Research Article| September 01 2020 “Childish Things“: Tragic Conservatism, White Evangelicalism, and the Challenge of Racial Reconciliation John B. Hatch John B. Hatch John B. Hatch is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He would like to thank Prof. Martin Medhurst for dedicating space in Rhetoric & Public Affairs both to the present and previous forums on racial reconciliation, and thank Mark McPhail and David Frank for modeling consilience, mutual respect across differing views, and dialogic coherence in pursuing racial justice and healing. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 587–616. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John B. Hatch; “Childish Things“: Tragic Conservatism, White Evangelicalism, and the Challenge of Racial Reconciliation. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 587–616. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0587 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. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| September 01 2020 (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail Mark Lawrence McPhail is a Senior Research Fellow in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs at Indiana University. I wish to thank Professor Martin Medhurst for his sustained and ongoing commitment to inclusive excellence, diversity, and equity, Professors Aaron David Gresson, III, John Hatch and David Frank for their courage, commitment, and integrity, and Dr. Evelyn Boise Bottando for showing me the clear connection between white privilege, innocence, and sociopathy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (3): 529–552. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Lawrence McPhail; (Re)-Signing Reconciliation: Reading Obama’s Charleston Eulogy through a Rhetorical Theory of Adaptive Racism. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2020; 23 (3): 529–552. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.3.0529 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. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creatingco-composedknowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztectlacuilolitztlipractice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

Women continue to be underrepresented at the highest academic rank of full professor. Studies show that once women earn tenure, they are inundated with teaching, service, and administrative responsibilities, which take time away from research and publication—the primary criteria for promotion. We believe that rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) faculty are uniquely situated to confront this challenge because of our disciplinary expertise, our experience administering writing programs, and our interest in equity. With the goal to increase the number of women full professors at our university, we created a year-long writing program for women associate professors. Based on results from this pilot study, we argue that RWS faculty can use their expertise to decrease the disparity at the highest academic rank and make the university more diverse and equitable. Moreover, we believe that RWS scholars can use their disciplinary expertise to address a range of other institutional and systemic challenges.

