In this short essay, I want to consider, first, how literacy studies as a field has been sponsored—What work has been foundational, transformative, and innovative?—and second, to reflect on how my own study of literacy has been sponsored. In particular, I want to think about how Brandt’s concept of “sponsorship” has not only been transformative in conceptualizing the dynamics of literacy, but how it is also useful in addressing questions of equity and diversity within literacy studies. As defined by Brandt, “sponsors of literacy” are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (19). It is the first part of this definition that is key to my discussion: How have sponsors who “enable, support, teach, and model” informed what we do as a field broadly, and what I have done in my own work specifically? In theorizing a deep understanding of how literacy is enacted, Brandt has helped us to see that literacy does not simply empower or provide access to resources for individuals, but perhaps most importantly creates a complex web of relationships that may sustain literate action. We might think of sponsorship itself as a literacy practice and as literate action, marshalling resources in order to create opportunities for literacy development.

This article traces the arc of research on two-year college writing programs and looks at implicit patterns of belief that shape discussions of such programs to offer a definition, however tentative, of a model of a two-year college writing program.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how Aristotle's conception of tragic catharsis provides a basis for fleshing out the political office he tacitly assigns to rhetoric: defending a city-state's constitution against its characteristic forces of corruption so as to promote stability over the long-run. By inquiring into the Politics' emphasis on preservation and its endorsement of ostracism, this essay argues that Aristotle's theory of constitutions enables a rethinking of rhetoric's political efficacy in terms of a non-representational cathartic process that by means of facilitating civic purgation renews a community's political identity and so strengthens its commitment to the task of preserving the constitution. It demonstrates how, in articulating the grounds for exile, appeals to ostracism work toward the clarification both of the community's organizing principle and the emotional bonds of political philia. The essay concludes by reflecting on the persistence of rhetorical catharsis in today's Western democracies.

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

Book Review| December 01 2012 Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity. G. Mitchell Reyes. Jennifer Heusel Jennifer Heusel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 740–743. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940636 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer Heusel; Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 740–743. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940636 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| December 01 2012 Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee's Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality Darrel Allan Wanzer Darrel Allan Wanzer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 647–657. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940627 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Darrel Allan Wanzer; Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee's Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 647–657. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940627 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Forum You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractThe disconnection between the idea of nation-based citizenship and the current practices of migrants presents the opportunity to reconceptualize and redefine the idea of citizenship and thereby grasp the realities of movement. I employ Giambattista Vico's theories of universal rights and his history of civilizations to interrogate rhetorically national origins and expand on what I call a renovation of citizenship. This is a process that embraces daily practices of nation-based citizenship and encourages us to imagine new ways to express citizenship, ways that comport with the realities of a mobile world, specifically the human right of freedom of movement. In formulating this renovation of citizenship based on mobility, I introduce the metaphor of stochastic citizenship to resolve the tension between the legal structures governing citizenship and the promotion of mobility as a human right. The Roma people in Europe serve as a test for stochastic citizenship.

AbstractThis article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze's cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly's critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of manipulation. Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly's politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

This article engages disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) conversations at the intersections of race, rhetoric, technology, and technical communication and offers a case study of curriculum development that supports disciplinary inquiry at these complex interstices. Specifically, informed by a decolonial framework, this article discusses the status of cultural and critical race studies in technical communication scholarship; tentative definitions of race, rhetoric, and technology; the cultural usability research conducted and located accountability in the process of designing a graduate course that studies rhetorics of race and technology; and the implications of this inquiry for the discipline, field, and practices of technical communication.

This article presents a critical, new historical analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census form. The authors demonstrate that the Hispanic origin and race questions, as currently formulated, imply a “double occupancy of Hispanics” that serves a dual function: to simultaneously monitor the Hispanic population growth and inflate the white count by incorporating Hispanics into the white racial category. This double occupancy of Hispanics results in skewed data analyses that support specific political agendas and ultimately produce racial inequities.

