Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

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The Caribbean is a haunted place, and because the people themselves are haunted. To be haunted in the sense is to be moved in a way that may defy easy identification or logical explanation. Of course, the phenomenon of being haunted is not exclusive to Caribbean folk but to marginalized peoples wherever they lose or find themselves, as ideological contortions, jargonistic somersaults, theoretical misdirections, and methodological missteps often signal the existence of a common-and intensely human-situation: that we may well be driven or inspired to embark on a given project, and that we are often at odds in our attempts to precisely identify the source of that drive, the inspiration that may have caused it. Here, Browne talks about the rhetorical significance of Caribbean tradition.

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Those of us who work at universities are accustomed to the way diversity and inclusion initiatives become institutionalized. Internal grant applications ask how the proposed research is relevant to a university's mission in relation to diversity; required online surveys are distributed to assure that faculty and staff understand accessibility guidelines; task forces, committees, and planning groups articulate goals related to diversity and inclusion. The application of these rhetorical acts in daily academic life undulates, sometimes visible and meaningful, other times fading into the scenery, becoming background to seemingly more pressing matters. We address these questions as they relate to scholarly publishing in rhetoric and composition journals, questions that affect editors and authors as well as those who teach and study in the field. As editorial team members of Composition Studies, a biannual independent print journal, we detail strategies for creating a home for diversity in our field.

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As the epigraph attests, knowledge production by women deserves increased attention; doing so contributes to better interpreting the domains and conditions of our lives. This broad claim may not seem controversial, yet marginalization of African American women’s perspectives continues within academic and popular discourse. One occasion when publics pay attention to African American women is upon the tragic deaths of their children. Specifically, mothers of urban homicide victims face important rhetorical moments that facilitate how individuals and urban communities respond to such violence. Local and national news media sponsor this response as well, as reports feature the reactions of victims’ mothers, placing them in the position of having to make meaning of their children’s deaths and thereby endow these children’s lives with value in a racist culture that devalues African American youth, the most likely victims of gun violence (Beard et al.; Ferdman; Light; Reeves and Holmes; Sugarmann). For the Mothers Against Gun Violence (MAGV) in Syracuse, New York, the organization at the center of analysis here, buffer rhetorics unite individual mothers’ experiences to form a communal activist identity.

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This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

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.

This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.

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

This article sheds light on moments when educators affirm and when writers assert their epistemic rights— the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. Affirmations and assertions of epistemic rights can work to counter epistemic injustice, or harm done to people in their capacities as knowers. Though an understanding of rhetoric as "epistemic" or "epistemological" is not new (e.g., Berlin; Dowst; Scott; Villanueva), I argue that we need to bring attention to the related terms and conceptual frameworks of epistemic rights and epistemic injustice. Together, these terms help to explain the wrongs (micro-inequities leading to macro-injustices) that manifest when writers are stripped of language, experience, or expertise and their attendant agency, confidence, and even personhood. This study highlights both the social stakes involved and the interactional work needed for putting one's words into the world. Hence, this project contributes empirical research in addition to an understanding of epistemic rights that can counter epistemic injustice.

This article foregrounds story as a rhetorical mode of Indigenous leadership to argue for the value of local scholars working in place. Utilizing recent scholarship in Native rhetorics, educational leadership, decolonial theory, I offer my own experience as a Cherokee citizen and Indigenous researcher to illustrate the value of local cultural knowledge to the field and the academy. I suggest the reconsideration of cosmopolitan values and institutional practices that alienate Indigenous scholars from their communities.

Our article examines the challenges that “outsiders” face as academic leaders in higher education, with a special emphasis on the specific complications prevailing in the rhetoric and composition fields within English studies. We survey descriptive statistics and historical evidence to locate several of the problems confronting women and others newly and provisionally admitted to—and more often, still excluded from—the highest levels of academic leadership. Then, we bring together feminist-revisionist advocacy tools and Ernest Boyer’s alternative vision for “engaged scholarship” to suggest ways that leadership work formerly categorized as simply administrative duty or mere service be recognized for its broad-ranging impact both on campuses and the public domain.