The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso, located on the U.S-Mexico border, employs mostly tutors who are bilingual, Spanish-English; however, there are a significant number of international tutors with different linguistic backgrounds. Using a qualitative method approach, this article discusses findings from focus groups and interviews with international multilingual student tutors who worked at the UWC. Through our analysis of the data, we found that international tutors face a unique set of challenges, but also bring a wealth of knowledge to working at the writing center. This article focuses on three major themes discussed by participants: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Tutors’ experiences in leveraging linguistic and cultural differences prompted the need for the UWC to implement changes to its tutor training and policies to support international tutors. As institutions in the United States become more diverse, writing centers need to challenge who best practices in the discipline were created for and who they serve, all while critically examining how we can leverage the experiences of international tutors to reshape writing center pedagogy. Keywords : international writing tutors; multilingualism; linguistic diversity; Hispanic-Serving Institution; writing center pedagogy; tutor training The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is located in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. El Paso, combined with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, make it one of the largest bi-national areas in the world. Residents of Juarez frequently commute over the international bridges daily for work; many of these commuters include students at UTEP. UTEP is a Hispanic-Serving Institution where 80% of the student population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx (UTEP, 2019). Furthermore, 20% of these students are students from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and an additional 5% of students are international students from around the world (UTEP, 2019). Due to the diverse and complex linguistic and cultural lived experiences of students at UTEP, the UWC is informed by theories on multilingualism, antiracism, and equity. It is often cited that writing centers are not just places that enact marginalization, but centers for those who are often marginalized in academia. The UWC has drawn from these theories to develop its programmatic identity, including its goals, tutor training and pedagogies, and professional development, in order to adopt socially just practices. This work, and the theories motivating the work at the UWC, serve as a direct response to our institution and to the students it supports. In a typical semester, the UWC assists over 8,000 students with their writing. The UWC offers face-to-face and synchronous online tutoring, employing about 30 writing tutors, undergraduate and graduate. The undergraduate writing tutors are all hired directly by the UWC, and the graduate students are those who have been awarded a master’s or doctoral teaching assistantship through the English Department or the Creative Writing Department. This year alone, over 40% of the 30+ tutors working at the Writing Center are international students and bi/multilingual with languages ranging from Spanish to Nepalese. Needless to say, this creates a linguistically and culturally diverse work environment as international writing tutors assist students with their writing at the center. This diversity of languages is at the core of our approach to training and pedagogy for writing center tutors. An intricate dynamic develops between writing center tutors and students who often have different home languages, many of whom are English language learners often working towards enacting Academic English as their writing assignments require. While the majority of writing center pedagogy focuses on how to tutor English as a Second Language students and many tutoring books include chapters on working with ESL students or multilingual writers (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie and Lerner, 2009; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2015; Bruce & Rafoth, 2016; Lape, 2020), very little has been written on the experiences of international tutors from the tutor side. This project started in 2017 when the UWC Director and Assistant Directors were approached by several international students who had been writing tutors, one who is currently the Assistant Director of the UWC and co-author of this piece, asking how training would account for the linguistic differences between the new students joining us from Nepal and the majority of the Spanish speaking students who visited the writing center. Through multiple conversations with international student tutors about their experiences working at the UWC, we were confronted with addressing the following questions: What are the experiences of international tutors working at the UWC? How do non-native English speakers navigate assisting students who are native English speakers, or, in the case of our institution, many non-native English speakers with a different home language? The UWC’s week-long training at the beginning of each academic year includes an entire day focused on tutoring multilingual students, with a larger emphasis on Spanish speakers and writers. However, this was a destabilizing question and set us on the path to try and learn about the experiences of international tutors working at the writing center. In an effort to learn how international writing center tutors navigate concerns about language usage, the UWC needed to reconceptualize training to better account for linguistically and culturally diverse interactions during tutoring sessions. Our article’s contributions to both this special issue and the writing center community opens with an overview of the theories which inform our work at the UWC. First, we came to realize that applying writing center theory and best practices in the UWC was problematic, as some of these best practices did not resonate within the context of UTEP and the UWC–a clear indication of the highly contextualized linguistic ecologies of writing centers on college campuses. Most importantly, these best practices were developed from the ground up and informed by the experiences of students and tutors. Next, we provided a brief description of our study and data collection process. We then structured our data findings into three themes: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Lastly, after discussing the most insightful aspects of our findings and how they informed changes to tutoring training at UWC training, we offer readers insight for how writing centers can reconceptualize and reframe the linguistic and cultural knowledges of international tutors as rich resources to learn from, and move away from the deficit rhetoric that has traditionally circulated about non-native English tutors.

In order to disrupt standard writing center norms and shift to an inclusive and socially just space, writing centers need to re-envision their culture and tutoring practices. In 2016, we embarked on a transformative journey through a multilevel effort to shift the ethos of the writing center to be more inclusive and supportive of diversity in all forms. Informed by theories of translingualism, multiliteracies, and social justice, this article narrates our journey in developing hiring, training, and outreach initiatives to transform the writing center. In addition, we reflect on our successes and challenges and offer our future directions to serve as an example for centers wishing to create more racially and linguistically just multiliteracy centers. Keywords : social justice, translingualism, multiliteracy, community of practice

As a writing center community, we are constantly striving for ways to address underrepresentation to help restore justice in our centers. In this article, I discuss how the current makeup of writing center administrators does not reflect the U.S. student population. As a response to this historic underrepresentation in writing center administration, I propose that we utilize structures from mentorship theory to develop actionable ways to bring diverse student voices to the forefront of writing center leadership. These methods for increased representation include tutor-led Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound (SMART) projects, tutors serving as professional development facilitators, and rap sessions. Ultimately, this article should serve as a guided starting point to help writing center administrators to continually critique and reflect on how they represent the voices of the student populations they serve. Keywords : administrative underrepresentation, peer mentorship, professional development, student diversity, writing center leadership

