Abstract Considering the recent erasure of LGBTQ+ representation in school curricula in states like Texas, this article explores the benefits of pairing medieval flytings (verbal battles with homophobic insults) in “Loki's Quarrel” from The Poetic Edda with recent homophobic discourse over rapper Lil Nas X's controversial music video “Montero.” It suggests that teaching such pairings of past and present queer texts and utilizing a range of inclusive practices and activities in the college classroom can highlight queer experiences and foster inclusion through representation. Through comparing insults that the trickster god Loki is ergi (a bottom) with Lil Nas X's Twitter defense reclaiming his agency as a “power bottom,” the article shows as well how homophobia and misogyny intersect in practices of medieval and modern bottom shaming. Moreover, it demonstrates how queer figures, whether in Viking culture or American pop culture, have always drawn power from queerness to challenge heteronormative masculinity.

AbstractThis article argues that the oral performance of personal monologues in first-year composition courses allows students to identify meaningfully with one another across difference at a time when the American political climate too often forecloses such opportunities. The author considers the opportunity personal monologue provides for parrhesia that recontextualizes the space in which deliberative discourse occurs. Drawing on a case study of the author's food-based composition course, this article provides supporting evidence for the power of performed personal monologue to encourage mutual identification among students that creates a new foundation for subsequent discourse.

Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to

In the winter of 2022, I had planned a place-based literature course on Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. A series of outings formed the backbone of the class: my aim was to have students connect to the place where they lived through experiences like standing atop the landfill to understand the afterlife of their waste and touring a colonial house to trace the violent foundations of the city's wealth. Instead, due to the omicron-variant surge, the course was largely conducted over Zoom and all but one outing became virtual. I found that a disorienting, nearly absurd sensation clouded the course when we discussed places that we should have been inhabiting together; instead of bridging the distance between the texts and the world, in the end, the course only accentuated that distance.Postcolonial/ecocritical place-based teaching is challenging for the precise reason that it is based on place and our places are changing now more than ever. And yet, as the kind of teaching the planet needs becomes more difficult, it also becomes more essential. In his foreword to Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, Graham Huggan asserts that “teaching is the most valuable thing we postcolonial/environmental scholars do” (xiv). Amid global health and ecological crises that perpetuate, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is a collection invaluable for its compilation of teaching ideas, resources, and commentary on the field of postcolonial environmentalism. But perhaps more importantly, it is invaluable for the sense of community it creates among educators who continue to dedicate themselves to a livable future.At its core, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media aims to show the analytical and pedagogical import of considering social and environmental injustices together through postcolonial ecocriticism. Editor Cajetan Iheka writes about the collection this way: “Taken together, the growing interest in postcolonial ecologies and the demand for a diversified curriculum addressing social concerns, including the climate crisis, makes this book a crucial contribution to the environmental humanities” (5). The majority of the essays are field-tested success stories of teaching postcolonial ecocriticism that offer a snapshot of the contributor's course. Most courses are literary, and while some are more typically environmental and others postcolonial, all experiment with the overlap of the two in exciting ways. The collection is particularly useful for teacher-scholars who know one side of the critical conversation—either postcolonialism or ecocriticism—and are wanting to bring the other to bear on their thinking and teaching.In recent years, postcolonialism has advanced the field of ecocriticism, a field long dominated by a Euro-American epistemology that put forth romanticized imaginings of pristine nature and prioritized wilderness conservation. While this hegemonic strand of environmentalism was challenged by scholars from a range of social and disciplinary perspectives, stoked in part by the US environmental justice movement in the 1990s, the conspicuous dearth of postcolonial analysis from ecocriticism remained. Due in part to the contributions of major critics like Graham Huggan, Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, the second decade of the twenty-first century has come to mark what Iheka calls “the ecocritical turn in postcolonial studies,” characterized by increased critical attention to “the inextricability of colonial plundering from environmental conditions” (1). The recognition that colonialism and neocolonialism—and the world order they uphold—are dependent on land theft, resource extraction, and the degradation of Indigenous cosmologies with devastating consequences for people and the environment has fundamentally impacted both postcolonial and environmental studies, leading to the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism.This collection contributes to the critical project of postcolonial ecocriticism by emphasizing the practice of teaching it (even as you will also learn much about postcolonial ecocriticism itself from this impressive group of scholars invested in advancing and diversifying the field). Although there is now a number of major works that take up the study of postcolonial texts and environmental concerns, Iheka points out in his introduction that “none of them explores teaching postcolonial environmental texts” (3). Published in 2021, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is especially timely, as it responds to the growing demand by students that their education attend to past and present environmental and racial injustices. Uniquely positioned to expose these injustices, postcolonial ecocritical texts can help us teach the afterlives of colonialism that dually exploit local communities and environments.As you might expect from a collection that spans two fields, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is impressive in its scope and breadth: twenty-seven essays are organized into six sections. The geographic diversity of the literary and other cultural media analyzed in the book, and to a lesser extent the classrooms themselves, soundly positions the project in a global context. Together, the contributors draw on an “expanded sense of the postcolonial” (9) by including colonized spaces from the Global North in their discussions of the Global South. This approach is important, as it underscores shared systems of exploitation and solidarity outside region or nationhood. The collection also features canonical ecocritical and/or postcolonial texts like Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Month and a Day alongside newer ones like Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, making it valuable to faculty who teach introductory and advanced literature courses. Finally, as the title emphasizes, the book examines media other than literature, and several key articles focus on teaching visuals, a crucial component of many environmental humanities courses.The first five essays, which constitute “Part I: Background and Theoretical Foundations,” showcase the intersections among postcolonial ecocriticism and other major theoretical frameworks, including environmental justice, Indigenous, queer, disability, and place studies. In the opening essay, Byron Caminero-Santangelo is motivated by “the unique contributions that postcolonial ecocriticism could make to transformative ways of imagining the world and to possibilities for action” (23). Arguing that environmental justice struggles in the Global South “are neither belated nor peripheral” (24), he shows instead that these struggles foreground fundamental elements of injustice, such as the role of multinational and transnational actors, too often ignored in US-centric conversations of environmental justice. Even as Caminero-Santangelo writes toward a global conceptualization of environmental justice, he acknowledges the equal importance of paying attention to specific and local circumstances. Throughout, the collection is animated by this “generative tension” (26) between the universal and the particular that centers the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.Together the contributors to section 1 unsettle the United States and Europe as epistemological strongholds in mainstream environmentalism. In “Finding Balance: Disability and the Ecocritical Lens,” Roanne L. Kantor describes the limitations in how disability is generally studied in the Global North. When disability is approached as socially constructed, in which “impairment happens offstage, such that its causes cannot be politicized or legally redressed” (55), it elides bodily harms inextricable from environmental hazards and disparities in medical care, as in Sinha's Animal's People and Rohinton Mistry's Fine Balance. Similarly, Brady Smith's “Place and Postcolonial Megacities: A Project-Based Approach” redresses the historic exclusion of urbanity in Euro-American literary traditions of “place” through a project-based course that examines how Okorafor's Lagoon complicates many students’ preconceived ideas of the environment.Pedagogy takes center stage in “Part II: Global Ecologies and Uneven Flows.” Each contributor shows how the study of postcolonial environmental literature necessarily shapes the structure and aims of their courses. Examples include creating opportunities for students “to discover their own power” through assignments like an open-ended field journal (81). In Margaret Anne Smith's “Decolonizing the Environmental Classroom: Increasing Student Agency through a Journal Assignment,” excerpts from these journals enable student voices to dominate that essay. Perhaps most radical, Elaine Savory describes a course that integrates lecturers from various environmental fields in the close reading of literary texts. Together, the essays in part 2 demonstrate how postcolonial ecocriticism is by definition interdisciplinary and intersectional because, as Savory puts it, “to think about the environment in postcolonial space is to think globally and locally at once, beyond disciplines and across time” (105).More localized considerations of postcolonial ecocriticism are featured in “Part III: Regional and Local Perspectives,” and Christina Gerhardt opens the section with a region that exemplifies climate injustice: the Pacific Islands. In her environmental