This article, written as a response to Amy Robillard's article 'Pass It On: Revising the Plagiarism is Theft Metaphor,' approaches embodiment and plagiarism from a disability studies perspective. Vidali works to illuminate connections between plagiarism and disability such as passing, ownership, and policy. In doing so, she deftly presents the need for scholars, teachers, and administrators to re-think the processes by which these policies are developed and the problematic diagnostics of plagiarism. [Tara Wood, Margaret Price, & Chelsea Johnson, Disability studies, WPA-CompPile Bibliographies, No. 19]

A history and analysis of the uses of the term post-process in rhetoric and composition. Whicker presents a taxonomy of the ways post-process has been used in composition, critiques the term as a confuscation in all but the strongest applications, and critiques the tendency to construct narratives of change that involve ambiguous metaphors designed as a questionable power-move to discredit past scholarship in order to forward new theoretical perspectives.

In 1990, English department faculty at the University of Texas, Austin attempted to redesign first-year composition to help students think about civic issues and write reasoned arguments. The course was soon targeted by conservative critics who claimed it constituted “ideological advocacy” in writing classrooms. As the controversy exploded, it became a national touch point in America’s culture wars. The public attention has been seen in retrospect as a major factor in the course’s eventual cancellation, but public attention was necessary for both supporters and opponents to achieve their goals for the course. The conservative backlash that caused the course’s cancellation points less to the quality of the course than to the lack of ethos of Rhetoric and Composition specialists. If writing specialists hope to have authority with publics, there needs to be a general movement towards establishing common ground with publics that may hold views that contradict disciplinary commonplaces.