Writing center training often teaches tutors to be aware of the “writer not the writing” (North) across from them—the whole person —but tutors are less-informed on how to bring their whole person to sessions. In this article, we question how tutors can practice restorative justice if they aren’t aware of the harm, hurt, or, even at times, healing that our whole person, as tutors, can bring to the table. To do this, we weave together stories of and theoretical influences on the planning and implementation of our undergraduate writing center theory and practice course. Further, we provide a course model for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of how-tos and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. Similar to our time together teaching the writing center theory and practice course, we include here an ongoing conversation alongside the main text in which we reflect on our experience and model the ongoing critical reflection necessary to embody a restorative justice ethos. Keywords : restorative justice, tutor training, wholeness, canon “Similarly, issues around gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and physical ability will inevitably arise in a writing center and the available responses to these issues vary greatly among cultures. A general, short text such as The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors cannot adequately cover all possible situations and issues, and so we invite you to explore more deeply with your tutors the concerns of subjects that affect the writers who visit your writing center.” (Ryan and Zimmerelli, 2016, p.VI) During the summer of 2019, we (Shelby, Floyd, and Rachel) met together in a conference room that was always too hot and crowded with obnoxiously loud chairs. We were meeting to discuss plans for the upcoming writing center theory and practice course for the Fall 2019 semester. Shelby, a master’s student; Floyd, a PhD student; and Rachel, a PhD candidate, met to talk about the course they would be working on together. Rachel, as the instructor of record, created an agenda for the meeting that included looking over previous versions of the course, the service learning component, and what Shelby and Floyd’s roles would be, as two graduate student teaching assistants. We talked about our respective experiences in tutor training courses and how that preparation looked unlike what we had all come to know as writing center work, particularly when we considered the movement the Writing Center @ MSU was undergoing as we rolled out our Language Statement . Our “rollout” included a Speaker Series of invited lecturers and focused workshops on languaging in the center. We felt more traditional writing center training courses often create a utopian ideal and then complicate it, retrofitting the course to accommodate a checklist of writer identities. However, it was the complications of writing center work that felt more urgent for us in light of our center’s current initiative. We asked ourselves, how do we get new tutors, in just 15 weeks, to do this complex people-work in a way that is responsible to marginalized folks who are disserved by the institution. It was our responsibility to construct a primer that is built on social truths like systemic oppression. Accordingly, we began to construct a course that worked against writing center commonplaces and toward a social justice framework that we hoped would foster a more equitable, embodied, and human tutoring practice. Our epigraph, pulled from Ryan and Zimmerelli’s (2016) The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors , one of the most ubiquitous tutor training guides, frames identity as “issues that might arise,” tertiary concerns to the foundations of writing center work. Conversely, we tried to create a new vision of what the “basics” of writing center work entails, shifting away from the traditional trope of introducing new tutors to writing centers via the pathway: North’s “Better Writer’s”>History>What is Tutoring>Styles>Types of Students. Shifting away from this comfortable pathway was welcoming for us as teachers but still unsettling for our new tutors. We leaned into this discomfort because for us, this act was one of restorative justice. In fact, when we deviate from that pathway, we might be more likely to see the harm that the WC, as an institution itself, is complicit in and work to neutralize it. We must stop onboarding people to orientations that do harm—we must begin to reduce the need for restorative justice as an after-thought and, instead, consider the history of writing center tutorial training and courses as unjust and reorient ourselves to centering marginalized voices and bodies as the explicit way of introducing newcomers to the field of writing centers. This reorientation to the work of tutor training, in our minds, is a restorative justice stance that lends itself to writing center faculty and staff who are the stewards of the profession—those of us who are charged with undoing the harm of writing center lore that was once held sacred. Given our experiences and understandings of this charge, in this article, we offer three stories from our unique perspectives working on this course that further illustrate how restorative justice work uses the whole person—writer, tutor, teacher, and administrator—to create a tutor training course centered on restorative justice. Further, we provide a course example for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of “how-tos” and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. As you read our article, we want to offer our intention behind the format. While textually we follow a fairly typical organization pattern, we’ve additionally interspersed the article with comments. We did this so that we could use our individual voices to talk back to our collective voice and reflect more personally on specific moments in our experiences. They also provide space for smaller ideas that don’t easily fit into the larger narrative of our article but that still have great importance. We think these comments are representative of collaborative writing in general, but more specifically, they represent what tutoring looks like: a back and forth conversation, sometimes, even, across time and space.

