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.

In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack’s Autism and Gender , Anne McGuire’s War on Autism , and Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism . Each of these texts centers disability—autism in particular—and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and personal autism narratives support extant social hierarchies that sideline autistic lives in scholarship and beyond. Central to these three books are issues of rhetorical play, textual narrative, and storying in contemporary autism discourse, so in this essay I aim to tie together these fundamental themes, placing them in conversation with one another. I begin the discussion with a brief overview of the history of autism before drawing from Yergeau, Jack, and McGuire’s texts to explore the lay of the discursive field of autism and forms of rhetorical (and physical) violence that are normalized in autism discourse. Finally, before concluding, I explore what the authors of these texts explicate about the rhetors who take part in a shifting discursive field.

This program profile will describe how the University of Central Florida’s Student Accessibility Services’ (SAS) Faculty Liaison program functions in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. The Liaison Program served to provide an intermediary between departments and SAS so faculty may brainstorm accommodations with colleagues familiar with their field, department, and courses in ways that do not fundamentally alter their course goals and objectives. Ultimately, what emerged from this program is the idea that access is and must be regarded as a networked practice in order for transformative access work to occur. Access, like writing, needs to be understood as a way to move among different communities of practice.

In this article, I explore normative assumptions regarding multimodality from the perspective of disability studies, and focus particularly on how coherence and wholeness work in disciplinary conversations and professional statements. I offer a reading of the hybrid graphic-written text The Ride Together as a way to resist these normative impulses and to explore a different kind of wholeness at work in the interaction between text and image. I argue for appreciating the rhetorical strategy of dis-closure, which I define as occurring when disability frustrates the normative expectations of multimodal, compositional, and narrative closure in productive and generative ways. I analyze multimodal collaboration and revision in The Ride Together , arguing that insights from comics studies, together with an appreciation of dis-closure, present alternatives to the limiting disciplinary focus on coherence and wholeness.

Informed by my embodiment as a Deaf instructor asking hearing students to challenge captioning conventions, this article shows how hearing composers can reimagine the design of their captioned videos, and appreciate students’ embodied responses to new rhetorical situations. The embodied methodology and methods in this article incorporate embodied differences and are directly influenced by the fields of disability studies, cultural rhetorics, and embodiment. This article foregrounds students’ embodied responses—their individual reactions to the videos and activities—in the form of their reflective letters on the process of designing and analyzing videos with dynamic visual text, or captions that move around the screen in interaction with other modes of communication. In addition to discussing their written responses and the skills they developed, I assess their group videos to show how student composers interpret the process of infusing captions with meaning.

This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence.

In this article, I argue for pedagogies that explicitly center the embodied perspectives of students and their audiences. Using Stephanie Kerschbaum’s concept of “anecdotal relations,” or orientations towards disability that inform rhetorical transactions, I analyze my academic experiences as a Chicana with “invisible” disabilities to highlight how race and disability are both highlighted and erased in pedagogical contexts. I present two personal stories from my time as a student and as an instructor, respectively, to show how instructors’ orientations towards race and disability are typically based around impressions of deficit even as the importance of race and disability as critical heuristics are overlooked. Then I explain how my students and I attempt to build critical embodiment into our writing to compose more inclusively to suggest how we may all become more attuned to our audiences’ embodied needs.

This profile describes how the Writing Program at Southern Utah University enacts a rhetorical humanist framework in its administrative and curricular structures. At the administrative level, rhetorical humanism offers a collaborative governance model that gives all faculty a voice in programmatic decisions, while managing the cacophony created by those voices. At the curricular level, rhetorical humanism balances the benefits and critiques of traditional humanism with outward-facing social constructionist writing pedagogies of the last few decades.

This article presents data from a 2013 survey of students enrolled in a longstanding rhetoric and composition Ph.D. program at the University of Louisville (U of L), a mid-sized public institution in the American South. The survey collected data regarding graduate students’ perceptions of language diversity in the context of their professional development as composition teacher-scholars. It interprets the data in relationship to what Yasemin Yildiz has described as the “postmonolingual condition” of 21st century Western social life: a field of tension between monolingualist ideology and increasingly visible multilingual practices. Drawing from student recommendations, it suggests ways this program, and others like it, can leverage students’ positive perceptions of and attitudes toward multilingualism to norm language differences in its mainstream rhetoric and composition graduate curriculum.