humanities course, students explore the threat of sea level rise and the politics of representation as they view map collections and read Pacific Island literature, including Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter and Craig Santos Perez's From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. In choosing an island to represent in both essay and map form, students in the course are primed to think through ideological questions like who and what is centered in each representation and to what effect. Other essays develop these themes of positionality and audience. I particularly appreciate Salma Monani's honest appraisal of her pedagogical decision, as a woman of color in a majority-white classroom, to begin her introductory environmental course with “voices and situations familiar to [her] students” (132), even as the choice delays introducing Indigenous perspectives (Yurok, Hoopa, and Karuk) until a case study on water wars in the Klamath River Basin.While the third section brings together essays on a range of regions, from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean to Latin America, it concludes with the challenges of using region as an organizing principle. There needs to be more attention on the Global East as colonizer and as colonized, Simon C. Estok insists, at the same time that teacher-scholars need to acknowledge the vast heterogeneity among East Asian nations. This work includes serious obstacles, not least of all because “teaching postcolonial East Asian ecocriticisms outside the region means teaching in a language and culture not of the region” (172). While most of ecocriticism is conducted in English, Estok includes untranslated Korean to highlight how “an inability to read something means an inability to receive the information contained in that writing” (172). Readers will find that Estok's essay resonates with critical linguistic conversations outside of this collection, including those on the politics of language in postcolonial writing, the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages, and the need to diversify standard academic English in composition studies.“Part IV: The Lives of Animals” introduces the more-than-human community as an essential element of postcolonial environmental teaching. Although animal rights are often pitted against human rights—with one taking precedence over the other—essays by Jonathan Steinwand, Amit R. Baishya, and Jason Price eschew the hierarchal thinking that justifies environmental, racial, and (neo)colonial violence. Instead, both Steinwand and Baishya formulate courses that emphasize multispecies entanglement and, as Baishya defines, “the mutual constitutiveness of the human and the animal” (199). Price confronts the vexed animal studies debate on how to interpret cultural renditions of animals by teaching animist-realist African literature. Instead of reading animals as wholly outside symbolic meaning or not, Price helps students work toward “metaphoric-material approaches [that] successfully blend treatments of animals as literal and nonliteral without denying or backgrounding the animal” (221).Rhonda Knight and Mary Laffidy, a professor and a student, respectively, open the next section with a question that many of their co-contributors in the Global North grapple with: what scaffolding is required to help Western students engage responsibly with literature from other parts of the world? Their course focuses on speculative petro-fiction, in which new worlds are built on African and Caribbean cultures. Knight and Laffidy choose not to provide contextual resources directly but to create a multimodal assignment that guides students to fill in their own knowledge gaps. Students keep a reading journal and then rewrite parts of their journal for a public blog, building their capacity for research and communication in global digital contexts.The essays in “Part V: Extractive Ecologies, Environmental Justice, and Postcolonial Ecomedia” experiment with media that allow for new forms of storytelling. To understand art as a tool of empire and resistance, students compare hegemonic representations of the Caribbean with Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié’s exhibit Imagined Landscapes, in which bright colors are notably absent from his paintings and glitter reflects viewers’ faces, details that lead students to consider their own role in the exoticism and exploitation of the Caribbean landscape (Charly Verstraet). (This essay immediately made me want to learn more about the exhibit and to incorporate more art in my classes.) Another course describes the digital project Colonize Mars, “part choose-your-own adventure novel, part nonfiction account of Mars exploration past and future, and part video game” (273), created by Rachel Rochester (and now available to the public) for students to contend with interplanetary colonization and terraforming, as well as to envision alternative, sustainable futures.What will strike you over and over as you move through Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media is the reminder that the stakes of our teaching are high. “Effective environmental pedagogy,” Rochester writes, “must expose the ideological miasma that normalizes colonial violence and its trail of environmental and social catastrophe while invigorating learners to identify alternative means of inhabiting the world” (274). The final section of the collection, “Part VI: Place-Based Approaches,” highlights pedagogical methods that engender these alternative means of inhabiting the world by rooting students in place. In “Ecocriticism in Nigeria: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy,” Sule Emmanuel Egya outlines the challenges and rewards of teaching ecocriticism in a country where the field remains relatively new and of incorporating place-based practices. Class trips to “ecological zones” around campus cultivate students’ concern for local environmental conditions alongside the desire to become agents of change. Additionally, in their significant contribution to the collection, Kristin Lucas and Gyllian Phillips contemplate how to resist a place-based pedagogy that reinforces settler colonialism by centering Indigenous texts that ask their settler students in Canada to engage with the continuance of colonization, as well as restorative human-land relations.Far from being provincial or parochial, the place-based courses shared in the last section illustrate the relevance of the local in studies of the global and offer expansive imaginings of what place-based education can be. For example, comparative learning is presented as place-based when images of oil spills in Ogoniland and writings by Saro-Wiwa lead students in Malaysia to make connections between the power structures that govern both postcolonial places in what Shalini Nadaswaran describes as a “text-to-world-to-self sequence” (324). In the final essay, Sarah Dimick and Cheryl Johnson follow a similar sequence in writing about students in a postcolonial literature course visiting a Chicago-based environmental justice organization. The experience is guided by pragmatics—bringing students to locales depicted in the literature would have required international travel—but also politics: “Without domestic context, students from relatively unpolluted areas of the United States who enroll in a postcolonial environmental literature course may inadvertently come to associate sacrifice zones . . . with distant geographies” (349). For faculty or administrators who need to be encouraged to include field trips in university courses, this concluding essay showcases the critical, reciprocal, and hopeful learning that can happen when students engage with environmental justice community work.While too often “place” is reserved for the rural and place-based teaching as excursions into “nature,” this collection integrates throughout pedagogical methods that invite the careful study of varied places, including urban and built environments. In her book that asserts the specificity of global connections, Anna Tsing (2005: 3) asks, “Where would one locate the global in order to study it?” We might read each essay in the collection as a response to that question. In fact, one of the most provocative moments in relation to place-based approaches appears outside the section labeled as such in “The Colonial Relation between Digitization and Migration in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West” when Sofia Ahlberg asks students to track their online activity, calculate its corresponding carbon footprint, and “imagine which part of the world their finger actually affects as they click and drag on their devices” (246). While it is difficult to find any serious shortcomings with this smart and capacious collection, brushes with the virtual world like this one made me wish that explicit discussion of online courses had been included, especially given the challenges of making local, material environments come to in virtual Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media will teacher-scholars in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism to bring students to the place where the two to For an this collection, not only in the need for more postcolonial ecocritical teaching but also in the capacity to make to own course or the book, you will as you are in a of their and and, because course and are you will that it is more than to For the of the the contributors to this collection that you