This position paper exemplifies potential and existing applications of bilingualism, multilingualism, and translingualism in tutoring sessions with support from existing literature and contextual examples from a public state university’s writing center. The authors advocate for the acceptance and incorporation of a diverse range of languages, dialects, and accents in writing and tutoring practices, providing local context to support the development of the writing center as a hub for diversity and a sense of belonging, to the benefit of participating students. Using reviewed literature, this paper examines existing strategies and how they can be applied to a specific writing center environment and describes its broader implications and methods of possible replication in other writing centers. Through a video by a conversation circle facilitator at the aforementioned state university writing center, this paper describes the benefits and means of developing cross-cultural communication skills in the increasingly multicultural and multilingual university context. Further, this paper provides examples of specific strategies used at the writing center, both online and in-person, that spread awareness of a writing center’s multilingual offerings and can be replicated at other writing centers in different regional settings. Combining strategies from literature and the center’s own practices, this paper contributes a unique perspective on the applications and benefits of embracing bilingualism, multilingualism, and translingualism beyond local contexts; other writing center administrators, tutors, and tutoring practitioners alike can incorporate the discussed strategies that are appropriate to the unique linguistic needs of the students at the universities they serve. Key words : linguistic diversity, inter linguistic, interlinguistic, intra linguistic, advocacy of writing across languages

This article describes a womanist approach to antiracist, racially just writing center administration from the perspective of a Black cisgender director of a writing and speaking center at a PWI. Drawing on womanist ethics and scholarship on race and writing program administration, the author explains the ethical commitments informing the curation of tutors, tutor training, and a cultural rhetorics art display. This womanist work occurs in the midst of intersecting traumas—rising hate crimes against people of color, ongoing anti-black police violence, longstanding systemic racism, and a global pandemic disproportionately impacting Blacks. In response, the author presents the article as a reflective three-part lament and closes with an invitation for solidarity. Keywords : womanist, antiracism, racial justice, cultural rhetorics, writing center administration, lament

Calls for antiracist pedagogies in university writing programs have gained attention and momentum in recent years. Many BIPOC scholars, and some white scholars, have been making arguments for more equitable university writing instruction and writing ecologies for decades. Yet, conditions have largely stayed the same. Undoing systemic racism in our institutions, programs, and ourselves is an individual and communal process that requires commitment and action. In this article, the authors describe a multiyear engagement with Equity-Centered Community Design, a framework offered by Creative Reaction Lab, that facilitates the process of seeing and recognizing systemic racism as intentionally designed to produce outcomes, so that what is designed may be dismantled and redesigned for equity. The multimodal composition of the article aims to convey the fluid, dynamic, and embodied process of doing this work that goes deeper and reaches farther than more typical writing center and writing program work. The goal is to offer a tool to writing centers, writing programs, departments, colleges, and beyond for turning antiracist support into antiracist realities. Keywords : Equity-Centered Community Design, antiracist pedagogy, writing centers, writing programs, design, equity Below is the preferred composition of this article. Please click in the in top right corner to open in a new tab and view as intended.

Rhetorical studies scholars in both communication and writing and rhetorical studies (WRS) are currently investing in momentous discussions about social justice with the promise of material, consti...

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“Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?”

The concept of black boyhood has always been marked with negative associations. American media usually portray black boys as a potential threat. Rather than focusing on their future, they treat black boyhood as an experience “in the now,” failing to consider the historical context of African American communities. Thus, they create a monolithic picture of young black men, which highlights only their faults. This way of imagining black boyhood has inspired African American authors and illustrators to talk back and join the national debate. Their picture books reject the public rhetoric of crisis and replace it with a new black narrative, which reconstructs the black male identity. The aim of this article is to analyze selected images of black boyhood included in the books, as well as to compare them with the message of today’s media.

This graphic meditation on issues of cultural relevance and accessibility in comic-based health communication texts presents the web of rhetorical considerations inherent in creating culturally accessible health communication texts. Applying recent technical communication theories related to social justice this article will examine contemporary instances of comics being used as health communication tools for culturally diverse patient populations. The authors offer original drawings and text for the article.