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.

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.

The books reviewed here share the theme of women “making it†in the world of rhetoric and composition academe. The reviewers first critically summarize each of the three collections; then narratively synthesize their personal experiences with four prominent themes across these collections: knowing, balance, mentoring, and change. This four-part woven analysis, shows and tells tales from women about what has been lurking in the academy’s closet and what still needs to change.

The author proposes three ways that engagement with religious rhetorics in undergraduate writing courses might enable teachers of rhetoric to cultivate writers’ civic capacities. To give readers a sense of what courses on religious rhetorics that aim to improve writers’ civic capacities look like in practice, DePalma discusses three undergraduate writing courses recently taught in different kinds of institutional settings and the kinds of learning that occurred as a result of students’ engagement with religious rhetorics in those courses.

This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

This article examines the role of reflective practice in rhetoric and composition scholarship and argues for reconsidering practice through posthumanism. It (re)introduces posthumanism as a productive frame for considering rhetorical training in a networked age. In place of reflective practice, the article develops the concept of "posthuman practice" as a serial and material activity for rhetorical training. The article concludes by reconsidering metacognition and how reframing rhetoric as a posthuman practice could affect rhetorical pedagogy and ethics.

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.

This article investigates the spatial politics at work in composition and rhetoric's turn toward revisionist historiography. Drawing on critical spatial theory, the author seeks to answer a fundamental question: What would it mean to formulate a historiography for composition that brings an interrelation of space and time, of spatial and historical work, to the fore? This article expedites this foregrounding by highlighting the ways in which the divisions between time and space have already grown increasingly tenuous in our revisionist historical scholarship and by providing this interrelatedness a vocabulary—a space-time hermeneutic—to highlight and predict its theoretical and political implications.

This column reviews four books that illustrate the idea that our locations shape our meaning-making processes. She notes how each author frames the social justice issue at the heart of her or his analysis, paying close attention to how visible the Indigenous presence is as well as the settler colonialism involved in each. The resulting readings are not so much as critique of these studies, but rather show how explicit attention to the settler colonial situation might inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues.

Keith Gilyard's contribution offers a bracing response to the symposium and the larger body of work identified with "translingual." Identifying the emergence of translingual perspectives with a long tradition in composition (and beyond) combating monolingualist ideology, he cautions against temptations to turn translingual theory's insistence on difference as the norm of language practice into a flattening of all difference through abstraction that elides the negotiation of differences in power from communicative practice, a removal that would lead to overlooking which differences in language have what effects on whom. Gilyard's response and this symposium as a whole show how "translingualism" can, might, and needs to be always put to work.

This essay argues that students must call on their rhetorical sensibilities each time they sit down to write instead of automatically assuming that engaging in code-meshing is the appropriate response to every writing situation. It also encourages pedagogical efforts among teachers that invite students to locate translingualism in its larger contextual relationship with monolingualism and multlingualism, two other approaches to language difference that inform the teaching of writing. In the end, the essay suggests, students must take into consideration how each of these approaches to language difference influences the various decisions they are required to make in the writing classroom.

Emancipatory projects that have sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen short of addressing the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought. This essay defines three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition and rhetoric (i.e., languaging, translating, and dwelling in borders) that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always index imperialist legacies of thought and deed.

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.

While “expertise” has been both an implicit and explicit focal point of composition, our most familiar models of expertise running along a spectrum from novice to expert may not allow for a nuanced deployment of tacit knowledge. Without dismissing any of the field's important work on expertise, therefore, I introduce the concept of para-expertise: the experiential, embodied, and tacit knowledge that does not translate into the vocabulary or skills of disciplinary expertise. This concept may help to resituate how we conceptualize, teach, and use notions of expertise in the classroom, since it can teach nonexperts to pursue rhetorical action through strategic expertise alliances without overstepping the very real limitations of nonexpertise.

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s  The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

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.