The authors suggest that writing should be conceived of not only as a verbal activity but also as a visuospatial activity, in which writers process and construct visuospatial mental representations. After briefly describing research on visuospatial cognition, they look at how cognitive researchers have investigated the visuospatial dimension of the mental representations and processes engaged in writing. First, they show how Hayes’s research integrated the visuospatial dimension of writing. Second, they describe how the written trace can serve as a visual resource. Third, they focus on the visuospatial processes involved in constructing an overall representation of the text and its physical layout. Finally, they review findings on the visuospatial demands that planning places on working memory. All the data and theories presented in this article support the idea that writing is indeed a visuospatial activity.

Abstract This essay examines reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln that were published in the aftermath of his death by those who had interacted with Lincoln personally. An understudied genre y Lincoln reminiscences offered judgments of Lincolns character through a portraiture style designed to make salient private as well as public dimensions of his character. We historicize the rhetoric of portraiture and trace the rise of reminiscence out of biography as a stand-alone genre, which reached unprecedented popularity in the competitive subgenre of the Lincoln reminiscence. We argue that Lincoln reminiscences featured a balance of common and uncommon virtues thought essential for a president, a balance that helped democratize and humanize presidential character.

This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment)initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay raises questions regarding the viability ofexporting educational aid efforts to developing countries that are modeled after large-scale, highly prescriptive and mostly ineffective programs from the U.S. context. The essay argues fora reframing of educational aid that promotes research and development efforts that embrace a broadened view of what counts as literacy, a valuing of local contexts and a commitment to beguided by local expertise and problem solving capacities.

Abstract Humor that addresses race can easily backfire. This article engages in an analysis of The Boondocks, an adult cartoon, to investigate how humor about race and racism can function not only to generate laughter through satiric rejection of long-held racist stereotypes in the American context but also to encourage new perspectives. The analysis makes use of rhetorical concepts drawn from theorist Kenneth Burke to analyze the rhetorical and comedic functioning of the dialogue, the use of music, and the visual features of the show. Notes 1We thank two extremely helpful RR reviewers, Richard Marback and Adela Licona. The quotation in the title comes from Glenda R. Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 15. 2As an example, CitationVidmar and Rokeach (1974) examined audience interpretations of the humor in All in the Family. They found that while some viewers laughed at the overt racism in the comments of Archie Bunker, others laughed at his hippie son-in-law Michael, who portrayed a racially enlightened person. 3McGruder has also published his comic strips in a series of books including The Boondocks: Because I Know you Don't Read the Newspapers, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel (2000); A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, New York: Three Rivers P (2003); Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection, New York: Three Rivers P (2005); and All the Rage: The Boondocks Past and Present, New York: Three Rivers P (2007). 4Readers interested in the media portrayal of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers will find the following works helpful: Pearson, Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America; and Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist. The Party is seen to have continued the militant and nationalistic efforts of Malcolm X. Huey Newton, who earned a PhD in Social History from the University of California at Santa Cruz, also continued the intellectual legacy of Malcolm X. He was convicted of manslaughter in 1967, but this was overturned two years later. He and the Black Panther Party later adopted a nonviolent creed and focused on providing food, housing, and basic social services to black Americans in need. He later faced another charge for murder, but this did not result in a conviction. In 1989, after a conviction and short jail sentence for the misuse of public funds, he was murdered in Oakland, apparently participating in a drug deal that went bad. 5All quotations from episodes of The Boondocks, season one and season two. 6Anime is a uniquely Japanese visual art form that began in the early twentieth century. In the United States, the form became popular in the 1960s when a Japanese comic book, Aru Machikado, was made into a television show, Astro Boy. Other anime television shows followed in the midsixties including Gigantor, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion. The art form often includes children as main characters and heroes. The form also presents human emotion in a very visual manner and highlights the role of emotion in human interaction: "In anime the feelings of the characters play an important role in shaping their actions, much more so than in most American products, live or animated" (Poitras 55).

Interests and Opportunities appears at a critical moment in university writing instruction, a moment when many colleges and universities are relegating the task of basic writing instruction to two-...

