The video shown above was created as part of my WRA 891- DIY, Craft, and Material Rhetorics course taught by Dr. Hillery Glasby, a class that I’m taking as I write this portfolio. For this particular assignment we were tasked with creating a rhetorical analysis of a maker, making, or set of makings. Other than that, we were given the freedom to present this rhetorical analysis is the way we thought would be best for our development as rhetoricians and students. I chose to create a PowerPoint presentation instead of a traditional paper with the hope that once the pandemic settles down I can present this in a conference.
My main argument in this piece could be summarized as: “Puerto Rican stickers makers and the Puerto Ricans buying and sticking these stickers use these visual objects to resist coloniality and negotiate what Puerto Rican culture is and should become.” I used sources from Puerto Rican studies, visual rhetoric, and cultural rhetoric to make an argument about craft and one role it is currently playing within Puerto Rican culture. There are still things I would like to change in the future. One glaring example of this is the lack of captions for the video, which renders it inaccessible to a lot of people. This oversight was born from the fact that I envisioned this as a presentation and not its current form as a video.
That said, I still love this project. I was able to use it to synthesize knowledge from various different areas to craft my argument while still learning new things about multimodal composition through practice.