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.

Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.

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 article presents the findings from a small case study to examine how community-engaged research is systemically delegitimized over the course of a scholar’s career. Analyzing a genre system of university professionalization documents prior to tenure and promotion shows how such documents discourage emerging scholars from thinking of their community-engaged work as research, except when it results in traditional forms of scholarship like a publication or conference presentation. A more complicated understanding of this genre system reveals pressure points to leverage for institutional change that might allow community-engaged scholars greater institutional freedom to create and sustain strong community partnership projects.

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.

We advocate for the inclusion of Indigenous studies within first-year writing and academic English courses, particularly those taught to multilingual, international students. We argue that asking international students to learn about local and international Indigenous issues productively intersects with coursework in academic English. Our pedagogical approach emphasizes metalanguage and allows Indigenous studies and explicit language instruction to work in tandem, thereby recognizing the agency of Indigenous scholars and guiding non-Indigenous students in relation to it.

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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.

Drawing from a qualitative study, we share findings that demonstrate how students articulate and express emotion in reflection. As they reflect on their writing identities, processes and products, peer and instructor feedback, and assess their work, the students in our study routinely discuss their emotions. Our essay closes with pedagogical strategies for helping students reflect on their thinking and feeling about writing.

To demonstrate the value of access and attending to audiences’ experiences, this article shares our analysis of our interviews with eleven students who created videos with sound and captions. We build on our analysis to present a modified set of criteria for assessing how video composers demonstrate awareness of their audiences’ needs and preferences when designing access.

This empirical study of a virtual writing marathon (Write Across America) theorizes a dynamic online ecosystem in which the five realms—virtual place, design, writing, sharing, and emotion—interact in the process of writing. The study has implications for students and for the professional development of writing instructors.

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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.

This essay defines “benevolent gaslighting”: a technology of whiteness in which racisms are repurposed as benevolent misunderstandings. In reading disciplinary trends and cultural examples, we show how it (re)centers whiteness and prompts BIPOC to question their histories, memories, and realities by situating racial trauma as “progressive” teaching moments.

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Currently, creative writing and writing studies occupy different disciplinary positions, but this relationship doesn’t need to be adversarial. This study illustrates “line-crossing” pedagogies of two creative writers who teach FYW to further the discussion of creative writing’s place in FYW and to help bridge disciplinary gaps.

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In this article, we call for translingual praxis—an antiracist and decolonial pedagogy that interrogates, with students, language ideologies and their political histories. Amplifying the voices of scholars of color, we provide a rationale for and illustrate four strategies for delinking our language work from the legacies of racism and colonization.

These remarks have been edited lightly for publication here.

This is the print version of the chair’s address delivered at the virtual 2022 CCCC Annual Convention.

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.

Based on a qualitative case study of students’ “theory of writing” essays, this study examines ways that first-year students’ community engagement experiences solidify and disrupt their writing knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Analysis of student writing demonstrates how different community-engaged writing projects inform first-year students’ writing theories and strategies.

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.

Drawing on interviews with ten female-identifying graduate students, this article theorizes a norm of recognition and argues that recognition, conceptualized as a masculine-coded good, circulates away from female graduate students toward faculty and from faculty back to male graduate students. Female graduate students instead experience misogyny, understood as a punishment for straying from patriarchal gender roles in which they are required to be givers.

This essay examines two narratives for US higher education—the tradition of access and the current moment of globalized expansion—to understand how policies about access and language do not inherently uphold practices of equity. I also discuss how writing specialists can intervene in the explicit and implicit practice of these policies.

Situated in disability studies, this article shares the results from a qualitative research project that examined how three community college students who wrote about addiction navigated the process-based activities assigned in their first-year writing courses. These findings illuminate how such exercises evoke a spectrum of emotion that shapes both process and product.

Developed from a collaborative transdisciplinary analysis of transfer scholarship, we redefine transfer as a relational phenomenon to capture the “dynamic, emergent, embodied, messy” elements of writing transfer (Prior and Olinger 137). Relationality also highlights conceptual relationships in transfer research that produce seeming contradictions but are more often complementary than confounding.

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This article argues that our course descriptions may perpetuate White language supremacy (WLS) by regularly using specific terms and policing racialized student populations for written standardness more so than White student populations.

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 multi-institutional study surveyed undergraduate students (n=669) about how and what they learned in hybrid and online first-year composition (FYC) classes, employing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework to analyze their responses. The data illustrated a significant difference in hybrid versus online students’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship.

In this praxis-focused article, I reflect on incorporating what disability justice activists call “collective access” into the composition classroom through a semester-long, class-wide “Accessibility Best Practices” assignment. I show how asking students to recursively address access together helped them approach writing itself as a collaborative and revisionary process.

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.