In 2014, members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus began contributing citations to a shared Google Document (GDoc) that suggested a relatively significant contribution of scholarship to the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies. Scholars of color have argued that rhetoric and composition scholarship fails to represent diversity in academic publications (Baca; Banks; Jones Royster; Pimentel; Ruíz). This study examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color.

“Holmes provides a scholastic exploration and personal examination of what it means to revisit research, explore rhetors, and reframe history as a means to answer one’s own questions about identity, social justice, and change-making.”

ABSTRACT Written in late March 2020 in the early days of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, this essay represents a contingent reflection on the American pandemic response, mourning in anticipation of what would soon surely unfold. I argue that the State's long-standing sacrificial economies have in this moment culminated in a suicidal State. The term is Foucault's, appearing in a controversial lecture on biopolitics, Nazism, and “biological racism.” Despite Foucault's problematic treatment of racism, I suggest that some aspects of this discourse might nevertheless be apropos in our context. The U.S. pandemic response is racism's suicidal State legacy writ large: an extension and retooling of historically racist infrastructures deployed (once again, again) in racialized domains (as more recent reports evidence), but in this moment also across biosocial inequities and vulnerabilities marked by differential fungibilities other than race.

For technical communicators wanting to learn how to enact social justice, Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action by Rebecca Walton, Kristen R. Moore, and Natasha N. Jones is a useful and insightful guide. The book successfully achieves its purpose of introducing technical communicators to social justice scholarship and practice after the social justice turn within the field of technical communication. To successfully achieve its purpose, the book provides technical communicators with methods of understanding oppressive structures in their daily lives and then establishes a theoretical framework for understanding social justice. Using this information, Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn directs technical communicators toward stances of activism, intersectional awareness, and coalitional action. The book’s contribution to the field is that it serves as a comprehensive introduction to social justice after the social justice turn in the field of technical communication and that it anticipates and addresses questions and criticisms that both readers and researchers may have. This book will be a great asset for anyone looking to understand technical communication after the social justice turn and ways to address social justice issues in various situations, including day-to-day interactions and the workplace.

Research problem: With the extensive use of the internet, cyber language management has become a critical issue for international organizations (IOs). IOs' language choices on their official websites represent the very interests of member nations and form a key factor in organizational image construction. However, research on IOs' cyber language management is rather limited. Literature review: Previous studies examined the use of different languages on websites of large corporations, state institutions, and organizations that aim to reach linguistically diverse populations, but discussions of language management of international organizations generally focus on traditional offline language policies. This article attempts to examine the choices of languages on IOs' official websites. Research questions: 1. What languages are used on international organizations' official websites? 2. How do intergovernmental organizations differ from nongovernmental organizations in such language choices and cyber language management? Methodology: Data from the official websites of 50 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and 20 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were collected, and both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted to analyze the data. Results: The findings show that English is the dominant language on IOs' official websites, and is especially preferred by NGOs; inconsistency of IOs' cyber language policy is found among the languages used on specific pages, e-documents, and the general available languages; and IGOs' language choices are more diversified, unified, and standardized than NGOs'. Conclusion: Accordingly, the effect of technology on IOs' language policy is further analyzed, and suggestions for IOs' language management are presented concerning the linguistic ecology at supra-national levels.

It is widely assumed that by identifying spelling errors and suggesting replacement words, spellcheck allows writers to revise spelling errors even if they do not have the necessary spelling knowledge. However, there have been no studies evaluating the efficacy of modern spellcheck tools for students with spelling difficulties, such as dyslexia. In fact, the very limited and dated research into use of spellcheck by writers with dyslexia indicated that, even when using spellcheck to revise spelling errors, this group left many misspellings in their texts. The current study is the first to investigate whether a modern spellcheck program allows college students with dyslexia to produce texts that are as free from misspellings as texts by their peers, and whether this affects the quality of the text in other ways.College students with dyslexia (n=18) and a control group of peers (n=18) wrote two short essays using Microsoft Word, one with spellcheck active and one without spellcheck active. Spelling accuracy and overall quality of the texts were measured. Without spellcheck, students with dyslexia made more misspellings than the control group, however, with spellcheck active students from both groups left almost zero misspelled words in their texts. Text quality was not affected. Results demonstrate that spellcheck helps college students with dyslexia to overcome the limitations that poor spelling knowledge imposes. Importantly, results indicate that spellcheck does not lead to improvements in text beyond spelling accuracy, or lead to poorer quality texts, indicating that it is suitable for use in exam conditions.

