Current historical research is shifting its gaze away from metalevel studies of the field that examine the discipline’s history on the national level toward archival histories and case studies of underrepresented individuals, groups, and movements that aim to shine a light on the darkened corners of our past and provide alternative or parallel narratives of the field’s development while also hinting at the expanse of rhetorical and disciplinary history yet to be uncovered. With this observational frame in mind, the author launches into a rich and detailed review of three recent books on the history of localized populations. Each of these books adds to the field literature on the idea of microhistories; on histories of rhetoric and public voice; on the education and professional preparation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women; and on race and racism during this same time period.

This article examines the rhetoric and pedagogies of employment and workplace guidebooks for adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to demonstrate how the texts reflect and reinvent cultural desires or fantasies about contemporary employees and also work to norm real autistic employees to be closer to a neurotypical ideal. This norming is achieved in large part through the guidebooks’ surprising appropriations of and appeals to rhetorical training.

Faced with the need to educate women collectively about politics and government, Jane Croly established the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in 1890. Based on archival documents from the GFWC, this article seeks to address the following research questions: What do the patriotic pageants sponsored by the GFWC illustrate about civic education in the Americanization era? What can we learn about civic education and the use of particular rhetorical forms from twentieth-century pageants and organizations such as the GFWC? By exploring the organization’s contribution to civic education alongside other pageants in the same era, it is possible to better contextualize the competing histories of civic education for ourselves and our students. This article also focuses on the patriotic pageants that club women used to develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had contradictory results. The GFWC both supported and resisted whiteness as the position of authority in its promotion of pageants. Embracing the contradictions of pageants and their role in civic education in the Americanization era allows for a more nuanced and accurate picture of the history of civic education.

A Comment on “Reimagining the Social Turn”Donald Lazere, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander A Comment on “One Train Can Hide Another”Paul Lynch and Nathaniel A. Rivers, Tony Scott and Nancy Welch

This essay draws on genre theory and recent conceptualizations of the personal as rhetorical in order to investigate the collective stakes of writerly self-representation. Contextualizing and analyzing a widely published early twentieth-century genre, the vocational autobiography, I argue that female professionals made use of the rhetorical resources available in the genre to personalize their professional identities, counteracting a widespread discourse of exceptionalism and flouting widespread advice about the necessity of strict separation between personal and professional identities. By using personal narratives to depict their gendered and embodied presence in powerful professional spaces such as laboratories and newsrooms, female writers made use of this genre to normalize their presence and to open up access to such spaces for other women.

Preview this article: From the Editors, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/6/collegeenglish27371-1.gif

This review takes on the assumption that readers of College English believe in democratic practice and the possibility that education can play a role in supporting and cultivating those practices. The books reviewed here are a good reminder that education does not have to be focused on competition and achievement, about defining intelligence through academic aptitude, a reminder well served as the Common Core and its impending assessment shape the nature of public education and its goals.

This essay argues that calls to end, move beyond, or expand composition participate in a discourse of need that accepts and reinforces the legitimacy of dominant, and

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/5/collegeenglish27173-1.gif

As the people most directly harmed by standardized education, students must lead both local and national fights for progressive, alternative pedagogies. This article exhorts writing teachers to help cultivate youth agency by establishing a Rhetoric Project in concordance with the Algebra Project, which employs mathematics literacy and community organizing as tools for promoting quality education. Specific Rhetoric Project efforts can include building cultures of rhetorical literacy and updating traditional organizing methods for twenty-first-century contexts. The Rhetoric Project is framed as an initial step toward a potential interdisciplinary alliance of writing and mathematics teachers and students.

Preview this article: Emerging Voices: Emissaries of Literacy: Representations of Sponsorship and Refugee Experience in the Stories of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/5/collegeenglish27174-1.gif

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/4/collegeenglish26919-1.gif

Pidgin, the Creole identified with “Local” culture in Hawaii, is seldom discussed in terms of its connection to the Hawaiian language and the ways it affirms Native identity.—Using Indigenous rhetorics and language politics as frames, I articulate Native Hawaiians’ adoption of Pidgin as acts of Ellen Cushman’s cultural perseverance and Scott Richard—Lyons’s rhetorical sovereignty. Using the poem “The Question,” written in Pidgin by Hawaiian poet Noelle Kahanu as an example of Indigenous rhetoric, I discuss how teaching—it through this lens, compared to a minority rhetoric lens, captures different histories and experiences and engenders critical awareness of the identities students perform.

Recent scholarship has highlighted discursive constraints students face when writing on religion in college classrooms and has questioned the efficacy of current classroom—practices for responding to such students and texts. This article addresses these concerns by positing a translingual framework for responding to students’ religious discourse. It—describes how changing conditions create and transform religions and illustrates how religious practitioners participate in those transformations. It rereads texts written by—religious writing students, demonstrating how instructors could use translingual responses to help students employ their diverse religious resources in writing to interrogate and—intervene in these changing religious contexts.

A concerned group of L2 professionals write an open letter to express their concern that the terms “L2 writing” and “translingual writing” have become almost interchangeable in—writing studies publications and conferences and further argue that much will be lost if “translingual writing” replaces “L2 writing.” Each are distinct areas of research and—pedagogy: L2 writing is a more technical description applied to writing in a language acquired later in life, while translingual writing describes an orientation to language—difference. Without attention to the distinct contributions made by each field, L2 scholarship becomes marginalized in publications, conferences, and hiring practices. The letter—authors and endorsers encourage writing studies editors and organization leaders to recognize and understand the difference between the fields so as to ensure a strong and—enduring future for L2 scholarship.—

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

classroom blogging can be an effective tool through which to apprentice students in appropriate disciplinary thinking and reasoning skills. Inquiry is the basis for disciplinary literacy. Effectively framed blog posts can situate learning tasks from an in

This essay urges scholars and teachers interested in the rhetorical agency of economically disenfranchised groups to expand their field of vision beyond the organized labor movement. The author discusses the Moonlight Schools, founded in Kentucky in 1911 by Cora Wilson Stewart, as a site for investigating alternative forms of solidarity. More particularly, she argues that Appalachian women used the literacy skills they developed under Stewart’s tutelage to support their own long-standing practices of neighborliness. By thus looking beyond strikes, walkouts, and other dramatic rhetorical moments from the labor movement, this essay hopes to begin building a more nuanced understanding of how people with limited economic resources gain purchase in the world through words.

