US higher education faces mounting political pressure and censorship, resulting in threats to our institutional missions and challenges to academic freedom. In this article, we trace two moments in disciplinary history that examine (mis)understandings of how censorship functions: efforts to roll back the Guidelines for Nonsexist Use of Language in NCTE Publications (now Statement on Gender and Language ) and Students’ Right to Their Own Language , both approved by NCTE in the mid-1970s. We draw from the feminist theories of Kate Manne and bell hooks to analyze materials from the NCTE and CCCC archives, documenting the rhetorical and logistical moves employed in these rollback efforts. In doing so, we identify how the exploitation of organizational apparatuses contributed to the subversion of a larger and necessary priority: establishing credible disciplinary boundaries to serve as a bulwark against political encroachment into literacy education. In sorting through these case studies, we offer examination of how misguided censorship accusations can threaten our discipline when actual censorship efforts are enacted by governmental entities.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into academic writing has raised questions about the syntactic complexity of AI-generated texts compared to human-authored essays. While studies have explored syntactic complexity in human writing, limited research has compared AI-generated argumentative and narrative texts, particularly in isolating cognitive overload and proficiency factors. This study addressed this gap by examining genre-specific syntactic patterns in AI-generated essays. Using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, the study analyzed four hundred AI-generated essays (two hundred argumentative and two hundred narrative) and employed paired T-tests and Pearson correlation coefficients to identify differences and relationships among syntactic measures. Results showed that argumentative essays demonstrated higher syntactic complexity than narrative essays, especially in production unit length, coordination, and phrasal sophistication, while subordination measures remained similar. Correlation analysis revealed that argumentative essays compartmentalized ideas through coordinated and nominally complex structures, while narrative essays integrated descriptive richness through longer sentences and embedded clauses. The findings suggest that genre-specific rhetorical demands shape syntactic complexity in AI-generated writing. Implications for teaching and learning writing and future studies are discussed.

In a relatively short time, market and political forces have intensified the reach of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become, in a word, climatic—not only a discrete technological system but also a creeping assemblage of ideological, material, and political forces. This article tracks these forces by developing rhetorical climates of AI as a conceptual framework. In doing so, I aim to (1) link the harms of climate change with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure and (2) shift the frame of the conversation by emphasizing the extractive, exploitative, enclosed, and knotted supremacist conditions that have been prerequisites for building AI systems at scale. While these pervading rhetorical climates may seem unchangeable, I track how microclimates of resistance have developed, in the past and in the present. In particular, I emphasize the importance of bodily intelligence in navigating asymmetrical conditions of power felt in the AI industry. The article concludes by discussing how rhetoric and writing studies can weather the unfolding rhetorical climates of AI by diagnosing conditions, seizing moments, and plotting futures to imagine a less extractive and less harmful world.

In gaming, cheat codes change how players engage a system by inviting exploration and reducing the fear of failure. Drawing on writing center pedagogy, this article proposes a similar framework for navigating generative AI in writing instruction and positions play as a method for developing critical AI literacy. Writing centers have long served as spaces where students engage collaboratively with new technologies and construct meaning through dialogue. This article extends that tradition by positioning writing center pedagogy as a framework for helping students examine AI’s ethical implications through treating it as a rhetorical situation to be unpacked, which demands principled, human-centered engagement rooted in values such as collaborative exploration. By weaving together writing center praxis and game-informed pedagogy, this article contributes to ongoing conversations in writing studies about how to integrate AI in ways that support critical thinking and ethical reflection. It demonstrates how playful, classroom-tested activities can animate discussions of bias and representation while helping students build rhetorical discernment through experience. Ultimately, the article argues that ethical literacy must be practiced through relational, iterative work. As writing classrooms become one of the few remaining spaces where students encounter generative AI with support and critical context, writing instructors have a vital opportunity to help students learn to write with, against, and around powerful technologies.

This Research Brief discusses transformers—the core engine for most artificial intelligence applications. The brief situates transformer technology within the field of rhetoric and composition by surveying recent studies; highlights the innovative aspects of transformers; and, finally, thinks through (Majdik and Graham) the operations of transformers and generative AI through Miller’s theory of topoi, illustrating one way in which rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers can critically engage with generative AI in instruction and research.