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

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Using a multidisciplinary approach to social justice teaching, this article explores the often invisible impact of double consciousness on adult English language learners in the United States and provides examples of classroom practice that invite students to reflect on its effects. The experience of double consciousness is examined as it relates to English language learner identities. A Critical Language Awareness (CLA) framework and identity-conscious teaching practices are explored to encourage student participation and reflection. This approach, demonstrated through examples used in writing classes, encourages the exploration of identity in the face of oppression by interrogating social constructions and fiction and nonfiction stories containing connected themes. Three classroom lessons and consequent writing are analyzed with a critical discourse lens to examine student responses and reflections on language and identity. Student writing demonstrates that encouraging English language classes to interrogate the language of institutionalized inequity and identity formation can illuminate potential influences of double consciousness, which can empower students to think critically about their identities and choose whether to take steps to mediate the ways in which they could be affected by double consciousness.

A highly visual social media platform such as Instagram is incorporated by many companies in their marketing communications strategies to advertise their products and services employing digital visual rhetoric. The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of visual framing strategies, sentiment, and product presentation modality in the multicultural context by examining social media practices of influencers belonging to two cultural backgrounds, namely the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Using content analysis, this study reveals visual rhetorical strategies practiced by Instagram influencers that can equip digital marketing practitioners with effective devices of persuasion. The study provides a useful contribution to the theory of digital visual rhetoric.

This article reports on a rhetorical analysis of media reports on campus sexual assault informed by the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The analysis reveals patterns of narrative construction wherein those accused of campus sexual assault remain absent from reporting while universities and accusers are burdened with responsibility. Consequently, the “disappearing accused” contributes to public uncertainties about how to respond to the problem of campus sexual assault and complicates how governing policies, particularly Title IX, are perceived, wherein Title IX’s equity framework does not match expectations of justice in response to violence.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

As the reach of community engaged writing has expanded, it has come to offer a uniquely powerful contribution to a college education, well beyond service. We have the opportunity to make a visible, cross-disciplinary case that embraces this remarkable diversity in a compelling public argument—one that can link vision with new evidence of genuine educational consequences for students. This paper sketches a framework for both articulating that social, ethical, and intellectual contribution and supporting it with theory-driven and data-based evidence of shared, valued outcomes.

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.

This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video "This Is America," artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of "appropriate" kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst's own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

Charles "Teenie" Harris spent more than three decades as a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, capturing through his camera lens both once-in-a-lifetime and everyday occurrences in the city. The Courier played an active role in the lives of many African Americans in Pittsburgh, promoting local and national news, sports, and entertainment that represented their communities. Using a selection of Harris's photos, this essay begins by identifying the self-evidently political images in his oeuvre. It then theorizes what I refer to as idiomatic visual rhetorical strategies of representation that manifest in less obvious places: images of women and children whose celebrations and struggles were not likely to be publicized outside their own neighborhoods. Through the introduction of idiomatic representational strategies, this essay contributes to efforts in visual rhetorics to refine methodologies for interpreting images, and it also furthers historiographies of African American rhetorics.

Between 2011 and 2013, prisoners in California's Pelican Bay Prison launched three collective hunger strikes protesting long-term solitary confinement. At the height of the third strike, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused food, ultimately forcing California to alter and limit its use of solitary confinement. Collective resistance of this scale is rare in prison, especially in supermax facilities, which attack prisoners' subjectivity and condition expressions of agency that are harmful to self and others. Through a rhetorical analysis of the imprisoned activists' accounts of cross-racial coalition building, I argue that prisoners found means to survive and resist social death by restoring a discursive space across cells and by claiming control of their bodies through regimes of self-discipline. I conclude by considering implications for mainstream prison reform discourse.

Research problem: Cultural differences may be increasingly important in technical communication. Research is needed to investigate differences in document design practices and user preferences. This study examines cultural differences between Chinese and Western manuals for household appliances. Literature review: Earlier studies identified a wide range of possible differences between Chinese and Western documents, but the findings are not consistent and do not provide more generic perspectives on cultural differences. Possible reasons are the diversity of the documents used, the rather informal research designs, and relatively small sample sizes. Research question: To what extent and how do Chinese and Western manuals for household appliances differ from each other in terms of content, structure, and use of visuals? Methodology: To overcome these shortcomings, a quantitative content analysis was conducted, comparing 50 Chinese manuals and 50 Western manuals for household appliances. The coding scheme was based on earlier research findings and focused on content, structure, and the use of visuals. Results and conclusions: The results show that the content of Chinese manuals is less strictly confined to the function of user support than that of Western manuals. Compared to Western manuals, the structure of Chinese manuals appears to be fuzzier and less rigid. Regarding visuals, Chinese manuals contain more non-instrumental, entertaining illustrations than Western manuals. Underlying these differences is a more general distinction between highly instrumental Western manuals and more flexible Chinese manuals. These differences seem to point to two cultural dimensions: holistic versus analytic thinking and analog versus digital cultures.

This book posits that there is a lack of social justice coverage in today’s engineering curriculum. The authors’ fundamental premise is that, while some social aspects may be covered in engineering courses, the general approach to engineering subject matter presents only the technical details, not other aspects. The book examines how culture and other social issues are a part of engineering practice. The authors want to get educators thinking, as well as changing and making courses and programs more aware of cultural, political, and social issues. The authors assert that the social impacts of the engineering curriculum are hidden and generally ignored. The book opens an interesting discussion of social justice and engineering professionals. The underlying message is that professional engineers—and the engineering curricula being taught—are not emphasizing the inclusion of social justice within those programs. Current curricula include social justice as only a minor component in the training of engineers, with the technical aspects overriding social needs except in small doses. The book addresses a truly significant problem to society: Who bears the responsibility of ensuring that social injustice is addressed and corrected? The authors provide thoughts and insights, but the solution is very complex and cannot be solved with one book. Each person needs to accept the responsibility of correcting injustice where they can. Understanding the problem may still not provide a solution that prevents social injustice completely; it’s a start. Introducing a semester course on social justice is insufficient, but it may foster changes in other curricular offerings. Such introductions and changes will take time. Regarding limitations, it would have helped to make the case if the book did more to address potential naysayers. Professors in engineering who do not see the importance of the matter might claim that the engineering curriculum already meets accreditation requirements, and therefore, they might justify not making changes by saying that accreditation agencies must believe that social justice is being adequately covered.

AbstractIn his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, President Obama responded to postracial claims in the United States and to criticism that he had not done enough for black Americans by drawing on grace as the vehicle for collective salvation and his own agency on civil rights. Eulogizing Pinckney as a man of faith and grace, Obama affırmed the black church’s dual focus on religious faith and collective civil rights action as exemplary of American civil religion and treated Dylann Roof’s heinous act as both emanating from the sin of slavery and embodying prevenient grace that had led the nation to acceptance of justifying grace and the need for sanctifying action as he discussed the Confederate flag, systemic racism, and gun violence. In encouraging the ongoing work of collective sanctifıcation, Obama employed code-switching, particularly in his delivery, which served to heighten and reinforce his powerful message.

ABSTRACT This article explores the roots of (African American) rhetorical theory through an examination of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Rhetorical theory in this case is a forcible call for antislavery unity between races that at the same time rejects notions of the body as a racial essence. This essay attempts to make Douglass's rhetorical theory clear so that we can better understand how the key term functions today.

I still remember the feeling. I was beginning the 2nd year of my PhD program and was finally feeling like I had an understanding of what being a technical communication scholar means. I was also starting to feel critical of our field---wondering if I, an Indigenous scholar from rural Alaska, would find a meaningful place in technical and professional communication (TPC). I was at the grocery store and my phone dinged; I had received an email from Natasha Jones. She and her coauthors were writing a book and wanted to include a list of multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholars to amplify in its pages. They asked if I wanted to be part of their list and if I knew others who should be added. I emailed back immediately thanking them, consenting, and gave them my friends Zarah Moeggenberg and Les Hutchinson's names. I paid for my groceries, walked out to my truck, and cried.