Despite claims that Creative Writing and Composition don’t speak to one another, this article finds that composition does borrow fictional craft elements and artistic tools. Moreover, these devices and tools show up in composition pedagogy in two ways: explicitly or implicitly. Many of the tools found come from fiction writers and poets, while some are from creative non-fiction writers. The article searches through 17 years of journal articles to show how artistic tools are discussed, used, and how teachers adopt or theorize them for writing students. What the essay proposes is a greater independence of the student writer as a harvester and user of rhetorical tools and to have students go past mere techniques into a more conscious use of the tools available to them outside of what the teachers offer, since there could be, and surely are, more options for analytical and artistic creation and criticism.

This article proposes a translingual/transdisciplinary rhetoric that aims to complement, rather than confront, current discipline-specific discursive, linguistic, and cultural conventions. Specifically, the article reviews various lines of inquiry on translingualism in composition scholarship and identifies and accounts for the challenges and resistance to this orientation in practice. After defining translingual/transdisciplinary rhetoric and conceptualizing what it means to practice it across disciplines, the author proposes tentative directions for achieving a translingual/transdisciplinary rhetorical norm in pedagogical spaces.

This article posits that inviting students to interrogate and share their worldviews through personal narratives could promote mutual inquiry across difference. Detailing a series of assignments and activities developed from the model of invitational rhetoric, this article analyzes students’ writing and reflections to demonstrate how mutual listening and inquiry function as an effective means to cultivate self-reflexivity and ethical relations with others who do not share the same positionality.

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing , fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray’s legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting and fails to do justice to Murray’s broader contributions to the field’s disciplinary ethos.

How we argue for, create, and mobilize around writing and rhetoric majors will continue to shape our field’s disciplinarity in crucial ways, including our recognition, resources, and relationships. The range of such majors and their institutional contexts, and the disparate field-level efforts to track and build consensus around them, generate more questions than answers, leaving the turn to disciplinarity an open question. This article proposes techne —rhetoric as the productive art of enacting knowledge—as a conceptual tool for identifying connections across writing and rhetoric majors. Such points of connection can, in turn, serve to guide efforts for supporting and building shared resources for majors, and to enable a contingent and adaptive understanding of our field’s identity and (potential) disciplinarity.

As writing teachers increasingly engage students with audio media, it has become crucial to coach listening explicitly in the classroom, activities that students may otherwise approach passively. In this article I suggest that a rhetorical approach applicable to (or derived from) print texts is not enough to help students listen actively, and offer instead a materially engaged practice of listening that helps students to understand their interactions with compositions on a material level that involves bodily activity. My proposed pedagogy moves students toward a reflective awareness of their practices, encourages purposeful listening, and acknowledges the role that attention plays in listening. Such a pedagogy can help students to engage with audio compositions on their own terms, encourage them to understand listening as a dynamic practice with critical heft worthy of their time and attention, and open insights into affordances of sound that are obscured by print-centric approaches.

This article describes and theorizes a failed writing program assessment study to question the influence of “the rhetoric of agreement,” or reliability, on writing assessment practice and its prevalence in validating institutional mandated assessments. Offering the phrase “dwelling in disagreement” as a queer perspective, the article draws on expertise theory and notions of ambience and attunement in rhetorical scholarship to illustrate the complexity, unpredictability, and disorder of the teaching and assessment of writing. Adopting a queer sensibility approach, the article marginally disrupts “success” as assumed by order, efficiency, and results in writing assessments and explores how scholars might reimagine ideas, practices, and methods to differently understand a queer rhetoricity of assessment and learning.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn Writing Program and Writing Center serve an increasingly large number of recent immigrants, international students, and students who as children immigrated to the United States. The Writing Program and Writing Center have for a decade developed curriculum and support services geared specifically toward meeting the needs of this increasingly heterogeneous student body, while at the same time highlighting students’ rich contributions to the learning and rhetorical contexts of the university and surrounding communities. Owing in part to the university’s proximity to Detroit and in part to Dearborn’s own particular history and demographics—a city with the highest proportion of Arab Americans in the U.S.—UM-Dearborn comprises a truly cross-cultural and transnational space. Within this rhetorical context, Writing Program curricula with “cross-cultural” and transnational emphases afford students unique opportunities to learn to write for public audiences with backgrounds, experiences and socio-political affiliations very different from their own.

