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.

Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

Extracting a writer’s profile from a broader literacy study aimed at documenting extracurricular literacy practices among the Latinx population in Northwest Arkansas, this article presents a case study of a Peruvian woman’s lifelong use of literacy to enhance her personal agency in the face of personal, social, and civic demands. The article presents the writer’s profile as an indicator of the various literacy demands faced by the Latinx community and suggests that a critical consideration of such demands may lead to improved understanding and theorizing of writing through a lifespan writing research lens. Such a reorientation to writing may have a beneficial impact on first-year college composition courses by cultivating pedagogical practices oriented toward socioculturally diverse student populations and nontraditional students in college-level writing courses.

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.

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.

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students’ myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students’ experiences.

This article argues that a focus on racialized emotional economies is crucial to cultivating antiracist programs and an antiracist field. This study is framed around a racist fuck-up. We provide a framework and recommendations for ways that administrators, scholars, and educators can attend to emotions more directly within academic spaces.

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

Asao Inoue’s work has dominated antiracist scholarship in writing studies, but is flawed when it comes to the performance of Black students. This essay reviews a large, overlooked body of work on antiracist feedback from educational psychology and suggests ways that this work can inform our own research and practice.

Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

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.

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.

In “Our Story Begins Here” (2014) the CR Theory Lab offers key concepts related to cultural rhetorics such as constellating and relationality. Drawing from decolonial theory and practice, these concepts allow cultural rhetoricians to develop a scholarly practice that is reflective of the cultural community they are a part of and write for and to address the long histories and cultural practices of the land they dwell on. Where the CR Theory Lab is committed to a decolonial practice invested in the theories and lived experiences of the tribal nations people of Turtle Island, they also offer that it isn’t the only approach to cultural rhetorics. I argue that both scenarios reflect a larger political and cultural issue regarding how the occupied territories of Turtle Island (also known as the United States) don’t know what to do with tribal nations people, our fight for sovereignty, or our ongoing effort for cultural continuance. In other words, I will make an argument that maps how our discipline’s approach to decolonial theory, cultural rhetorics, and Indigenous rhetorics reflects the ongoing efforts of survivance and resurgence of Indigenous people.

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.

This essay argues for attention in cultural rhetorics scholarship to stories as effective civic pedagogical tools informed by participatory knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a multiyear “mobile cinema democracy project” based on the physical circulation across Africa, Europe, and North America of a successful African democratic story told in the multi-award-winning documentaryAn African Election, I attend to both the documentary and its larger contextual project, “A Political Safari: An African Adventure in Democracy Building.” I demonstrate the ways that the African storytelling traditions of collaboration upon which this project rests offer us cultural rhetoricians key opportunities to reimagine inclusive knowledgemaking practices in using stories as civic pedagogies. My analysis reveals how such knowledge-making practices might orient our work against the grain of hierarchical, exclusionary, colonial practices and toward decolonial approaches that are truly participatory and inclusive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

This essay explores the implications ofThe Elements of Styleas a universally received narrative about literacy. I recontextualize the book as a product of 20th-century histories of literacy as normative middle class desires, and as a response to Cold War era ideologies of a white national language.

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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.

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.

To reveal responsibilities of storytelling, I first disclose my representation of indigeneity, and then, as an indigenous writer, I use the narrative paradigm to examine divergent stories told about the death of Apache Chief Mangas Coloradas. This study demonstrates for teachers and students of writing how important it is to remain ethical in telling and listening to stories.

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.

In recent years, decoloniality has emerged as a topic of critical inquiry across Latinx writing studies. This article examines the politics and stakes of this scholarship and argues that Latinx writing has reached an impasse in its project to theorize alternatives to Western epistemologies of writing. Drawing from deconstruction and subaltern studies, we propose to think Latinx writing at its “absolute limit.”

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.

Public discussion of “the authoritarian personality” returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s—followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal combination of forces since then.

In this article, we argue that HBCU composition faculty members impact the composition field through our innovative and unorthodox tactics that we label cross-boundary discourse, discursive homeplacing, and safe harboring. Our goal is to show that HBCUs are unique sites of inquiry and poised to be at the forefront of conversations about race and writing because of our institutional contexts and the student populations with whom we work each day.

Two-year college faculty have begun articulating ateacher-scholar-activistprofessional identity. After tracing the emergence of this concept and calls for solidarity in two-year college writing studies, we draw on two case studies to advocate for cross-sector disciplinary alliances that expand educational opportunity, improve professional equity, and advance social justice.

This article discusses strategies by which compositionists can use Kenji Yoshino’s theory on “covering” to identify rhetorical moves white compositionists make to “pass” as allies, so they can revise the moves effectively to support colleagues and students of color.

Forty years ago, Nancy Sommers identified dissonance and the ways in which writers respond to incongruities between “intention and execution” as a core competency of revision. While still a challenge for student writers, dissonance now takes different forms, particularly for advanced student writers who embrace theories of revision but struggle to implement the practices. Unspoken, these experiences of dissonance become internalized as fear-based narratives and scripts that negatively impact student writers. Through in-process reflection, this study surfaces the ways in which students navigate the dissonance by adapting, or rescripting, their fear into a productive element of writing and revision. To better understand the interplay of strategy and struggle, we argue that revision pedagogies for advanced student writers must take the emotional work of revision into consideration

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Examining the chanupa, or ceremonial pipe, from a Lakota perspective reveals it as responding to a particular ontology and extends indigenous rhetorics to consider the ontological dimensions of communication. Distinctions between indigenous rhetorics and new materialist rhetorics bring greater attention to how groups and individuals constellate themselves as beings.

This article uses rhetorical genre theory to discuss methods for writing studies research in light of increasing participation of Indigenous scholars and students in disciplines throughout the academy. Like genres, research methods are embedded in systems of interaction that create subject positions and social relations. Using rhetorical genre theory to understand methods as the cultural tools of research communities, we argue that methods can be enacted as flexible resources in the interest of advancing ethical knowledge. In the context of Indigenous epistemological activism, researchers can then take a contingent stance toward method, a stance we name “principled uncertainty.”

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that early approach to writing and writers.

Reviewed are:—Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies Carmen Kynard A Language and Power Reader: Representations of Race in a “Post-Racist” Era Robert Eddy and Victor Villanueva, editors

Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe

Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino