Using the work of Keith Gilyard (Voices of The Self) and Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps) as models for interrogating his own development as a writer of color, Cagnolatti explores the way HipHop influenced his rhetorical education in the urban and militant environment of a Los Angeles magnet high school. Through his detailed analysis of the E.M.E.R.G.E.… Continue reading Battling to be Heard by Damon Cagnolatti

As a follow-up to his own article in this collection Damon Cagnolatti decided to interview Thomas Lee about his experiences with EMERGE, a student group designed to build critical thinking through discussions on hip-hop, the local community, and youth culture. Thomas Lee is currently the director for the Pasadena, CA based transitional housing organization known… Continue reading A Conversation About Music, Legacies, and Youth Culture: An Interview by Damon Cagnolatti

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new… Continue reading Viral Advocacy: Networking Labor Organizing in Higher Education by Kevin Mahoney

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is,… Continue reading Civil Engagement and New Media by Michelle Albert

At the time of this interview Dr. Grabill had just returned from West Virginia where he was working with junior high and high school students. Grabill’s work in West Virginia was as a member of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center (WIDE), which came out of a grant designed to develop young leaders in… Continue reading Change is Really Hard Work: An Interview with Jeffrey Grabill by Paula Mathieu

This book—slim in size but big on ideas—won the 2010 Reflections Civic Scholarship Outstanding Book Award. The subtitle might scare away those who aren’t computer and composition enthusiasts, but that would be a shame because Jeffrey Grabill, while certainly invested in emerging technology, is making a case—and a convincing one—about how we should reconceptualize several… Continue reading Review of Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action by Jeffrey T. Grabill reviewed by Thomas Deans

In 2008, I attended a symposium that highlighted our university’s outreach and community engagement initiatives. Sessions and exhibits ranged from promoting pesticide safety programs in Africa to local community design assistance projects. The symposium was very satisfying, but my conversations with participants often began the same way, with questions arising from my “Rhetoric and Writing”… Continue reading Review of Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements edited by Sharon Mckenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh by Megan O’Neill Fisher

IMAGE DESCRIPTION The image depicts a person nearly naked. They are light skinned, with red facial hair and dark body hair. They wear a purple powwow dance shawl over their shoulders and are seated behind a large chemistry flask. They have a serious expression on their face, and their eyes are directed slightly away and… Continue reading Digital Photograph: “Our Lady of Perpetual Blood Quantum” by Qwo-Li Driskill with Michael Floyd

Drawing from a larger qualitative research project focused on Black women’s naming practices, I consider how Black women employ Black feminist consciousness practices of self-definition and self-valuation to name, define, and describe their identities. Given the complex history and popularity of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) image within public and private discourses, I focus on… Continue reading Strong, Black, and Woman: Examining Self-Definition and Self-Valuation as Black Women’s Everyday Rhetorical Practices by Ronisha Browdy

Reflections currently seeks submissions for Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019. Reflections publishes scholarly research articles (18-30 pages); brief profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement organizations, partnerships, programs aimed at disseminating information and sharing models from which other faculty, scholars, and administrators can benefit; brief project/course profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement that are not developed… Continue reading Call for Submissions: Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019