Abstract In this commentary, the author urges educators to consider how the discourse of best practices emerges out of and legitimizes neoliberalism's logic of differential worth.

AbstractThis article describes a creative public humanities project undertaken to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that transformed the entire novel into an erasure poem made by incarcerated and nonincarcerated participants. The article traces its genesis, outlines the pedagogies that informed it, and closely reads one image from the erasure poem as a touchstone for reflecting on the lessons learned from the project. It also addresses the absence of critical discussions of failure in the discourse of the public humanities.

Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

Abstract This article examines the construction of and contestation over the idea of the nation through contemporary popular cinema in India. Building on his experience of discussing the Bollywood spy thriller Raazi (2018) in an English class, the author proposes that “reading” the film in terms of gender and genre can not only help students apply modes of textual analysis to narratives in other media but also alert them to the location of such narratives within larger discursive frameworks of defining national identities. Raazi presents a critical and ideological counterpoint to the generic conventions of the spy thriller within the increasingly polarized sociopolitical context of the Indian subcontinent. The film presents an unlikely female protagonist as both the physical agent and the psychological subject of the violence integral to the “action” of an espionage film. It also interrogates the oppositional relation between the patriotic “self” and the foreign “other” that lies at the basis of the militaristic conception of the nation and ultimately reveals the shared human vulnerability of both to the traumatic effects of pursuing the idea(l) of nationalism at the expense of individual moral integrity. Thus a close reading of the film's narrative structure and conventions, as well as a critical engagement with the historical context of its production and reception, can be pedagogically fruitful ways of understanding and critiquing the processes through which a nation is collectively imagined into being.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

Abstract Graduate students must learn to read as professionals who move their reading work into spoken and written discourse. This study borrows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's description of transcontextualizing moves to examine how graduate students use social annotation to develop as readers. Specifically, the study examines graduate reading practices through think-aloud protocols and archived annotations of three readers enrolled in a doctoral literacy seminar. Findings suggest that graduate readers may benefit from opportunities to reflect on how the technologies of annotation contribute to the transcontextualization of their reading across time and space.

This article shows how diversity discourse and programming function as a dominant pedagogy by highlighting three commonplace approaches to diversity: as a defense to mitigate a problem, as a commodity to be collected, and as a threat to those in privileged positions. The authors intervene in these approaches by forwarding a difference-driven pedagogy, which seeks to foster movement toward the practice of deliberation, the recognition of difference as in flux, and the willingness to be vulnerable in engaging the complex, messy work of difference.

Classroom writing assessment practices can interrogate white supremacy through the way readers judge student writing. Furthermore, writing assessments designed and engaged in as ecologies offer social justice projects that can explore judgment as a racialized discourse. The author demonstrates one application of an antiracist writing assessment ecology through a practice called “problem posing the nature of judgment and language” and discusses the problem posing of two ecological places in the class.