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Some computer code bootcamps offer racially marginalized adults training in computer programming to assist in their social mobility. Many African American adults have little to no prior experience with programming. Literacy life history interviews show that the procedural literacy adult students practiced out of school scaffolded their learning coding literacy.

This article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food insecurity for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse.

This study examines the visual representation of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to1925. Compilers of the Atlases used a variety of visual strategies to facilitate rhetorical inclusion and exclusion, and by creating particular visual emphasis, constructed Chinese immigrants as being alienated, racialized, and low in the ethnic hierarchy. The visual constructs of the Chinese population reflected and reshaped the state’s policy of immigration restriction in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

Recently, educators have created crowdsourced syllabi using social media. Activist syllabi are digitally circulated public collections of knowledge and knowledge-making about events and social movements. As technical communicators, we can function as curators of public intellectualism by providing accessibility and usability guidance for these activist syllabi in collaboration with activist syllabi creators. In turn, technical communicators can work with syllabi creators as a coalitional social justice strategy to enhance the circulation of these activist syllabi.

This article reports the results of a survey of technical and professional communication (TPC) undergraduate and graduate students regarding their perceptions of diversity in TPC academic programs. The responses of the total group of respondents and a subset of respondents identifying as a person of color (POC) are compared. Results show that both the overall group and the group of students identifying as persons of color see their TPC programs as both diverse and supportive of diversity. Respondents identifying as a person of color also reported that they were not worried about fitting in when enrolling in their TPC programs. However, the survey also shows that TPC students who identify as persons of color note a lack of students and faculty of color in TPC academic programs and departments. Possible reasons for respondents’ perceptions of having diverse and supportive departments while also observing the lack of POC within the department are discussed.

In responding to conversations on engaged infrastructure, racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments), a community writing project at Towson University in the Baltimore metro area, where students are a primary, if not the main, source of research, grantwriting, and grants tracking for partner organizations via classwork, paid internships, and parttime employment. I problematize and locate this work within the nonprofit industrial complex and discuss the structure and functioning of grassroots organizations and how their particular milieu lends itself to projects like G.I.V.E. The project views equity as way to “return stolen resources” (Marcus and Munoz 2018), acknowledges the legacies of injustice in our communities, places students of color in leadership roles, and prioritizes work with under-resourced organizations that are led by folks from the community itself.

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class predominantly made up of immigrant students. The videos spotlight the students’ personal experiences with immigration, incorporate multiple languages, and explore themes such as cultural diversity and welcoming immigrant students into the classroom. Following the creation of the videos, the college students participated in a video chat with the third graders. This article offers an overview of the video project, student reflections, and guidelines for future pedagogical implementation. In addition, I reflect on the importance of pedagogical flexibility in the classroom and the ways in which multilingualism can expand our understanding of multimodality.

This essay presents a polyvocal review of the 2019 Conference on Community Writing. It is composed of a series of vignettes and reflections written by the authors, community partners, conference organizers, educators, and others who attended the conference. Together, these reflections examine a central theme of the conference, “the work” of community writing, by attending to four questions: 1) What is the work of the Conference on Community Writing, and what does it tell us about the state of the subfield of community-engaged writing?; 2) What spaces does the conference encompass, and who is included in these spaces?; 3) What are the material realities that enable and constrain our work, in and beyond the conference?; and 4) What work is unfinished, and what will sustain us as we tackle it? The polyvocal essay presented here examines these questions through multiple positionalities within community writing studies, ultimately arguing that attending to the diversity of voices, stories, and perspectives in community writing must guide our efforts to understand community writing as a field and imagine its future work.

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices to lobby the Tennessee General Assembly for in-state tuition for undocumented students at Tennessee public universities. Responding to the political moment of uncertainty surrounding DACA and immigration policy, we designed a course focused on meaningful projects designed for public dissemination and presentation, and our group-based learning approach allowed us to meet both institutional learning outcomes for effective writing and research, as well as softer outcomes for socializing and professionalizing first-generation and DACA students. This course offers a model for other community-engaged writing courses to support student efficacy and student persistence.