What are we in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies currently practicing? What practices do harm and, in contrast, which counter harm? How do we disrupt everyday, cumulative, and structural injustices and instead invest in accountability? In addition to asking these and other questions, this article engages four accountability practices that are necessary for countering the ongoing violence of the mythical norm (Lorde), of domination, and of harm within higher education: (1) resisting denial of ongoing harms; (2) recognizing normalized violence; (3) divesting from whiteness; and (4) investing in a consistent, relational approach to seeking justice. These practices help us tap into and amplify the work of BIPOC feminist and womanist educators-scholars-activists (including Ahmed, Gumbs, hooks, Mingus, and Royster) who have been countering epistemic injustice by building linguistic resources and expanding what we can name. These practices are part of a whole in which taking a piecemeal approach entrenches the current state of affairs: white supremacy status quo and normalized violence. Together, these add up to a call for striving toward justice in a sustained, momentum-gathering way.

This Research Brief provides an overview of the current scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR), drawing from interdisciplinary traditions. TFR inquiries should always begin with “a cogent analysis of power” (Dingo et al.), attending to how transnational power dynamics act on gendered bodies and how those bodies engage with and speak back to intersectional geopolitical forces. They rely primarily on the analysis of textual and visual artifacts in historical and contemporary contexts and use a variety of concepts and theories from rhetoric and elsewhere, grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The Research Brief ends with a discussion of future directions for this field, calling for more interdisciplinary inquiries, continued critical intersectional engagement with diverse transnational communities and subjectivities, reflexive and ethical research practices, and pedagogical applications.

Critiques of neoliberal capitalism have offered a rich vocabulary for the analysis of the political economy of literacy across professional, public, and classroom contexts. Since the Great Recession, commonplaces about work-readiness have been conditioned by economic precarity and changes to the social contract of work that blur the lines between professionalization and exploitation. Looking beyond the confines of the neoliberal present, the uncertain future of work for our undergraduate students will be shaped by what the World Economic Forum describes as the “double-disruption” of the pandemic and the rise of automation. Whereas neoliberal critique offers a vocabulary for describing many job seekers’ experience of the present, this article seeks to recover an element of “literacy hope” (Wan) by looking to speculative and utopian postcapitalist theory to inform and challenge career guidance conversations with students in writing studies. By framing the future as a resource in the rhetorical constitution of present-day workers, this article advances an inquiry-focused career-guidance pedagogy that asks: How do our assumptions about the future of work inform our relationships with employers and each other in the present?

This article shares three focal participant profiles from a national study on graduate student writing pedagogy in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Working toward a more linguistically just discipline, this research explores how we might teach graduate students disciplinary genre expectations while centering their embodied ways of composing.

Avowing settler status positions settler scholars to join in storying less harmful futures for the discipline. The author’s journey toward avowing settler status through the Northern Shoshoni word daiboo’ helps clear a path for this world-making.

I aim to inspire people to suppress language and practices that oppress people. I engage with scholarship to advocate for learning from suppressed communities. I call for rhetoric and composition scholars to recognize how the existence and progress of oppressed communities require suppressing language and practices that oppress those communities.

Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

This article uses the results of a five-year study of job seekers to argue for improving job search preparation. Graduate students entering the job market want advice that is knowledgeable, realistic, and honest and that goes beyond emphasizing tenure-track research jobs to include a consideration of their needs and interests.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

Archived tobacco industry documents reveal a relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between the author of a first-year writing textbook and the Tobacco Institute, a tobacco industry trade group. I present details of this relationship to argue for an expanded account of institutional influence on rhetoric and writing studies.

We take up disruption in this article to consider what sustained attention to disruption and its relationship to agency can bring to scholars and educators. We do so by revealing the ideological commitments, relationships, and labor that make disruption possible and valuable. We also look to Indigenous studies and new materialism to explore matter and ethical responsibilities at the interstices of rhetorical practice and work. From this, we propose a theory of disruptive agency that seeks to understand how disruptions emerge and how they can be rhetorically engaged for progressive change.

Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research, this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing, pedagogy, professional interaction, and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates, inclusion is not inherently equitable, nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately, I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.