This article explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of “standard” edited American English and the ideologies (specifically, standard language ideology and Whiteness) that work to create and justify common patterns that associate privileged White students with written standardness and that disassociate underrepresented—especially African American—students from “standard” edited American English. Drawing on interviews with composition instructors about their readings of anonymous student texts, the author argues that indexicality and standardness are mutually informative: The non/standard features of student texts operate as indexicals for student-author identities just as perceived student-author identities influence the reading of a text as non/standard. Ultimately, this article offers inroads to challenging destructive and enduring indexical patterns that offer unearned privilege to some students at the expense of others and, in the process, perpetuate race- and class-based privilege.AQ Note that APA style capitalizes Black and White.

Abstract Barack Obama’s "A More Perfect Union" speech was widely viewed as a key rhetorical moment in the 2008 presidential campaign. The purpose of this essay is to unpack reasons why the speech was significant, focusing particularly on the complex historical and contemporary dynamics of African American oratory black churches, race relations, and American politics. largue that the significance of the speech lies in the specific rhetorical challenges posed by the immediate context, the rhetorical strategy that Obama used to negotiate those challenges, and the way in which this strategy resonated more broadly with the rhetorical themes underlying Obamas candidacy.

Book Review| March 01 2012 What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race. John Hartigan Jr. Jonathan P. Rossing Jonathan P. Rossing Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (1): 190–193. https://doi.org/10.2307/41955616 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan P. Rossing; What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2012; 15 (1): 190–193. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41955616 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The editors introduce this issue of RTE.

This article traces the influences of hypertext theory throughout the various genres of online publication in technical communication. It begins with a look back at some of the important concepts and theorists writing about hypertext theory from the post-World War II era, to the early years of the World Wide Web 2.0, and the very differing notions of its potential. A significant challenge during this formative period was the fact that limitations in technology and infrastructure placed limitations on the potential envisioned by these scholars. The ways in which we look at early scholarship differ even a decade or more later, in terms of some of the information technologies and tools we use today. In the Web 2.0 era, we see a trend of blending and extension beyond principles found within hypertext theory in the tools we use and user experiences we create with them.

This article examines Rachel Carson’s assimilation and revision of scientific uncertainty in her sources, annotations, and drafts for Silent Spring. It argues that Carson’s emphasis on the special topos of uncertainty was not an original invention but instead was Carson’s contribution to an ongoing scientific and political conversation about uncertainty in 1962. Carson transformed this topos into a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use. Carson’s adaptation of scientific uncertainty to environmental policy making provides a historical precedent for contemporary invocations of scientific uncertainty in debates surrounding global warming, nuclear power, cancer studies, and Gulf oil drilling. The methods that the authors use to trace the development of this special topos can also serve as a pattern for excavating the histories of other pivotal topoi in the rhetoric of American science and environmental policy.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the motif of eternal life in Walter Benjamin’s work. Whereas myth understands natality and sexuality as characterized by guilt and deserving of death, this article argues that Benjamin seeks to develop an alternative conception of life that is no longer caught up in guilt and thus no longer fated to die—this is the idea of eternal life. By offering a reading of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, the article maintains that for Benjamin the possibility of eternal life was always linked to a sexual politics that turns around the problematization of heterosexual, patriarchal conceptions of married life. The outlines of this sexual politics are then further traced in his later work on Baudelaire and compared with Foucault’s reading of Baudelaire in the context of working out an idea of life as a work of art.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the critical dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, to which a letter and several references in their work testify. It shows how affinities and differences between their respective positions can be explained from a shared theologico-political approach. Both authors believe that, in spite of secularization, political phenomena can only be adequately understood in light of certain theological concepts, images, and metaphors. However, they explain these theologico-political analogies differently. Whereas Schmitt advocates the authoritarian state, which he compares to God’s omnipotence, Benjamin endorses the proletarian revolution, in which he recognizes traces of a divine law-destroying violence. Challenging existing interpretations, this article shows how the political theologies of Benjamin and Schmitt are not static but developed in the course of their dialogue, in which both authors respond to each other’s criticism by changing and correcting their own positions in significant ways.