To illustrate how genre pedagogy and public writing pedagogy can inform one another, this program profile describes the second-semester composition course at University of North Dakota, ENGL 130: College Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences. In this course, genre works as a rhetorical bridge across an interlinked sequence of research, professional, and public writing assignments focused on a contemporary topic of public interest. The course maintains a public orientation throughout: as a simulated genre system, the course constitutes a protopublic, or a rhetorical space in which students can learn about public debates, rehearse public discourses, and prepare for future performances of public genres with rhetorical awareness in their repertoire.

Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential harassment. Compositionists should avoid relying on a Habermasian understanding of the public sphere and instead embrace a political, ecological approach to public writing that recognizes publics as the result of the interactions between multiple texts and actors, and that attends to the ways in which power relations alternately shape, constrain, and enable those texts and actors. This model equips students with a more sophisticated framework for understanding internet publics, and will ultimately empower them to make informed rhetorical choices about which public networks to enter, ensuring not just more effective rhetorical action but safer online experiences.

Drawing from their experiences teaching two different activism-focused writing courses, the authors consider the benefits, pitfalls, and potential dangers of activist writing pedagogy. Scott provides a retrospective on a rhetoric and writing course focused on the employment of digital rhetoric, while Katherine reflects on an activist-rhetoric course that culminated in the execution of an annual Take Back the Night rally. Despite the risk of “politicizing the classroom,” the authors argue that activist pedagogy, when thoughtfully implemented, can help students (no matter their political leanings) learn how to write, act, and think—necessary skills for a democratic society. Yet, while both authors support activist-focused rhetoric and writing courses, they also examine the ethical, pedagogical, occupational, and even legal issues that might arise from teaching such courses.

This multimedia article focuses on my experience as a professor working on a campus adjacent to Ferguson, Missouri. I discuss the ways that Ferguson and Black Lives Matter pushed me to intentionally and meaningfully connect my teaching, research, and the local community. Through narrative, video and audio excerpts and analysis of conversations with Ferguson community members, and pedagogical reflection, I argue for an understanding of public rhetoric and writing that is more inclusive of listening, archives, collectivity, and social justice. I also highlight the importance of building rhetorical theory alongside public rhetors in local communities, helping students understand that the rhetorical tradition is far from a historical relic. Instead, it is a work-in-progress, living and breathing all around them.

Drawing on new materialist and public writing scholarship, this essay advocates for public writing projects that foreground distributed action by pursuing material ends . Analyzing the rhetorical consequences and pedagogical potential of the Children’s Peace Statue Project (1990-1995), a student-led activist project to fund, design, and dedicate in Los Alamos an international peace statue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I argue that such projects foreground durability : the slow grind of rhetorical action, its reliance on multiple texts composed and circulated over a span of years, across numerous sites, and encompassing multiple languages, registers, and media. Furthermore, through retrospective interviews with participants who contributed to this effort as children, I investigate the power of embodied learning to create durable literacy experiences—experiences that these participants reflect on vividly even twenty years after the statue was first assembled. Ultimately, understanding both objects and public writing as distributed networks foregrounds the attention to durability that I suggest needs to accompany our embrace of an ecological, distributed model of public writing.

In this interview, Paula Mathieu explores the rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices necessary to cultivate hope in a period of political tumult. Drawing on her scholarship on the “public turn” in Composition Studies, a term she gave us in her vital Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition , Mathieu discusses tactics and strategies for teaching public writing and supporting the work of public writing teachers at a time when community partnerships and service learning are more susceptible to critique in political discourse. Mathieu traces out a synthesis between mindfulness and public engagement and underlines the importance of seeing the contemplative as productive and reflective of public engagement.

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?,” Wells discusses the possibilities public writing instruction holds for cultivating students’ public agency, while also exploring the boundaries between what can and cannot be accomplished in the public writing classroom.