Drawing on disability studies analysis of institutional narratives of disability by composition and rhetoric scholars, this article theorizes “favor access.” Favor access gestures toward inclusion, but is steeped in the capitalist, colonialist logic of academic institutions in service of ultimately extractive, dehumanizing agendas. Instead of favor access, the article points to collective access as articulated by disability justice activists. As opposed to favor access, collective access rejects institutional logics and values community and collaboration rather than academia’s emphasis on individualism and competition. This article considers sites where collective access is happening in composition classrooms and in the field of composition and rhetoric.

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide. In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

In this article, we share and reflect on our experience working together (as a Native youth and settler scholar) to develop a cultural camp for tribal youth. Through reflection and storytelling, we came to realize the complexities of attempting to support what Scott Lyons terms “rhetorical sovereignty” (particularly of youth) in real institutional contexts, of appealing to different audiences without compromising our vision, and of determining where the line really is between “I” and “we” in our writing and our visions for this work. In short, we have come to realize how complicated justice-driven work really is and how the process has actually changed us both along the way. We use our own stories of collaboration and the program we designed to explore both the possibilities and complexities of allyship and collaboration across difference in our cultural rhetorics practice.

Expanding conceptions of material cultural rhetorics in activism, I explore how amplifying autogestión by artist-activist collectives allows for an approach to allyship that contributes to changing material realities for those involved. Writing about artistic collectives that engage in autogestión amplifies projects calling out corrupt governing practices rooted in systems of oppression, while emphasizing and exercising the power of relying on each other. In this article, I reflect on how amplifying autogestión as cultural rhetoric in venues outside of the field expands the reach of cultural rhetorics and how bringing that work back to the writing classroom encourages interdisciplinary perspectives where students learn about their relationality and responsibility to Puerto Ricans and other colonized peoples within the United States.

This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.

This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading, writing, and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric, at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.

This dialogue between a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and administrator proposes listening-oriented curricula to cultivate actionable empathy in FYC: an attempt at understanding and acceptance when engaging across difference that results in naming how power shapes engagement. Actionable empathy can help students become introspective, flexible communicators and help instructors develop pedagogical agency.

In this article, I will attempt an unbuilding of a history of composition—a history of policy in/as language—to see how claims of policy (pedagogical, historiographical, conceptual) influence, complicate, or even reverse the direction of certain theoretical projects in rhetoric and composition

This article examines the role that syllabi play in the current system of disability accommodations, and how disabled students use syllabi as a rhetorical tool in their approach to disability disclosure. I offer strategies for teachers to gauge how their syllabi encourage or discourage agentive disclosure of disability accommodations.

Podcasting has been used by many scholars to teach ancient and contemporary rhetorical principles. We extend this conversation by examining narrative nonfiction podcasting and its potential to work toward social change. We suggest pedagogical principles that amplify the affordances of the genre and acknowledge its constraints for achieving social change.

So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which scholarly ethos and praxis are being proposed. The goal of this essay is to call for and work towards establishing a foundation to explore such questions vis-à-visdeep rhetoricity.Deep rhetoricityinvites and demands of us all returns, careful reckonings, and enduring tasks. We illustrate possibilities ofdeep rhetoricityacross these three epistemic principles. Ultimately, we argue fordeep rhetoricityboth as an intervention into rhetorical practices and as a praxis of invention.

Bilateral mentorships in rhetoric and composition can persist beyond formalized, institutional arrangements in ways that continue to (re)shape lives in the profession. Mediated discourse theory provides a lens through which to describe practices of enduring mentorships in terms of ways they might advance cross-gender and cross-generational understanding.

This article argues that conceptions of public memory, as constructed, produced, and enacted in spaces such as a university campus, can be strategically reconceived for social justice ends by mapping student-created rhetorical audio tour compositions to physical locations around that place.

As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

This article shows how high-achieving Appalachian college students engage in rhetorical (in)visibility to conceal their Appalachian identity and strategically deploy markers of difference in their writing. The article challenges the assumption that Appalachian students are empowered through visibility and offers an alternative framework for understanding how students negotiate stigmatized cultural identities.