This article argues that to help students join academic conversations we should look for opportunities to integrate multimedia texts into the classroom, both as artifacts to study and as models for assignments. In contrast to traditional assignments like response papers, projects that invite students to engage with texts and ideas in multiple ways—digital, oral and nonverbal, and visual, as well as through writing—can make our classrooms and academic conversations more accessible and inclusive. Often our students struggle with not what to say but how to say it in an academic register; using a more accessible and inclusive approach creates space for students to join the conversation while they are still learning the norms of academic discourse. Drawing on my experience teaching a freely accessible online adaptation of a classic novel, I emphasize that models of more inclusive and accessible ways for students to respond to course material can be found all around us. I offer teachers strategies and a rationale for integrating more digital texts, tools, and platforms into their course and assignment design.

Suggesting that higher education is at a pivotal time regarding the influx of veteran students on campus, this and the following essays argue that faculty have an ethical obligation to investigate and, if appropriate, respond to the veteran student demographic enrolled in two- and four-year institutions. We hope to encourage language, literature, and writing faculty to rethink their preconceptions of war, warriors, and military culture—to ask hard questions about what we know about the wars, the people who fight them, their families, and the public narratives that have controlled our access to “combat operations.” We encourage faculty to engage the complexities of war, to honor the complicated questions and dilemmas military members face, and to understand how those questions will likely filter into classrooms, social interactions, and broader national discourse. We provide our colleagues with an opportunity to hear veteran voices in the hope that classroom teachers can have some grounds on which to reconsider and engage with the culture of war. We have an opportunity to theorize classroom practices that are in clear contact with veteran experiences and, more important, an opportunity to engage with veterans and service members not simply as objects of study but as colleagues.

This article seeks to center what lies before, beside, and beyond normative modes of linguistic communication in the classroom and in literary scholarship. Framed by my experiences with my disabled brother, I focus mainly on Disability and Difference, a section of English 2 that I developed and taught at Brooklyn College for five semesters between 2008 and 2010. Throughout, I pay particular attention to mental disability; stigmatized and silenced, it is often unspoken and unspeakable. I begin by outlining some of the ways that students can benefit from exploring disability and how it frustrates linguistic representation. I then discuss ways that academic discourse, as well as pedagogical practices and policies, may begin to better account for mental disability. I conclude by briefly considering a kind of disability aesthetics that privileges the inarticulate and inarticulable, one that might allow students and scholars to appreciate the extent to which literary studies is already enriched by the same kinds of non-normative articulations that are deprivileged in our modes of formal discourse.

This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.

This article shares tactics for teaching Blu’s Hanging as a text assigned because of its controversy, though not necessarily subsumed by it. The novel is presented so as to grapple with the stakes of ethnic/racial representation alongside careful textual analysis, using the controversy around Yamanaka’s work to “teach the conflicts” of literary studies.

This response to the articles collected in this cluster observes that many analysts have constructed a “survivor” discourse surrounding graduate education, offering solutions at the level of individual choice and agency. The author argues instead for the critical importance of addressing academic employment structurally.

Margaret Atwood’s recent dystopian fiction depicts a troubled food system that calls into question our own patterns of production and consumption. These matters of food politics provide fertile ground for a pedagogy that is both critical and grounded in real-world pragmatics.

Educational theorists emphasize the importance of creating a classroom environment that encourages positive or productive student resistance to dominant social discourse. This article revisits work in critical pedagogy, feminism, and composition by focusing on the challenges of teaching a first-year writing course on the theme of masculinity. The gender imbalance of this class, with a majority of male students, combined with the course theme, contributed to an environment that raised unanticipated questions, which prompted the reconsideration of the intersections of critical, feminist, and composition pedagogies. In this class, the dynamics worked against a process of critical inquiry and reflection and instead often reified dominant view-points and social positions, specifically with respect to gender. This article concludes with evidence of how practices in composition studies, especially student-instructor conferences, helped to redirect some of the reactive resistance encountered in the classroom.

The outsider ethos established by Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray in their early books is a driving force behind process pedagogy. Close textual analysis of these theorists can help writing instructors better understand the role of ethos in process pedagogy and in their own teaching.

Strong writers often implicitly know how to create strong titles by managing audience expectations to draw interest and describe information. This article makes these internalized strategies explicit for all writers. The list of eighteen forms and examples provides students with concrete starting points to create an engaging preview. Creating the title allows students to think globally about their projects, as well as to signal their entrance into academic discourse. By mixing and matching forms from the list of strategies, students learn to concisely and coherently relay the content of their papers to an academic audience.