This article asks, “what in the broad and excessive definitions of composition and rhetoric keeps us from talking about personality and temperament alongside other issues of identity?” Pulling from scientists, queer theorists, and composition scholars, I explore the lived experiences of introverts and highly-sensitive people, which often spill outside the boundaries of dominant structures in composition. I consider the price paid by highly-sensitive people who may move at a different pace and find their ways of working and experiencing the world devalued in the field. Using personal narrative and a momentary high-sensing lens on the work of Donald M. Murray, I assert that there are those who thrive best in small group or one-to-one interpersonal relations, and I argue that these are issues of identity and social justice for those who find themselves on the temperamental margins in composition and in a western society that has an extrovert ideal.

Scholarship on metacognition in the composition classroom shows how asking students to create reflective texts can help cue, analyze, and assess transfer. By following the composition processes of 13 students doing a remixing assignment, this project examines how genre mediates reflection. I use Rhetorical Genre Studies’ conception of uptake—focusing on the selection process of choosing a genre and the eventual genre production—to examine students’ reflective practice within this assignment. Tracing the students’ uptake selection processes and comparing them to what students reflect about in their reflective texts reveals how reflection is mediated through genre. I argue that reflective practice should take place through a variety of genres throughout the composition process, rather than just retrospectively on the finished product. Asking students to do multi-genred reflective writing throughout the composition process could allow students to map their uptake selection processes more effectively when moving across multimodal genres.

Recently, rhetorical genre studies scholars have challenged the field to de-center the study of genre as artifact to focus on the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain how those genres get used by writers: the genre uptakes. While prior research has begun to identify many of these consequential influences, these endeavors would benefit, I argue, from an emic, writer-oriented method that follows what writers perceive has impact on genres from a longitudinal and trans-contextual perspective. To that end, I extend previous research by introducing lifeworld analysis to the study and teaching of genre uptake. Lifeworld analysis, I argue, centralizes uptake, uptakes over time, and the background life from which uptakes are formed, as salient for literacy development. To support this claim, I present a lifeworld case study of one student (Ron), an electrical engineering major and participant in local and online maker culture, who I followed over four years of his undergraduate curriculum, from general education and discipline-specific courses into an online and local community makerspace. Ron’s case reveals the interplay between maker-consciousness and encounters with engineering and general education writing, highlighting how maker culture became a core scene of uptake for his performance of school-based genres. This lifeworld analysis shows the porousness and malleability of spheres of writing activity as well as the consequences of such perceived malleability for writers. Ron’s case grounds my introduction of an uptake awareness pedagogy: an attempt to help students recognize and strategically draw from expanded and often taken-for-granted temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories of their prior genre uptakes and those uptake histories.

This article argues that the field of Rhetoric and Composition has long harnessed the active potential of metaphor to change its own practices but has considerably overlooked student use of metaphor—a particularly urgent oversight given the metaphorical battleground that constitutes the discourse of contemporary higher education. Using this exigency, the article 1) explains how a more thorough reading of Lakoff and Johnson’s popular work on metaphor theory can re-energize Rhetoric and Composition to be more inclusive of student experiences in classroom coverage of metaphor and 2) offers imaginative but concrete pedagogical approaches and activities aimed at facilitating student learning of metaphor in the context of a consumer-based “University of Excellence.”

As multimodal writing continues to shift and expand in the era of Big Data, writing studies must confront the new challenges and possibilities emerging from data mining, data visualization, and data-driven arguments. Often collected under the broad banner of data literacy , students’ experiences of data visualization and data-driven arguments are far more diverse than the phrase data literacy suggests. Whether it is the quantitative rhetoric of “likes” in entertainment media, the mapping of social sentiment on cable news, the use of statistical predictions in political elections, or the pervasiveness of the algorithmic phrase “this is trending,” data-driven arguments and their accompanying visualizations are now a prevalent form of multimodal writing. Students need to understand how to read data-driven arguments, and, of equal importance, produce such arguments themselves. In Writing through Big Data, a newly developed writing course, students confront Big Data’s political and ethical concerns head-on (surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic filtering) by collecting social network data and producing their own data-driven arguments.

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.

