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The creeping dominance of Anglophone-center journals as the most viable publication venues worldwide has resulted in the ubiquity of English as “the language” for academic publishing as well as the preeminence of Western forms of genre and research conventions. Citing 2004 data from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, Lillis and Curry note that 74% of the periodicals listed that year were published in English. Drawing from the Institute for Scientific Information, they cite that 90% of social science articles were published in English (“Interactions with Literacy Brokers” 4). Clearly, academics who write outside of the centralized Anglophone center, which includes the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, have experienced increasing pressure to publish in English (Canagarajah, Geopolitics, “‘Nondiscursive’ Requirements”; Horner et al.; Lillis and Curry, Academic Writing, “Interactions with Literacy Brokers”; Tardy). Such increased pressure is exacerbated through ties to increased rewards, as publishing in English can yield higher salaries and/or increased research funding because economic and disciplinary mobility are often tightly linked with English language publications. Thus, functioning like an economy of English, this “academic marketplace” (Lillis and Curry, Academic Writing 1) of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie), privileges an Anglophone center over multilingual peripheries as scholars perform the ongoing intellectual work of literacy brokers to succeed (Lillis and Curry, “Interactions with Literacy Brokers” 5). These sets of conditions have implications for both the particular topic of Anglophone publishing regimes as well as the changing nature of academic literacy in the churn of globalization. In this article, we turn to Ukraine as an exemplar case for how literacy is changing for research writers in what we are terming global “edge” countries who are driven to join the Anglophone publishing center. This drive is sometimes personal but more often political and economic as writers’ livelihoods are tethered to the outcomes of publishing in English, and research universities’ funding is tied to large-scale output in pre-defined Anglophone publication venues. We define “edge” countries as those operating within a transitional, liminal, and often contradictory set of regulations, expectations, and norms around (a) the local use and politics of mono and multilingualism and the increasing ubiquity of an expectation of English fluency for job candidates in the workforce; (b) educational mandates that seek to drive a local knowledge economy to an Anglophone center; (c) de facto if not de jure participation in larger economic and political entities such as the EU or other forms of regional, Anglophone consolidation; and (d) internal economic volatility that delimits a writer’s even access to literacy’s social practices and technical skills.

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This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

This essay explores how Black LGBTQ students use writing to translate and transmit African American vernacular language codes in their everyday lives. Through documenting how students experience and interpret homophobia through the prism of African American vernacular English (AAVE), I demonstrate how some use language and literacy practices to critique and perform dominant gender behaviors reflected in their community. I theorize a Black queer rhetoric as a framework for understanding and nuancing the discursive limits of African American vernacular English

Arguments about literacy (and its boogeyman antonym, illiteracy) allow for, perhaps even insist upon, a certain degree of rhetorical flexibility. The idea of literacy slips into familiar commonplaces, hard to resist“or heard whether we mean them or not”in arguments with administrators, the public, our students, ourselves. Literacy’s trailing clouds include the sorts of promises that literacy scholars have learned to distrust, even as we’ve probably heard ourselves make them. None of the books in this review can sidestep these binds of literacy education, and in fact in their own ways, each of them embraces those binds as central to their analyses.

By examining the literate practices of persons with aphasia, or language disability after stroke or other brain injury, this essay develops the concept of literate misfitting—the conflicts readers and writers encounter when their bodies and minds do not fit with the materials and expectations of literacy. I analyze how literate misfitting reveals both how persons with disabilities are often excluded from normative conceptions of literacy and how their experiences adapting and innovating in the face of literate misfits offer vital insights into the social and material aspects of literacy.

This study accounts for the complex tensions that four FYW multilingual students from Lebanon experience as they strive to reconcile monolingual representations of language—as a fixed, internally uniform, and discrete entity—on one hand with their own commitment toward mobilizing their diverse language resources as fluid, malleable, and intermingling in their academic work. Based on an analysis of the "postmonolingual" nature of their representations of language and language relations as socially embedded and constructed, I argue that diverse, and often contradictory representations circulating in their minds have complicated, even stifled, these writers' translingual academic literacies and abilities.

This essay considers a student-led protest that took place in 1882 at Syrian Protestant College as a moment of rhetorical negotiation in which (Arab) students unsuccessfully construct and deploy an "imagined America" to speak back to (American) faculty and administrators. This essay's historical analysis helps illustrate the high stakes and implicit promises of transnational knowledge economies today and in the past, as represented in and through the globalization of American-style institutions of higher education and the assumptions about citizenship, and literate practices, that are attached to it.

