Forthcoming from IOPN: Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers

IOPN is thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers by Kandice Fowlkes. Fowlkes’s work provides writers with guidelines for how to research, break down, and develop cultural literacy for a wide variety of media, allowing them to not just improve their cultural literacy, but develop their ability to engage in rhetorical analysis and critique: what Fowlkes describes as “decoding cultural literacy.”   

“My AFRO-PWW publication, Decoding Cultural Literacy, stemmed from my masters’ thesis about how cultural literacy is indicative of our everyday interactions and discourse for how we navigate and make sense of people and digital media. I hope the tools provided in this handbook help people understand that media is art, art provokes conversation, and this conversation is so important that we participate in a decoding process we sometimes don’t even recognize.”-Kandice Fowlkes, Project Author  

Decoding Cultural Literacy engages with a wide variety of media forms, including hip hop lyrics, tweets, film, and books, to guide writers through the process of decoding a wide variety of everyday media. In doing so, Fowlkes presents rhetorical analysis as a means for improving one’s cultural awareness and participating in discourse as a member of–not an outsider to–a given community of discourse.  

“Anything can be rhetorically analyzed to compose knowledge for your designated audience—writers, students, and professionals alike! I think one of the most fun things about my publication is that I show how to analyze cultural rhetorics such as Hip Hop music lyrics. This handbook demonstrates how to analyze any media—movies, books, paintings—but the decoding involves understanding how culture ties into the media’s message, and I think the Hip Hop examples are a staple in regard to that.”-Kandice Fowlkes 

This work is a digital humanities project that was developed as part of a collaboration with the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars Program, an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, and African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO-PWW 2) at the University of Illinois, funded by the Mellon Foundation. AFRO-PWW 2 collaborates with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black Studies scholars at PWIs, and community-based memory institutions to produce open-source digital publications that document Black lives and experiences. 

“I will forever be grateful to AFRO-PWW for introducing me to digital humanities, and this program that allows scholars to connect from different backgrounds and states to learn tech-ethics. But most of all, for allowing the publication of my work as an open resource for others to learn from and use for their own pedagogical advancements.” -Kandice Fowlkes 

Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers will be published by IOPN under the Publishing Without Walls imprint’s Black Studies series in Spring 2025.