About Bump Halbritter

Bump is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University.  He is the author of “Musical Rhetoric in Integrated Media Composition” (Computers and Composition)and the co-director, with Todd Taylor, of the documentary “Remembering Composition” (JAC).  As a member of the plenary panel at the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference, Bump discussed the importance of infrastructure as a determiner of “The New Work of Composing,” a topic informed by his work designing and directing the MSU Documentary Lab.  Bump’s research engages literacy, documentary writing, digital-video production, and aural rhetoric. 

Bump and colleague Julie Lindquist are currently at work on LiteracyCorps Michigan (LCM), a long-term documentary research project investigating the practices of reading, writing, and composing of members of the "digital generation" across Michigan communities. LCM has two primary goals: the first to address emerging questions about literacy, technology, and access to social, educational, and technological infrastructures at the start of the 21st century; the second to develop a robust methodology for conducting new literacy studies. LCM collects narrative data via videotaped interviews with first-year writers at MSU to discover their experiences and practices of mediation and to learn how these practices vary across communities, especially in relation to their access to social and technological infrastructures?  Julie and Bump have spoken about this work at recent national conferences including NCTE, CCCC, Computers and Writing, Watson, and the Writing Research Across Borders conference at UCSB.