What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

This article reviews the history of federal adult education policy in order to draw composition scholars into broader educational policy discussions shaping literacy instruction at all educational levels. Adult education policy in the 1960s framed literacy as an element of human capital necessary for economic advancement, a limited characterization reinforcing assumptions that literacy education should generate more productive workers. These early policy discourses are reflected in our current economically driven educational climate, and I suggest that examining such historical and discursive contexts provides composition scholars and educators a stronger basis for actively engaging in policy conversations impacting their work.

Four texts are reviewed that exemplify an important strand of writing center scholarship focused on power dynamics and identity politics in literacy teaching and learning, particularly but not exclusively within college writing centers. Each text takes up the entrenched problem of oppression and injustice toward students identified as being minority by institutional standards; each addresses possibilities for more productive, humane, and inclusive practice. Considered alongside scholarship by authors participating in this January's symposium issue and others concerned with disrupting monolingual, monocultural ideologies and institutionalized oppression, these texts add significantly to the conversation on theory and practice of critical literacy teaching and learning.

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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 article investigates turn-of-the-century agricultural journals as mediums of composition education that taught readers the discoursal goals and values of the agricultural press. Editors of Maine Farmer and Ohio Farmer, in particular, argued that advanced composition skills needed to be connected to rural contexts and practices. They also ultimately offered readers an identity to assume as writers: teachers in a community of farming professionals. That these publications were critical of the pedagogies that did not empower rural voices, and were simultaneously so intent on sponsoring new rural writers, demonstrates that more current concerns with rural literacy have a long history.

Contributing to everyday writing research, this article reports on an interview study of retired women who use writing in the context of the household. Supported by an analysis of participants’ writing artifacts, it describes the social and material gains the women effect via mundane writing forms including menus and grocery lists. Such practices are acquired from the women’s workplaces and families, and an extensive analysis of one case in particular highlights the convergence of literacy practices, ethnic heritage, and material conditions to consider the impact and significance of writing practices handed down through family knowledge, or “rhetorical heirlooms.”

This essay examines the lived literacy experiences of six multilingual immigrant writers, arguing that their everyday multilingual practices foster a distinct rhetorical sensibility: rhetorical attunement—an ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity. Rhetorical attunement is a way of acting in the world as a multilingual writer that assumes linguistic multiplicity and invites the negotiation of meaning across linguistic differences. The essay shows that multilingual writers aren’t aware of this quality of language a priori, but come to know—become rhetorically attuned—across a lifetime of communicating across difference.

This article suggests ways digital tools and platforms can help researchers capture the local and global forces that interanimate local literacy scenes. As a concrete example, we offer Remixing Rural Texas (RRT), describing the way this digital tool works to capture a targeted literacy scene: the civil rights efforts of two African American students on a recently desegregated campus in 1967–68. RRT features an eighteen-minute documentary about these efforts, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a data-source annotation tool that connects the local literacy scene to global events. We conclude with an extended treatment of local stakeholders and the way RRT enables more sustainable, reciprocal, and participatory partnerships with the local community.

We argue that composition scholarship’s defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology’s spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the “White Shoes” essay from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” we show how such a framework addresses the writer’s agency iterating the “same,” and how it resolves concerns to meet students’ need and right to learn both dominant and subordinate languages.

By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field’s conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping subjectivity. Because subjectivities (re)constitute larger systems, scholars should investigate how literacy interacts with experiential knowledge to learn whether and how it mediates personal and systemic change. To further such efforts, I show how some literacy practices use conceptual and procedural knowledge to revise experiential knowledge, and I outline an experiential approach to studying literacy.

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.

Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

We set out to investigate Miller’s curious assertion “curious for a deconstructionist committed to a critique of the old metaphysics of presence” that literary works preexist their being written down. We find a basis for this sense of the preexistence of the literary work in Miller’s insights about the performative dynamics of reading and writing. We thus examine Miller’s intuition about the preexistence of the literary text in terms of language as a shifting structure that interpenetrates and always exceeds the writer’s and the readers’ minds, of the meta-awareness implicit in the dependence of the mimetic on self-referentiality, and of the relationship between the literary realm of the virtual and Derrida’s idea of the future anterior. As Miller’s insights into the performative act of reading disclose, the literary work exists among all of its possibilities of negotiation, interpretation, conjuration, and understanding. The intuition of the literary work’s preexistence thus relates to a sense of actuality as always a matter of interpretation and negotiation, rather than as simply a collection of facts.

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults’ literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection.

Reviewed are Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community by John M. Duffy, and Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe by Vicki Tolar Burton.

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.