Occluded genres in academia work “behind the scenes” to support and develop an academic’s professional identity. However, while significant attention has been paid to occluded genres that support an academic’s identity as a researcher, very little scholarship examines how occlusion operates in genres of pedagogy, such as the syllabus, teaching statement, or assignment prompt. These genres promote and endorse an academic’s teacherly identity, not only by expressing a teacher’s authority and expertise in the classroom, but also by representing a teacher’s pedagogical philosophy, activity, and experience in other academic scenarios beyond the classroom. In this article, I explore the characteristics of occlusion associated with these genres as well as the implications faced when their rhetorical complexity is obscured by that occlusion. Ultimately, I argue for an increased awareness and study of the occluded contexts of pedagogical genres so that we may better understand how these genres facilitate the pedagogical activity and identities of teachers within academia.

To clarify the role of desire in discursive practice, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and Lacanian theories of the unconscious. The former, it is argued, might be refined to shed more light on actors’ unconscious investments in and resistance to the desires maintained by genres. The latter, meanwhile, might be refined to address how desires are materialized in concrete situations. These refinements can be achieved when the two approaches are synthesized in a theory that figures genres as resources by which actors coordinate and materialize desires. This argument is developed through an extended investigation of students’ desires to perform particular kinds of identities as they compose career portfolios.

This article proposes a “pedagogy of riffing” and examines how satire and some earlier forms of metacommentary can help first-year composition students appreciate the mediated nature of contemporary current-events discourse. Beginning with comic news and working back to those pioneers of cultural riffing, Mystery Science Theater 3000 , this article examines the nexus of rhetorical awareness, citizenship, and riffing. I argue that using forms of metacommentary, situated within a pedagogy of riffing, helps students to locate themselves in the larger discussion of politics and informed citizenship.

Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw’s model of metacognition and Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness to outline four writing/rhetorical concepts within which meta-awareness about composition is observable. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity, and they provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how writers learn.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka’s approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka’s pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance—to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

In this interview, James Porter talks about his professional career and what he sees as the contemporary challenges for the field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. Throughout the exchange, Porter discusses his administrative concerns with the state of rhetoric in the field, the ongoing struggles with graduate education, the complexities of online writing instruction, and the potentials of programmatic collaboration. The interview concludes on a personal note about Porter’s scholarly trajectory, his collaborations, the fruits of his labor, and his advice for emergent scholars in the field.

In the field of rhetoric and composition, literacy narratives are sometimes framed through the idea of “inventing the university”; this, unfortunately, creates a trope of literacy as success. I argue that the success trope limits student expression of “outlaw” emotions in literacy narratives—like loss, pain, and anxiety—and as a result, flattens conceptions of literacy and glosses over complex student life experiences and positionalities (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.). This short pedagogical piece provides composition teachers with strategies that encourage students to identify a range of affective responses to the process of literacy acquisition.

Scholars have offered research and theory about emotional labor and the feeling of emotion in rhetoric and composition, but we have little if any such research on writing center work specifically. Drawing on data from a year-long qualitative study of writing center directors’ labor, this article examines writing center directors’ emotional labor as valuable yet undervalued, fulfilling yet fraught. Emotional labor was work our participants had to do—and often wanted to do and enjoyed doing—in order to accomplish (smoothly, swiftly, or at all) the other tasks on their to-do lists. Emotional labor included tasks such as mentoring, advising, making small talk, putting on a friendly face, resolving conflicts, making connections, delegating and following up on progress, working in teams, disciplining or redirecting employees, gaining trust, and creating a positive workplace. Ultimately, participants suggest that emotional labor is difficult not because they must devote so much time to it, but because they have not been adequately prepared to expect and negotiate it.

Empathy is attracting increased attention within and beyond the academy. In this essay I review relevant theories of empathy and their place within rhetoric and composition. I propose two approaches to teaching empathy: as rhetoric and as disposition. A rhetorical approach incorporates a necessary critical awareness of empathy’s enticements and limitations, while a dispositional approach cultivates empathy as a habit of mind. I argue that writing pedagogies of empathy as rhetoric and disposition are ideally suited to combine the cognitive and affective, critical awareness and practice, to inform not only our engagements with texts but also with one another.