The four titles that Adams discusses include scholarship from women's and gender studies, communication, and media studies, highlighting how the titles generate productive questions using those fields’ intersections with English studies’ own borders and emerging conversations and also allows that productive reimagining of a topic, both through its relationship with rhetoric and through an analytical melding of the familiar with the new. Adams’s review brings into focus how in representations and theories of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, “power articulates to reproductive capacities through rhetorics of risk, responsibility, fitness, and choice” (pp. 275–276) She argues that these four titles provide “numerous examples of how these terms rhetorically shape understandings of our own biology, perceptions of possibility and impossibility related to sexuality, and the ability to recognize how notions of autonomy might be enmeshed within larger contexts and systems beyond our direct control” (276).

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/3/collegeenglish26337-1.gif

This article describes a series of community-based research projects, (Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories, done in partnership with the local African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish communities. The author argues that these projects are one substantive response to the ongoing, growing demand that English studies teacher-scholars and students participate in purposeful, impactful public work. These projects position students as rhetorical citizen historians who produce original historical and rhetorical knowledge and promote democracy through conscious, deliberate rhetorical historical work. But these partnerships also raise complex issues of unequal, fluid, and shifting discourses among community partners, students, and faculty and, consequently, inform ways to enact publicly shared meaning in community literacy partnerships.

Given the ubiquity of images and, implicitly, the habits of looking that influence the production of those images for both representation and communication, English studies requires a theory of Design that better accounts for dominant perceptual habits that function both to constrain acts of choice making and to restrict the repertoire of available resources. This article contributes to that agenda by focusing on one perceptual habit: the racialized gaze, a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race-related visual phenomena. Employing a fascinating take on the political cartoons of the nineteenth-century artist Thomas Nast as “racialized design,” Hum uses this work to complicate the idea of both design and gaze for students and teachers of visual rhetoric today. Specifically, she argues, among other points, that “the racialized gaze as Design provides a valuable theoretical framework for visual rhetoric, exegesis, and cultural analysis by directing our attention to how designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions”

Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/2/collegeenglish26144-1.gif

Contributors to this symposium reflect on the role of the journal editor, noting the experiences of graduate student editors, the contributions of journal editors, and the tension that may exist between the roles of editor as gatekeeper and editor as facilitator.

This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

This article draws parallels between the Great Depression and the great recession that began in 2007 in light of the history, methods, themes, and relevance of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to contemporary community writing projects. Through a critical analysis of the FWP’s legacy as both a twentieth-century American epic and a lesson in powerful, sometimes flawed methodologies, this article suggests that a twenty-first-century reprise of the FWP would unify and inform already existing university-community partnerships to enact the “public turn” called for in composition and other disciplines at a critical juncture in American—and world—history.

Ferris looks at three books—Cross-Language Relations in Composition; Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies; and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China—as they address the question of adherence to a monolingual or “standard” set of language and writing norms in composition, and consider how the answer to this question impacts our teaching.

This history explores the early growth of composition faculty between 1960 and 1990, arguing that composition has historically functioned as a site of flexible expertise. As archives of the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List attest, early job advertisements for composition “specialists” defined the work of composition in terms antithetical to specialization, expecting a compositionist to perform a variety of administrative work and to teach comfortably in multiple areas. The flexible identity of the field’s faculty aided its growth during a period when tenure-track faculty waned; composition thrived because faculty could serve multiple institutional roles. This essay calls readers to investigate the ways that composition’s flexibility has impacted and continues to impact the field’s identity and labor structures.

Preview this article: From the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/1/collegeenglish26070-1.gif

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and census and economic data, this article examines the value of the GED for students at a community-based urban literacy center. After exploring assumptions about literacy implicit in the GED writing test, the article assesses the economic and noneconomic impacts of the GED, a test taken by over 700,000 adults in 2012. Because the students at this literacy center differ significantly from the national pool of GED test takers—being all women, older, and largely immigrants—the study provides information about the value of the GED for those who are particularly disadvantaged in seeking this credential.

This symposium offers three perspectives on how permanent non-tenure track faculty are positioned to effect change in English departments and writing programs, as well as some of the obstacles they face in doing so.

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”

The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

Preview this article: Response: Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition in the Age of Obama, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/76/6/collegeenglish25464-1.gif

Our fields need stories that are unwelcome—stories that bother us because we have not fully embraced the notions that our identities matter in our scholarship, our teaching, and our lives. We also need to embrace the multifaceted, intersectional nature of identity, and we need new strategies for engaging in cross-boundary discourses. I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American rhetoricians to explicate three concepts that are critical for engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse as well as three trajectories for moving forward.

Preview this article: From the Guest Editors: Reimagining the Social Turn: New Work from the Field, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/76/6/collegeenglish25458-1.gif

This essay focuses on new materialist reconfigurations of social theory that alter understandings of agency, identity, subjectivity, and power. This research lends itself to recognizing writing as radically distributed across time and space, and as always entwined with a whole host of others. After overviewing new materialist efforts to draft a robust concept of matter, I explore the value of this work for twenty-first-century writing studies through the lens of acknowledgments, a genre wherein relationality is dramatized.