Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

This article merges feminist methods with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to present a systems-theory method that can account for power and difference. After an explication of Feminist CHAT, the article applies the method to the archives of three women’s clubs in order to analyze their collaborations, theorize collaboration, and illustrate the use of Feminist CHAT. By weaving the stories of these three clubs together with Feminist CHAT, this article mediates two often conflicting contemporary approaches to English studies: those that emphasize objects of discourse and those that emphasize bodies and difference.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

In this essay, I build on current work in rhetorical genre theory to read a historical genre for the affective uptake(s) it generates. Medically authored child-rearing advice literature developed as a genre in Britain between 1825 and 1850; this new genre instantiated anxiety as the central affect of middle-class maternal subjectivity. This rhetorical genre analysis both extends our understanding of this period and the history of motherhood; it also contributes to the developing affective turn in rhetorical genre studies by offering a way to begin reading for affective uptakes.

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.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

Drawing on work logs kept by participants, the authors report and analyze a project at their university in which contingent faculty recorded the amount of work they actually performed during a week. The authors also recommend ways to enhance the working conditions of such faculty.

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.

The author reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.