Rhetoric and composition scholars’ almost exclusive reliance on Brian Massumi’s definition of affect has spurred a theoretical and practical divorce between “affect” and “emotion” in our field. This article returns to Lynn Worsham’s Going Postal and argues that to fully scrutinize and respond to what she calls “pedagogic violence,” affects and emotions must be theorized in tandem, especially as violent rhetorics increasingly spread through new media. Through a close reading of Massumi’s work, consideration of alternate affect theories, and discussion of Aristotle’s systematic theory of emotions, I illustrate how inseparable affects are from emotions. I examine the affects and emotions at work in a contemporary example of pedagogic violence—police brutality toward African Americans—and suggest new media not just contributes to but also disrupts violent rhetorics, damaging emotional educations, and negative affective relations, which I explore through a brief analysis of Twitter.

In this interview, Daniel M. Gross argues for an expansive rhetorical approach to emotion studies, one bridging composition, psychology, history, politics, and even theology. Speaking to compositionists, Gross begins by talking about writers’, teachers’, and administrators’ emotions, those possible and prohibited not in the classroom but in co-curricular activities—including tree-hugging. He also elaborates on his critique of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing for its exclusive focus on positive emotions. The conversation then touches on contemporary political issues such as the putative waning of affect in postmodern society, the revaluing of love in Third Wave feminist scholarship, the angry white male, and the BlackLivesMatter movement. Next, Gross brings his philosophical training to bear in discussing the vocabulary of emotion studies, including “pathos” and “affect,” and he addresses how students’, and prisoners’, writing can serve as a prosthetic for their sponsors’ emotional needs. The interview concludes with a comment about style.

In 2013, the Graduate School at North Carolina State University launched Thesis and Dissertation Support Services, a rhetorical, genre-based approach to assisting students with their graduate writing. Through a description of the program’s founding, goals, and first year of services, we summarize this genre-based approach that is informed by the work of Carolyn Miller, John Swales, Charles Bazerman, and Michael Carter. The goal of the program is to offer services to students writing theses and dissertations that will improve the quality of the work, increase degree completion rates, reduce time to degree, and, above all, develop life-long scholarly writers who are prepared to undertake the writing necessary to be successful in their careers. The theoretical concept of genre system provided a conceptual basis for achieving these connected goals, and each of the workshops, seminars, or other events that we host focuses on a single genre, a genre system, or subgenres related to graduate education. This profile describes our approach to the services through a description of our institutional context, core offerings, and a summary of reflections and lessons learned after a year of offering these services, concluding with recommendations for other writing program professionals who may want to establish similar support for graduate students and a summary of changes to our program after one year.

This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to “night-vision goggles,” that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a participating worksite. We adapt an RGS methodology developed by Anthony Paré and Graham Smart to create our course heuristic and add a more explicit framework for investigating concepts of genre set, genre system, and activity system. We argue that our course design addresses transfer concerns by helping students develop meta-awareness, or specifically critical genre awareness, that they can then apply to future workplace writing situations.

In the U.S., international enrollment trends have increased the pedagogical imperative to address multilingual graduate student writers’ linguistic needs/growth in the process of their developing disciplinary expertise. In the context of this internationalization effort, what can two disciplines—Applied Linguistics and Composition—constructively offer in terms of a pedagogical approach to address such growing institutional demands? With regard to the various ways in which these disciplines approach the teaching and learning of disciplinary expertise, what might a research-informed English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) curriculum arc look like and how might multilingual graduate writers respond to such an integrated pedagogical trajectory? Further, to what extent might such a curriculum be able to balance evolving student needs and institutional expectations for students’ linguistic development? This program profile examines the potential of Tardy’s 2009 model for building genre knowledge among a specific student population: first-year multilingual international graduate students enrolled in a "bridge" program at George Mason University. In addition to describing the practical work of enacting Tardy’s model at the program and course levels, the authors detail the results of a related study aimed at exploring students’ development of genre knowledge over the course of the bridge year. Results point to the complexity of designing and implementing an EAP/RGS-informed course structure which values the intersectional nature of disciplinary knowledge development and suggest the need for such an approach to explicitly foreground the visibility of language teaching, learning, and assessment in order to ease student anxiety around both language and genre development.

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.