it entails. We will evaluate the usefulness of such sites to teaching ethnic-American literature, while exploring the possibilities of connecting these sites to the use of technology in the classroom more generally, solutions to the ethical problems of undermining the instructor’s classroom authority, exposing the students’ privacy, and making the private thoughts of strangers the object of discussion.

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We envision this roundtable as a way for instructors to talk about the use of cyber communities in their own research and in the classroom.

This is the second of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.