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 describes how a first-year learning community combining library, archival, and digital literacies facilitated students’ grasp of threshold concepts of academic research and writing. It argues that critical-rhetorical processes and pedagogies can help counteract neoliberal educational trends that interpellate students as consumers rather than learners.

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.