Reviewed is X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Richard Lyons.

Review Article| October 01 2011 Pencil Traces: The Conversations of Composition Thomas L. Burkdall Thomas L. Burkdall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (3): 598–602. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1302881 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas L. Burkdall; Pencil Traces: The Conversations of Composition. Pedagogy 1 October 2011; 11 (3): 598–602. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1302881 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search 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. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: Reviews of The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller You do not currently have access to this content.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Race and Reconciliation is an ambitious study of recent trends in sociopolitical reconciliation within and among nation-states. At 401 pages the book is one of the most exhaustive considerations of...

“Senator Obama was faced with a complex problem: how to explain a longstanding friendship with a suddenly infamous figure? He had to do this, moreover, within the context of the most delicate issue of his campaign: race.”

This article traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, “rich-task” writing experiences for students.

This essay invites a critique of contact zone theory and rhetoric’s origin story based on a reading of Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government. I read this writer’s argument for indigenous ability and reshaping of space through picture, map, and text as a multimodal effort that invites attention to classroom rhetorical power dynamics and standards.

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children’s texts? How do teaching practices shape children’s writing development? Ethnographic data collected in a fifthgrade classroom reveal how children used drawing to create classroom texts. Data show that drawing is not simply a developmental preface to writing. Rather, when given guided intellectual freedom, children integrate writing, drawing, and pictures in sophisticated and creative ways. The author traces children’s text development to show how schooling as an institution bounds and limits their use of their authorial prerogatives, their textual possibilities, and ultimately their developmental potential. She concludes by asserting that we must reconsider development in writing to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing. Any analysis of development that fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional practices and ideologies is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of that developmental model.

What is currently known about the history of the paragraph has relied on the work of the first English and American compositionists, humanists, and philologists of the late nineteenth century. Alexander Bain and his followers defined the requirements for the English paragraph and believed it had not existed prior to the eighteenth century. Their sole focus, on humanist and historical writing, yielded a distorted, if not an incorrect history of the paragraph. This article begins to correct that view, prevalent since 1866, by examining paragraphs of practical works, such as printed how-to books of the early English Renaissance until 1700. The variety and quantity of how-to documents increased with the growth of knowledge, advent of printing, and emergence and expansion of middle-class English readers eager for books written in an accessible, non-Latinate style. When we examine paragraphs from technical books printed as early as 1490, we find paragraphs that exemplify the qualities stipulated by Bain nearly 400 years later. The existence of well defined and formulated paragraphs throughout the English Renaissance and the seventeenth century in a wide variety of technical book—works ignored by literary scholars pursuing the history of English—suggests that the paragraph is clearly indigenous to the English composition, much more so than modern composition theory has acknowledged. This article explores example paragraphs of these first English printed technical works and begins to expand the history of the English paragraph. Further studies of later Middle English paragraphs in incunabula of practical, liturgical, and historical works will likely show the indigenous nature of the paragraph to English composition and allow scholars to see how the formation of the paragraph helped English writers over 500–700 years ago create complete texts.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

In this article, I report on the experiences of one adult student making the transition from professional to academic literacy and trace implications for writing scholars and teachers.

Abstract The Stoic is often seen as the forerunner of Adam Smith's market man of morals, but others have suggested that the sophist played a role in the formation of market morality and political economy. This article traces Smith's treatment of ancient sophists and his use of the term sophistry in the Wealth of Nations. Smith praised ancient sophists for their effective didactic oratory and their ability to make money through teaching. Smith criticized arguments as sophistic when they promoted monetary advantage for a few over and above the principle of competition. This varied reception of sophists and sophistry suggests a keen understanding of the rhetorical tradition and its capacity to influence the development of the discourse of political economy. Smith's use of sophistry and reference to the sophists invites a deeper awareness of the essential vitality of effective argumentation for Smith's “system of natural liberty.”