This article details a newspaper-based composition exercise focused on examining coverage of a trio of local political sex scandals. The exercise encouraged first-year composition students to analyze how the rhetorical strategies that the New York Post used in covering these three similar scandals—which involved former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, then-current New York governor David Paterson, and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey—differed markedly depending on the Post’s then-relationship to each political figure. In the exercise, students chose several articles at random from a selection of newspaper clippings about these scandals and wrote any interesting headlines, epithets, or descriptions of cartoons they had found on the section of the board dedicated to each governor; students then used the evidence gathered in each section to generate and support thesis statements about the Post’s differing coverage of the three governors’ scandals. This examination through close reading of the Post’s rhetorical strategies in covering parallel sex scandals inspired thoughtful discourse among my composition students, including an increased appreciation of and interest in the news media, an improved understanding of the strategies that scholars use when they gather and interpret textual evidence, and intelligent discussions about the implications of rhetorical strategies utilizing Otherness.

This article contends that the pedagogical discourse of “integrative learning” fails to promote cross-disciplinary learning on university campuses, taking as a case study a recent controversy over the proposed renaming of a university dormitory named after famed anti-abolitionist Stephen Douglas.

Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

This article on digital writing identifies a range of genres that are employed by gamers, many of which evince dialogic rhetoric. Such discourse offers potential to decenter group power relations and thus suggests an opportunity to promote a democratic classroom.

Ruminating on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick around failed pedagogy and a confused cat, I consider ways to provoke new streams of critical thought in my composition students around issues of gender and sexuality without “pointing.” Thinking about Jean Genet's novel Querelle and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name, I delineate the specifics of how I teach these two difficult, often incomprehensible texts in an introductory class. In reviewing the confusion these works can provoke in student discourse upon reading and viewing the texts, I emphasize the role of disorientation and dislocation in the mapping of student thinking and writing, ultimately reemphasizing the importance of nondemagogic, malleable pedagogy in the teaching of sexuality and gender, particularly with composition students who are exploring and amplifying their voices. Teaching Querelle is like unleashing a virus of confusion and intrigue on student writers, but the incoherence it creates also creates opportunities to explore new ideas and horizons in these developing thinkers/writers.

Students' writing of parody can provide a more persuasive vehicle than conventional academic writing to move students from their intuitive awareness of irony to critical analysis of rhetorical strategies. Combining parody writing with strong critical reflection can encourage a more complex view of language choices, audience identification, genres, and persuasion.

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind elicited a storm of critical discourse regarding the condition of higher education in the United States. This essay performs a retrospective evaluation of the rhetorical modes that animated that body of discourse, suggesting that the polemical responses offered by Bloom's detractors validate his claims about the contradictory ways that openness, tolerance, and diversity are pursued in the university. Revisiting this controversy provides an opportunity for considering the ethics of the academic polemic.

This essay explores strategies for teaching texts that are critical of an untempered pursuit of wealth to business students, although many of these students have chosen their course of study based on their internalization and privileging of capitalist discourse. Karl Marx's “Estranged Labour,” Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Muhammad Yunus can be used in the classroom to encourage students to broaden their understanding of wealth, power, and class and to suggest that they, in their professional lives, may be agents of social change. Pedagogical strategies employed in this first-year course include giving students responsibility for the direction of class discussions, so that their specific interests and agendas receive attention, and requiring that students personalize these texts that may seem distant to them by exploring their own experiences in the world of work and commerce in the context of the readings. By the end of the semester, the binary structure of their worldview has been challenged and, ideally, complicated.

The essay traces the genealogy and implications of the emergence of a discourse of ghosts, spectrality, hauntology, and phantoms within the rational machinery of the modern university. Moving across disciplines—including literature, sociology, physics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy—the article contends that the university is at a new moment of self-understanding.

Based on the experiences of three graduate assistant directors working in the Howe Writing Initiative, a joint WAC effort between Miami University's business school and English department, this essay introduces entrepreneurial consulting as a model for implementing WAC initiatives in different disciplines. The entrepreneurial consulting model emphasizes the need to establish an ongoing presence within a discourse community, to continually “sell” writing and rhetoric to both faculty and students, and to strategically use rhetoric to promote rhetoric.

Research Article| April 01 2004 The Limits of PC Discourse: Linking Language Use to Social Practice Marlia E. Banning Marlia E. Banning Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (2): 191–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-191 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Marlia E. Banning; The Limits of PC Discourse: Linking Language Use to Social Practice. Pedagogy 1 April 2004; 4 (2): 191–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-191 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.