“Robbins’ greatest contribution in this book is her ability to move analysis beyond a passive stance, showing how archives can teach and inspire collaboration beyond their initial historical moment through the use of reflection.”

“While sexism is a backdrop for diverse women’s professional narratives in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle’s collection Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition, Kirsti Cole and Holly Hassel’s edited collection, Surviving Sexism in Academia, brings sexism uncompromisingly into the foreground as contributors define, explore and strategize responses to sexism in higher education.”

“Together, these two books present a strong justification for incorporating social media into schooled literacies because youth are engaging with social media, and bringing them into schooled literacies allows educators to foster critical thinking and awareness of these technologies.”

Our managing editors will be taking a short break between approximately June 16th and July 22nd, 2019. We will still be accepting submissions during that time, and we will be happy to process them for review when we return in mid July. Thank you for your understanding as we take this time to work on […]

“In this special issue, the authors examine a range of contexts of care to show how technical communicators and rhetoricians of health and medicine can work at the intersections of health, wellness, and culture to contribute to healthcare practice.”

“What our experience showed us is that communicating care in context requires a relentless engagement with stakeholders in context and a sophisticated understanding of the way ethics, history, sociology, politics and science affect one’s ability to experience feeling cared for.”

“By understanding these documents through memory and re-memory as a rhetorical function, rhetoricians of health and medicine may possess a more nuanced understanding of consent and literacy within a tribal context.”

“At La Escuelita, culture consists of everyday practices shaped by collective traditional beliefs and attitudes passed down from generation to generation and expressed organically by members of a community. Members participate in activities and events that reclaim, embrace, and promote shared cultural experiences that solidify traditions.”

“I argue that the yuesao’s postpartum care, unlike the care practices Derkatch examines in Newsweek reports, and JAMA and Archives theme issues, employs a true integrative approach that affirms the practices and underlying theories of multiple conceptual frameworks.”

“We call for more ethnographic and engaged approaches to research on cross-cultural visual health communication. We also provide recommendations for navigating the translation spaces of visual health communication with a design process that works from the ground up.”

“To what extent are biomedical products designed in industrialized nations contextualized to enhance health care and patient safety in underdeveloped countries that are using such products?”

Present Tense would like to welcome our new Annotated Bibliography Editor Matt Cox, an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. Matt has a background in Cultural Rhetorics and in technical and professional communication and will take over the responsibilities of providing developmental editing assistance for all new annotated bibliographies. Currently, Dr. Cox is working on […]

Present Tense would like to congratulate Patricia Fancher for being accepted into The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric & Composition, 2018 (Parlor Press). Patricia’s article, “Composing Artificial Intelligence: Performing Whiteness and Masculinity,” was published in Vol. 6 Iss. 1. Congrats!

“It’s time again to welcome a new issue of Present Tense – volume 7, issue 2. Though not a special issue, this edition includes articles on an array of topics that coalesce around public and visual rhetorics.”

“I am also drawn to the margins: I am drawn, though, away from the pages of a book and into those margins emerging from the shadows of brick and concrete and steel, of places that are out of place, on whose surfaces we play in other embodied ways.”

“Though all representations of publics are limited because researchers filter the lived experiences of others through their own perspectives to create representative compositions, sonic collages uniquely allow for a multitude of material voices to participate within compositions that highlight each participant’s singular corporeality.”

“The rhythmanalyst, composing with ambient visualities, elicits the rhythmic momentariness of matter. By looping the rhythm in things, animated GIFs reveal an ambient visuality evoking the wondrous warp of being in which we may linger, again and again.”

“When certain university offices—including administrators, marketers, and others—accede to representations of higher education as an engine of the market, they require students to behave individualistically and competitively in the classroom, that is, to behave a market-oriented citizenship.”

“As the book evidences, the difficulties in making change in the healthcare system are many; however, Arduser’s rhetorical work here that bridges patient agency with patient empowerment and shared decision-making aligns well with the recommendations of policy analysts as well as the U.S. government agencies such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.”

“Throughout this work, Pritchard’s methodology offers a useful intervention for future rhetorical considerations of literacy: by focusing not on the meaning createdthrough literacy but the meaning his participants give to literacy, Pritchard importantly shifts the focus of his study from literacy being something enacted onto something enacted by.”

“Asen contends that an education marketplace works in opposition to democratic citizenship, as elucidated by Dewey, because it “operates without a notion of a public good” where financial considerations are always at the fore.”

“Present Tense would like to congratulate andré carrington for being accepted into The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals, 2017 (Parlor Press). André’s article, “Implicating the State: Black Lives, A Matter of Speculative Rhetoric,” was published in Vol. 5 Iss. 2. Congrats!”

“Collectively, these articles focus our attention on issues of identity, inclusion, and social justice in realms ranging from sites of education to historical signage, to bathroom placards, to music, and to television. Taken together, these articles offer a view of how rhetoric shapes and is shaped by the multifaceted world around us in profound ways.”

“In an era of increasingly vocal and political challenges to and distrust of education at all levels, what happened to MAS may be less of an anomalous tragedy than a harbinger of what’s to come. These teachers’ responses illustrate the splintering, echoing effects of political and judicial decisions on teachers, schools, and education.”

