Mental health challenges, notably anxiety, disproportionately affect graduate students, with research indicating a 41% prevalence rate compared to the general population (Evans et al.). Academic writing anxiety (AWA) stands out among these concerns, correlating with lower grades, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (Martinez et al.; Daly and Wilson; Goodman and Cirka). Traditionally, AWA has been viewed through a cognitive lens, neglecting its complexity. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive survey gathering both quantitative and qualitative data on graduate students’ AWA experiences. Our analysis of student narratives unveils how academic cultures alienate marginalized students, fostering impostor syndrome and AWA. We advocate for integrating mindfulness-based and contemplative pedagogies within feminist and anti-racist frameworks (Mathieu and Muir; Inoue; Graphenreed and Poe) to catalyze transformative change amid this pressing historical moment.

The United States is undergoing unprecedented religious change, including an increasing diversity of religious tradition, rapid disaffiliation from conventional religious institutions, and a rise in syncretic and sometimes corporatized spiritualties. Given the speed and scope of these changes, all of which affect our students, rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) must undertake the study of spirituality. Insofar as RWS seeks to prepare students for democratic citizenship, it should engage in public discussion and study of the practices that appear to be replacing traditional religious observance. RWS has a special claim on spirituality studies, which have often undertaken scholarly work on writing, reading, and speaking practices. In fact, RWS has already begun to pursue this kind of scholarship, even if it does not always go by the name “spirituality.” This essay will therefore discern the ways in which RWS is engaged in this work, and it will offer reasons why we must engage it further.

Much of the research in composition about Hispanic-serving institutions focuses on the tripartite of writing program administrators, faculty, and students and the complexities of multilingual learner pedagogies. This article draws on conversational interview methods and data to analyze the servingness of three Floridian HSIs through critical race theory’s interest convergence thesis. The interest convergence thesis advances that institutional efforts toward racial equality will persist only so far as those efforts also preserve the interests of racial dominance in social institutions. Guided by an institutional critique and racial methodological approach, this interest convergence analysis examines the impact of culturally White institutional ideologies on general education writing curriculum choices, professional development, and the ethnic-racial cultural composition of institutional governance. Interviews with WPAs from the three institutions detail how the institutional epistemologies of literacy affect their decisions and opportunities for Latinx-centric programmatic servingness at their HSIs.

The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered. Culturally sustaining pedagogy explores, extends, and examines the experiences of students. Meaningful, experience-based, narrative writing assignments are suggested: memoir essays, ethnographic research reports, and multigenre interview projects. Analysis activities challenge students to examine a chosen experience through several scholarly lenses. By adding complex analysis to their writing, students gain a challenging new experience that considers past, present, and future influences upon their identity formation. Experience-based writing assignments make room for home language through dialogue and informal genres that include intentional code meshing and translingualing. This inclusion prompts questions about academic language conflicts and opens discussion about how language represents identity, negotiates hierarchies, and permits agency.

This article reports on an IRB-approved study conducted in a college preparation writing workshop. Using affect theory as a framework for exploring participants’ writing experiences, I theorize the phenomenon of affective rupture, a tension between the affect students experience while writing in school and their belief in the value of school-based writing. I describe three patterns of behavior students use to respond to affective rupture: downplaying their own ability or capacity, willing themselves to write, or becoming apathetic about writing. While these patterns are likely familiar to composition teachers, there has been little research exploring their affective roots. I also identify a fourth response that temporarily interrupts students’ negative affective trajectories. I provide a theoretical and practical understanding of this productive response, which I call hope. I conclude by suggesting how teachers might encourage and sustain hope.

Extending research on the relationships between materiality and process, this article examines how writers’ preferences for particular materials—places, technologies, objects—develop over time. With a specific focus on how materials affect writers and how writers are affected by their writing tasks, this article considers how writers’ histories of turning toward and turning against materials shape their writing processes. The findings of this research show that writers’ material practices register both materially and affectively and are echoed in writers’ processes years later and shape how processes evolve as writers learn to write in new contexts.

This piece examines the Writing Studies job market from a perspective not addressed in previous literature: accessibility. I draw on work in the field of disability studies to argue that accessibility does not only affect those people who identify as having a disability; rather, it is a concept that speaks to how well all candidates are able to participate in the procedures and expectations for a tenure-track job search. Focusing on interview formats, this article ultimately argues for more generous interview practices that take into account the various ways in which candidates might be disadvantaged by rigid structures.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a “sensual pedagogy” that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

Drawing on results from a survey distributed nationally through the WPA and WCenter listservs, we examine the affective aspect of failure in teachers’ responses to student writing, aiming to pinpoint teachers’ perceptions of why students fail. Overall, we posit that writing studies needs to pay closer attention to teachers’ emotional responses to student failure. This article represents a step in that direction.

Gretchen Flesher Moon’s 2003 analysis of emotion’s treatment in composition textbooks revealed that pathos "gets very short shrift" or none at all. Since then, however, conversations regarding affect and emotion have advanced in both scope and sophistication. This proliferation of scholarly activity has brought the passions of persuasion to a new level of prominence. This essay asks to what extent and in what ways these developments have manifested in representations of pathos in composition textbooks. In doing so, the article traces a through-line from Moon’s essay to now in order to provide a broader perspective of pathos in composition studies, and concludes with three recommendations for moving forward: 1) define emotion; 2) specify emotions; and 3) replace warnings and limits with complexity and curiosity.

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.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

In this essay, I propose a concerted effort to begin devising a theory and pedagogy of failure. I review the discourse of failure in Western culture as well as in composition pedagogy, ultimately suggesting that failure is not simply a judgement or indication of rank but is a relational, affect-bearing concept with tremendous relevance to composition studies.