Dustin Edwards, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director, SDSU Writing Center
College of Arts and Letters
Rhetoric and Writing Studies
SDSU
Bio
Dustin Edwards is Associate Professor and Director of the SDSU Writing Center. His research and teaching areas include digital and material rhetorics, environmental and land-based rhetorics, rhetorics of science and technology, and technical and professional communication. His work has appeared in journals such as College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, Convergence, enculturation, Rhetoric Review, and Technical Communication Quarterly. He is author of "Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival" (University of Alabama Press, 2025).
Broadly, Dustin’s research investigates the layers of extraction that are etched into current configurations of large-scale data infrastructures—e.g., the labor expended to mine minerals used in data centers, the energy and water expended to train large language models (LLMs), and the oppressive ideologies coded into digital platforms. Yet, crucially, his research is also committed to amplifying rhetorical practices of refusal and invention that insist other versions of the world are possible. His book, Enduring Digital Damage, engages a story-based approach to account for the entangled damages (ecological, climatic, colonial) of large-scale digital infrastructures, insisting that a less extractive world is already being imagined.
Outside of his work, Dustin enjoys hiking San Diego trails, watching questionable TV, drinking too much coffee, and swimming in the Pacific Ocean.
Publications
Hogan, Mel, Dustin Edwards, and Zane Griffin Talley Cooper. “The Making of Critical Data Center Studies.” The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics, and Resistance Online. Eds. Safiya U. Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, Brooklyne Gipson, and Sulafa Zidani. Peter Lang. In press.
Edwards, Dustin. “Critical Infrastructure Literacies and/as Ways of Relating in Big Data Ecologies.” Computers and Composition, vol. 61, 2021
Edwards, Dustin. “Deep Circulation.” Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillance Within and Beyond the Classroom, edited by Estee Beck and Les Hutchinson Campos. U of Colorado P, 2021.
Shivener, Rich, and Dustin Edwards. “The Environmental Unconscious of Digital Composing: Mapping Climate Change Rhetorics in Data Center Ecologies.” enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 32, 2020.
Edwards, Dustin. “Digital Rhetoric on a Damaged Planet: Storying Digital Damage as Inventive Response to the Anthropocene.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2020, 59–72. Honorable Mention for the 2020 Theresa J. Enos Anniversary Award.
Dieterle, Brandy, Dustin Edwards, and Paul Dan Martin. “Confronting Digital Aggression with an Ethics of Circulation.” Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression, Hate Speech, and Harassment, edited by Jessica Reyman and Erika Sparby. Routledge, 2019, pp. 197–213. Collection won the 2020 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award.
Gelms, Bridget, and Dustin Edwards. “A Technofeminist Approach to Platform Rhetorics.” Technofeminism: Computers and Composition Online. March 2019.
Edwards, Dustin. “Circulation Gatekeepers: Unbundling the Platform Politics of YouTube’s Content ID.” Computers and Composition, vol. 47, 2018, pp. 61–74.
Edwards, Dustin, and Heather Lang. “Entanglements that Matter: A New Materialist Trace of #YesAllWomen.” Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke. Utah State UP, 2018, pp. 118–134.