Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]

Grace Boulanger Knoblauch, Abby A., and Marie E. Moeller, editors. Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice. Utah State University Press/University Press of Colorado, 2022. Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, edited by A. Abby Knoblauch and Marie E. Moeller, is an exceptional survey book for scholars invested in learning […]

Responding to the call for embracing mêtis in the classroom, this piece puts scholarship on embodiment and emergent gameplay in conversation with one another to explore a potential means of cultivating mêtic intelligence in the composition classroom by empirically examining how the open world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ( BOTW ) scaffolds mêtic intelligence and encourages mêtic strategies in its players. Founded in Jay Dolmage’s understanding of mêtis as a means to turn the tables on those with greater bie (brute strength) and Karen Kopelson’s use of mêtis as a means of subtle resistance, this piece takes a mixed methods approach and utilizes interview data to see what design elements of BOTW may be able to be brought into composition course design to help cultivate cunning in our students both inside and beyond the classroom.

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.

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.

In the following conversation, conducted asynchronously through email, three current and former editors discuss the role of publishing in creating a disciplinary identity. Speaking from the academic (Villanueva), digital (Selfe), and community (Parks), and, often crossing these three categories, the editors discuss how the field has failed to fully embrace the full range of cultural, economic, and gender experiences that have been present in our field since its founding. In doing so, they also note that this absence has continued despite the ability of new publishing technologies to incorporate a wider range of embodied experiences, non-traditional knowledges, and literacy practices.

Recent explorations position multimodality as a largely curricular practice wherein the body typically is not figured as a potential mode of meaning making.  Such a projection not only fails to acknowledge extracurricular uses of such a rhetoric but also fails to acknowledge the role of the body in and especially for composing.  In hopes of countering this limited yet common understanding of multimodality, I consider an Auburn University 2004 defensive football play and sketch a picture of how embodied multimodality figures heavily in the literate activity surrounding college football. I end with a brief word on how Gunther Kress’s theory of multimodality encompassing the material and the bodily—two important concepts at play when examining football as literate activity—informs classroom practice through paving the way for embodied multimodal pedagogies.  Ultimately, I hold that an analysis of extracurricular embodied multimodality in college football invites student-athletes to hone a beneficial form of second-nature embodied rhetoric absent in curricular multimodality.