John Boe responds to David Bartholomae's “Teaching On and Off the Tenure Track: Highlights from the ADE Survey of Staffing Patterns in English.” Using his experience in a thirty-year career as a nontenured lecturer, the author addresses the discrimination lecturers face even in the most generous and democratic of institutions. It discusses the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for nontenured faculty, the unlikelihood of untenured faculty ever having full participation in the lives of their departments and institutions, the inequity of support given to the tenured for research and of support continuing to be given even when the tenured stop producing valuable (or any) research, the financial benefits that accrue to institutions through exploitation of the nontenured, the culpability of those in power for the flaws in the tenure system, and the solution to the aforesaid problems: eliminating tenure.

The present study documents everyday adult writing by type of text and medium (computer or paper) in an in vivo diary study. The authors compare writing patterns by gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, age and working status. The study results reveal that (a) writing time varied with demographic variables for networkers, but these variations disappear for workers; (b) all demographic groups spent more time writing documents than prose; (c) most demographic groups spent an equal amount of time writing using computers and paper, but younger and higher educated groups spent more writing time on the computer, while older and less educated groups spent more time writing using paper than the computer; and (d) workers spent more time writing using computers than paper. Implications of the study findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research are also given.

Book Review| December 01 2010 Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice. John B. Hatch. Gary S. Selby Gary S. Selby Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (4): 735–738. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940513 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gary S. Selby; Race and Reconciliation: Redressing Wounds of Injustice. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2010; 13 (4): 735–738. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940513 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines the work of anthropologist Franz Boas who, in the early twentieth century, argued against the existence of the stability of the cephalic index, a measure of head shape, and its relation to the mental and moral capacities of human races. The article claims that Boas successfully shifted the burden of proof to his opponents and set the stage for the scientific rejection of belief in innate racial differences in intelligence. The article urges rhetorical scholars to attend to the notions of burden of proof and presumption in scientific controversies over neurological differences.

At many levels of the educational system, teachers use Sojourner Truth's speech “Ain't I a Woman” as a powerful example of women's rhetoric. This article examines the politics of privileging one version of the speech. The author makes a call to teachers to teach multiple versions and talk about the politics of transcription, gender, and race.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

This article argues that in spite of some attempts to expand the diversity of approaches in Technical Communication, the field remains rooted in an expedient, managerial, techno-rational discourse, where discourse is understood as the values that guide research, practice, and teaching. The article draws on approaches from Communication Studies, specifically discursive analysis and metaphor analysis, to ground this claim and to demonstrate what possible alternative discourses might be possible. The article then argues that moving toward an “interpretive” discourse will expand the values of Technical Communication, but in a way that both retains existing assumptions but also includes a new focus on the “complete person.” Interpretive discourse is theorized using Habermas' communicative rationality and User Experience Design and the article concludes with some implications about moving Technical Communication toward discursive diversity. Ultimately, the goal of the article is to encourage researchers, teachers, and professionals to embrace this discursive diversity that complicates our historical means-ends rationality.

The authors examine language from the perspective of models of empirical sciences, which discipline studies the relationship between reality, models, and formalisms. Such a perspective allows one to notice that linguistics approached within the classical framework share a number of problems with other experimental sciences studied initially exclusively within that framework because of making the same sort of assumptions. By examining solutions to some of these problems found in contemporary science, the authors point out alternative approaches, which could be relevant for linguistics research, and some of which have already been tested in language studies. In particular, Corpus Linguistics is presented as an especially promising approach, positioned to avoid many of the pitfalls of the classical framework. Consequently, it seems that the future of linguistics, from theoretical to applied, such as Technical Writing, must be embraced by Corpus Linguistics research.

This article traces the trajectory of one particular scene in the work of three media students writing and filmmaking. The analysis scrutinizes the role of semiotic tools, such as synopsis and storyboard, in students’ filmmaking practice. Moreover, the use of interactional data combined with textual data allows for a rich recording of the activity, aiming to integrate a multimodal analysis into a sociocultural perspective on learners’ composing practices. The findings indicate that the students are not able to transfer their particular meaning from the written mode into the language of moving images because they downplay the role of the semiotic tools available to them in the educational context.

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.