“While I do not propose that the signage is simply a denial of the ontological character of the surrounding spaces, I do assert that the signs create an ontological impression that we experience as a result of the rhetorical absences in the narrative.”

“Rhetoric and other humanities instructors eager to teach topics on sustainability and food systems, which some call the most significant environmental issues of our time, can rely on campus experts with practitioner knowledge of these topics as well as campus activists engaged in these issues.”

“When we consider the range of transgender restroom placards, that there is no standard design evidences a kind of unstable assemblage that itself represents the social change currently underway concerning LGBTQ rights. For sure, there is still no consensus on these changes”

“The Nazis of WWII-era Germany famously co-opted the music of Wagner and classic Greek and Roman sculpture for propaganda purposes, but the white supremacists and neo-fascists who carry on their legacy today have found a more fitting tool to win the hearts and minds of today’s youth towards the cause: loud rock music.”

“Mr. Robot speaks to the increasing complex constructions of ethos in a multimodal media ecology. That there is no position of pure and absolute sincerity, that we are all imbricated in the brutalities of capitalism, is not a novel idea; however, Mr. Robot as content seeks to agitate against the very forms of power that enable it”

“Brandt offers writing scholars, teachers of writing, and WAC program administrators, and consultants a way to understand writing as broadly as possible as it changes in practice and evolves in theory. Writing in the workplace, and everywhere else, happens in broad contexts and has vast social implications.”

“Hidalgo’s unique video book addresses feminist filmmaking professionals and students of rhetoric and composition as she argues that moving images made by rhetoricians are teachable, publishable, and tenure-worthy projects.”

“Not only are platforms rhetorical in the sense that they occupy a public imaginary that is discursively constructed via carefully crafted branding efforts, but they are also rhetorical in that their decisions produce effects in the world.”

“The tension between open authorship/open participation and the legal, cultural, and technological systems that shape them is ongoing today and will no doubt continue as we further blur the lines between physical life and online life.”

“Researchers must be mindful of the identities they create on social media, being sure to consider the ethics of these platforms as both user and researcher. Social media platforms are powerful research tools, but they are above all rhetorical, and therefore deserve our continued methodological attention.”

“Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space.”

“In the end, GamerGate activism resembles a churn of constant invention, moving from one celebrity to another, whether as friend or foe . Rather than possessing a single, authoritative argument, GamerGate welcomed whatever argument caught fire.”

“Yik Yak was simply too open, too democratic, too anonymous, and too ephemeral to survive in the monetization-driven world of social media platforms today. Unlike Snapchat, which we use as counterpoint in this article, Yik Yak appears to have been incompatible at the structural level with what we call corporate kairos.”

“Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform.”

“Reddit is like a tiny internet: a place full of memes that are often offensive and hilarious at once. A place for activism and knowledge-sharing, shitposting and trolling. A place where mob mentality and anonymity more often lead to abuse campaigns and conspiracy theories than not.”

“ Weapons of Math Destruction expands our methods and pedagogies for critically engaging with digital platforms and algorithms. The book enables, and urges us, to engage new sites, civic institutions, and new issues, the effects of algorithms on institutions, those served by the institutions, and our democracy which is enabled by those institutions.”

“Our new issue features articles on such a range of research, it’s hard to write about them all at once. Articles here focus on pedagogy, students’ rights, investigations of public rhetorics, and the political and social impact of rhetorical choices.”

“Expanding on this link between the Southern Strategy and neoliberalism, I argue proponents of municipal schools in Shelby County, TN, deployed a small government rhetoric of freedom and a neoliberal framework of self-regulation to codify the boundaries of white flight in the geospatial and discursive realms of the new school districts.”

“Media support particular modalities over others, and formally shape and ideologically infuse products based on their affordances. Hence, students must be able to analyze rhetorical contexts while problematizing simplistic definitions of access and efficacy. The concept of a “multimodal home place” provides a tool to help students become more mindful about technology use.”

“Programmatic positions statements are a tool for generating and shaping the discourse of a program or, at the very least, making clear what a program’s expectations of writing teachers are so that they have more information about how their responses to student writing might be viewed by those outside the student-teacher interaction.”

“A techno-utopian style, the aestheticization of new technology, and the valorization of perpetual revolution represent a shift away from the managerial and risk-oriented realism of prevailing free market discourse towards an unproblematic view of the technological future and works to hasten its arrival”

“It is critical that scholars explore not only the emergent movement to end aging but also the phenomenon of aging itself, and that they do so from humanistic as well as scientific perspectives.”

“Just as The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without LeBron, The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without NE Ohio. What comes to matter in circulation, as a result of circulation, is that The Essay is marked by its regional appeal.”

“Using Michael Warner and Christian Lundberg as a frame, I argue the best Kickstarters mobilize their publics’ affect via meaningful tropes baked into their project’s pitch while using synecdoche to offer that same public the chance to help create the text that binds them together.”

“As our bibliography of roughly 200 items reveals, composition has long been readying itself for an encounter with religion. Though religious discourse has presented many challenges to our field’s pedagogical and civic projects, the majority of scholars have refused to dismiss religious concerns and attitudes as mere impediments.”

“In the ongoing quest to account for rhetoric’s “dynamic and distributed dimensions,” then, Still Life with Rhetoric contributes a robust new materialist methodology to the burgeoning scholarly reconsiderations of the material, temporal and consequential things of collective life.”