Date of Award
Spring 2026
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Kevin Brock
Abstract
This dissertation centers the demonstrations of ethos and expertise by freelance composers operating within destabilized digital environments enabled by the gig economy. As labor, and particularly the labor of writing, increasingly grows more precarious, composers have adopted nonstandard forms of communication that entail financial, socioeconomic, and material precarity and that break from conventions in highly hierarchical and standardized professions. Because freelance composers exhibit an alternative to institutional and hierarchical structures, composition must account for these growing precarious forms and conditions of labor. These composers represent the unstable horizon of composition and the diverse and destabilized practices of knowledge and composing that emerge from such conditions.
This research studies composers within the Ren’Py community as a means of interrogating how freelance composers demonstrate ethos and expertise in digital environments along the unstable horizon of composition. The composers in this community create visual novels with the Ren’Py language and engine within the greater independent gaming sphere. Using discourse analysis, Composition Histories based on literacy narratives and ethnographic interview, and Think-Aloud protocol, this research examines freelance composers’ work to complicate expertise and knowledge within and outside of composition studies. These composers 1) move across modalities that value computational thinking; 2) engage in collaboration; 3) express aptitudes that model generalized literacy practices; and 4) navigate the flux of the gig economy and destabilized digital environments. Composition pedagogy must help students navigate rhetorical situations that entail diverse definitions of what constitutes expertise. In turn, students must learn strategies to establish various forms of ethos and expertise that are flexible and adaptable to the many rhetorical situations they encounter.
Rights
© 2026, Mary Elizabeth A. Smith
Recommended Citation
Smith, M. E.(2026). The Unstable Horizon of Composition: The Demonstrations of Expertise and Ethos by Freelance Composers Within Destabilized and Precarious Digital Environments. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8870