This review of Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) and Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (2017) shows how both Clare and Kim critique the politics of cure in the U.S. and Korea. Specifically, these texts reveal the (at times) violent ways that cure has been forced on disabled bodies, and unpack longstanding debates within the political, cultural, and medical sectors about eliminating disability at all costs, and refusing cure. Although both works are oriented towards the field of disability studies, this review highlights the intersectional aspects of both texts and the concrete, practical ways that rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers can benefit from this discourse.

This essay offers a review of Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future with the intent of reminding composition instructors of the importance of intersectionality and accessibility. Each text encourages us to challenge traditional perceptions of success and failure thereby also interrogating imbalanced power dynamics between instructors and students particularly in regards to writing assessment and other pedagogical priorities. Finding ways to acknowledge difference, and affirm it, is vital to our collective success especially in the writing classroom.

Since the 2016 release of the Modern Language Association’s new style guidelines, scholars and teachers—along with writing centers, libraries, and editorial staffs--have been familiarizing themselves with the changes. Based on a standardized approach to citation, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook asks us to adjust some long-entrenched habits. Perhaps more pressingly, the new MLA format reminds us of enduring pedagogical challenges regarding students’ information literacy, habits of source citation, and understanding of knowledge-making. With this issue of Composition Forum marking the journal’s progression to the new guidelines, we asked two scholars to explore the MLA Handbook ’s significance for our field’s scholarly and teacherly work.

This review essay places Stephanie Kerschbaum’s Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference and Shannon Walters’s Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics in a conversation about how we can more productively identify with and across difference. While they have different theoretical approaches and applications, both Kerschbaum and Walters discuss identification, embracing rather than erasing difference, and the importance of eschewing stereotypes that are harmful to the multiple ways that we encounter and interact with disability and difference in the classroom and in our rhetorical histories and theories.

This review playfully approaches Rickert’s book through the lens of sonic rhetorical studies, focusing on the parts that seems most useful to scholars in this area. Naturally, then, it is presented as an exercise in practicing sonic rhetoric, with a dynamic, loose conversation between two sound scholars enlivened with a number of musical and sonic clips that exemplify the spoken parts of the review. The review is presented through multiple playback options to make it easier to digest in small chunks, but those sections are fluid, and the experience makes most sense when heard all together.

Even as veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seek higher education, civilians tend to know little about war and military culture. While this lack of knowledge makes veterans’ adjustments more difficult, it has a more pernicious effect on civilians themselves, as it limits civilians’ ability to act as informed, responsible citizens before, during, and after war. Writing teachers can help ameliorate this problem by incorporating war writing into their syllabi. Accordingly, this review essay provides an overview of the civilian-military gap, reviews memoirs by Army veterans Shannon Meehan and Kayla Williams, and suggests pedagogical approaches to teaching war writing.

Although student veterans comprise just four percent of the population of undergraduate students, this number is expected to grow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come to a close (“Out”). In recent years, higher education has become increasingly concerned with accommodating this emerging, diverse, and vulnerable population of students. This review essay discusses two Web-based initiatives that advocate for and about student veterans transitioning to higher education : In Their Own Words, Montgomery College Student Veterans and From Combat to Kentucky . Specifically, this review essay discusses how these two digital projects provide educators, administrators, and students (both civilian and veteran) the invaluable opportunity to hear the unique experiences and needs of student veterans in higher education. Hearing such stories can contribute to teachers and students’ learning practices by fostering identification with student veterans, despite our differences, while affording teachers and students a way of increasing our understanding of military culture and its large role in our nation’s present, past, and future cultural contexts.

Higher education has become increasingly concerned in recent years with its role in sustainability studies, both in the sustainability of the physical environments of its institutions and in the education of students as citizens and experts in a world facing complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. This review essay discusses the importance of sustainability-minded pedagogies in the writing classroom through an examination of Fountainhead Press’s new V (Voices) composition reader series . The essay discusses ways to integrate the V series themed readers and their assignments into a sustainability-minded writing classroom, and it concludes by suggesting important links between sustainability pedagogy and writing transfer.

This review essay examines recent texts by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, both of which use embodied activism as a starting point for their inquiries. Taken together, these works point to a distinct shift in composition studies’ turn toward the social, one that calls on workers both within and outside the academy to actively engage in grassroots political struggle.