This essay examines the discourse around the trigger warning through the analytic paradigm of racial literacy and the rhetorical frames of colorblind racism to illuminate how the trigger warning as currently conceptualized, even when framed as a means of equitable engagement, is mediated by and upholds the racial status quo.

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To equip students to analyze and create infographics with a rich understanding of rhetorical dynamics and sensitivity to how difference and equity issues are communicated, I propose a pedagogical approach to infographics drawn from Karen Barad’s concept of performative enactment and describe its implementation in a required writing classroom.

Drawing on Kenyan hip-hop, this article: (1) illustrates the decolonial possibilities of translingualism, including paths to linguistic decolonization; (2) showcases how translingualism can facilitate the recovery of Indigenous hybrid languaging practices; (3) highlights how global Western capitalism threatens translingualism’s decolonial potential; and (4) offers further implications for rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers.

“Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans.” –(1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language position statement; emphasis added)

When first admitted to Oberlin College, women were expected to attend their rhetoric courses in silence. Not content with an education that did not prepare them for public speaking, some women students collaborated to educate themselves. Their history uncovers feminist and antiracist disruptions to composition and rhetoric that have much to teach present-day educators.

This essay argues for a redefinition of disciplinary activity and examines disciplinary identity development beyond traditional academic/nonacademic binaries. Through analysis of interviews with twenty-seven retired members of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, this essay provides a closer look at retirement as an active but overlooked phase of the disciplinary lifecycle.

If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by “improvement imperatives” that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a strategy for queer rhetorical listening that maintains our commitments to peer review without the limitations created through the improvement imperative.

The Queer Caucus created the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award to honor Anzaldúa’s impact on “studies of both rhetoric and queer theory” through forging “connections across difference and oppression in order to dismantle systems of privilege, whether that be heterosexism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism or ableism (as a non-exhaustive list).” However, the text of the Award, along with its impetus, belies these intentions. The Award erases Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad from her work and her person through the emphasis on culture-less sexual and gender minority experiences, the redefinition of Anzaldúa’s work as focused on generalized difference and oppression, and the omission of any substantive acknowledgment of her Chicanidad. This essay examines the erasure of Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad and the appropriation of Anzaldúa as a race-less and culture-less liberatory figure through the operation of homonormativity and whiteness. I analyze the text and impetus of the Award through an analytical framework rooted in the rhetorical concepts of Kenneth Burke and Gloria Anzaldúa’s own concerns about erasure and appropriation through homonormativity and whiteness. I argue that the meaningful change to the text and its authorship, as well as to meaningful inclusion of queers of color, is necessary for the Award to continue.

Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creatingco-composedknowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztectlacuilolitztlipractice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

Women continue to be underrepresented at the highest academic rank of full professor. Studies show that once women earn tenure, they are inundated with teaching, service, and administrative responsibilities, which take time away from research and publication—the primary criteria for promotion. We believe that rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) faculty are uniquely situated to confront this challenge because of our disciplinary expertise, our experience administering writing programs, and our interest in equity. With the goal to increase the number of women full professors at our university, we created a year-long writing program for women associate professors. Based on results from this pilot study, we argue that RWS faculty can use their expertise to decrease the disparity at the highest academic rank and make the university more diverse and equitable. Moreover, we believe that RWS scholars can use their disciplinary expertise to address a range of other institutional and systemic challenges.

We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.

I weave stories on my relationships with the land, ancestral knowledge, and my experiences in doing research to theorize a relational scholarly practice. I invite readers to contemplate and grapple with me on what land-based knowledges, Indigenous intellect, and relationality can offer rhetoric and composition studies.

This article uses storytelling, rhetorical analysis, and critical historicization to critique the color-blindness of the writing studies movement’s two key texts, Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Down’sWriting about Writingreader and Linda Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s edited collectionNaming What We Know. Juxtaposing the writing studies movement with contemporary translingual and hip-hop theory as well as the history of the Students’ Right to Their Own language resolution and CUNY’s Open Admissions period, the author argues that the writing studies movement’s pivot toward neoliberalizing higher education excludes multilingual and diverse writers from its pedagogical audience as well as its conception of writing expertise. The author calls for a broader conception of writing studies that can theorize literacy in all its complex global instantiations.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

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