Links among the World Bank’s gender-mainstreaming policies and recent U.S. welfare policies demonstrate how transnationalism enables international gendered logics to become national (and international) norms. The metaphor of the network helps feminist rhetoricians expose how transnational linkages shape domestic and international policies by articulating the complex relationships among gendered logics, power, and occasion.

The author surveys various characteristics of contemporary food writing, identifying not only technical features but ways in which such texts shape and invite certain kinds of reader response.

The author responds to the editors’ introduction, as well as to the articles by Queen, Dingo, and Kulbaga, emphasizing that feminists need to relate theories of rhetoric to theories of transnationalism if both areas of thought are to be useful.

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The authors survey the history of struggles over the meaning of organic, emphasizing how these have involved associations that function as activity systems.

Reviewed is Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition by Steven Mailloux.

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Nineteenth-century American leaders in education came to advocate a redesign of the schoolroom that resulted in its being seen as more the province of female teachers than of male teachers. This discourse of reform serves as a case study of how space itself may be rhetorically “gendered.”

The author analyzes his experiences teaching literature courses in which he encourages students to research works by people from their hometowns. He argues that relating literature to concepts of “home” makes English classes more accessible to students while also helping them reflect on important issues in ecocriticism.

Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value.

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.

“Voice” is no longer a hot term in composition journals. Yet it continues to deserve scholarly attention, in part because it is still often referred to in classrooms and seems applicable to new forms of electronic communication. At the same time, we should avoid taking an either/or stand on the usefulness of “voice” as a term. This is a case where we should embrace contraries, by advocating concepts of “voice” on certain occasions and resisting the term on others.

Although writers of personal essays and autobiographies must often rely on vulnerable memory, they should not engage in sheer invention if they want to call their work “nonfiction.”

In higher education, issues of in loco parentis have been most often discussed in connection with campus administrative policies. College writing teachers need to reflect, however, on the ways they conceivably exercise parental authority in their own classrooms, through such models as the Stern Father and the Nurturing Mother.

We need to complicate current accounts of critical pedagogy by examining how educational institutions beyond traditional classrooms have served progressive movements. One example was the Sea Island Citizenship Schools. By examining the latter’s history, we also become better aware of how the education-related work of the American civil rights movement encompassed more than the desegregation prompted by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.

Drawing on activity theory, the author describes and analyzes how he uses software to determine whether websites administered by his university are accessible to disabled people. He argues that, ultimately, accessibility is a rhetorical construct, in the sense that it is defined by communities rather than by sheer technical measurements.

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Reviewed is An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity, by Mike Rose.

Although, by the time of her death, Louise Rosenblatt was highly respected in the fields of composition and reading theory, she did not enjoy the same status among literary theorists. Yet her book The Reader, The Text, The Poem can now be seen as a precursor of contemporary literary theory’s “ethical turn.”

Although many composition teachers feel anger when they discover that a student of theirs has plagiarized, they are more apt to reveal this emotion in personal conversations and in blogs than in published composition scholarship. The field’s scholarship should, however, disclose and analyze this common affective response.

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Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

Various writing programs have struggled to preserve their academic freedom amidst pressures from college administrators and members of the public. To discourage interference from outside parties, such a program needs to identify itself as focused on a substantial academic subject: the scholarly understanding of language and meaning.

When evangelical Christian students enter the academy, they often find that its tenets and values conflict with their reliance on the Bible as a source of truth and evidence. A pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, however, can help construct productive relationships between their religious community of practice and the academy’s.

Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

Focusing on students’ responses to an 1876 writing assignment at Illinois Industrial University (which would ultimately become the University of Illinois), the author analyzes ideological tensions that occurred as the United States found itself revising the pastoral image of the farmer in an increasingly industrial age.

In the North American academy, often scholars in the humanities unfortunately continue to privilege longer works over briefer ones—a preference that needs to be critiqued and changed.

Drawing on her interviews with professional ghostwriters who work primarily in organizations, the author examines what this practice implies about society’s current attitudes toward authorship, written work, and literacy in general. She also examines the ethical arguments that various critics of ghostwriting have made.

Letters and journals of American missionary women in early 19th century Hawai’i express conflicting desires. In some ways, the writers seek connection with the rest of the missionary community and with Native Hawaiians. In other ways, they try to separate themselves from these two groups.

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers’ responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies’ tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more recent constructivist theories.

The author critiques the much-publicized and potentially influential 2006 report of the Spellings Commission Report. He emphasizes the report’s inconsistencies, seeing these as reflecting a business model of education that neglects not only the decline in government financial support of colleges, but also the presence in them of new student populations

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. Composition researchers should study the paragraph once again, this time forging connections with similar work in other disciplines.

Reviewed is The Economics of {Attention}: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A. Lanham.

“Crash” does better than the Sidney Poitier looks at racism, but it still engages in stereotyping. In fact, the film becomes interesting if you see it as a study of stereotypes as a maze you can’t walk out of.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

“Crash” has value insofar as it dives into the muck and dirt of racial and ethnic tensions. But the film de-voices African Americans in the face of white privilege, and it papers over significant social tensions by ultimately emphasizing love and redemption.

“Crash” is a means for classes to explore the complicated interpersonal, social, and political legacies of the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, it is important for students to examine how, on the subject of racism, the movie blurs the distinction between individual moral choices and larger institutional practices.

“Crash” strives to show that just as culpability belongs equally to all racial groups, so, too, is redemption equally available. But that promissory note goes unpaid when it comes to the film’s Asian characters.