In this essay, we examine the complete published speeches of Arne Duncan from his seven years (2009–2015) as Barack Obama’s secretary of education, to understand how his language both defined problems and promoted solutions for our nation’s schools. By looking at Duncan’s rhetoric through close readings and computer-aided textual analyses, we find that his discourse contained paradoxes, particularly through a notion of schooling as a means of achieving both social justice and economic growth, by framing education as both a private and public good, and through assertions about the need for government both to centralize authority over schooling and promote a global educational marketplace. In essence, Duncan used a both/and approach to these purposes, adding to our understandings of the character and functions of educational rhetoric and showing how critical it is for scholars to recognize that such tensions exist in language about what education policy should do. Ultimately, we conclude that Duncan’s rhetoric obscures historic tensions in the purpose of education and highlights the way that policy rhetoric may saddle public education with responsibilities beyond its capacities.

Through a rhetorical analysis of Romper’s YouTube series Doula Diaries, I demonstrate how the reproductive justice framework helps illuminate the need for an intersectional approach to advance birth justice. While the video series brings obstetric racism to light, portrays empowering birth experiences among women of color, and prioritizes the shared experiences and communities among non-normative birthing people, it falls short on supporting the rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people to have children. I further argue for rhetoric scholars to adopt the reproductive justice framework in order to more critically interrogate how intersecting social forces and power structures influence the reproductive lives of individuals across positionalities.

This essay revisits the rhetoric of El Plan de Delano, a pivotal document in the farm workers movement and the broader Chican@ movement. Composed and circulated during their peregrinación from Delano to Sacramento, California in 1966, the manifesto stretched the topography of race in the 1960s, both geographically and bodily, as it publicized the farm workers’ struggle during their wage-strike. My reading of the visual and verbal rhetorics of the pamphlet of El Plan de Delano surfaces race as an energizing topos. I show how El Plan de Delano (re)fashioned a racial identity for farm workers and parlayed that identity in its appeals.

This article examines how three African American girls, ages 10 to 18, used journaling and interviews to better understand science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as part of their literate identities. Drawing on prior work about literate identities, the authors introduce the concept of literate intersectional identities, which describes how participants’ diverse histories, literacies, and identities traverse categories, communities, genres, and modes of meaning within the context of a STEAM workshop. The authors employed open and thematic coding to analyze the girls’ journal entries in an effort to answer a question: In what ways do African American girls’ journal writings and interviews about STEM reflect and influence their literate identities in a digital app coding workshop? Findings reveal how their writings about race, access, and the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM helped them make sense of their self-assurance, self-awareness, and agency as girls of color interested in STEM careers.

This essay contributes to the emerging conversation about two-year college teacher-scholar-activism by revisiting the work of Elisabeth McPherson, the first community college faculty member to chair CCCC. Arguing that McPherson's fade from disciplinary memory reflects the marginalization of two-year college faculty that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, Christie Toth traces three key themes in McPherson's published work: advocating for two-year colleges and the professionalization of their faculty; subverting institutional labeling of two-year college students; and challenging racism, classism, and sexism through pedagogy and policy. While her published work is not beyond critique, McPherson's career offers historical precedent for a two-year college English professional identity that integrates critical teaching, scholarly and organizational engagement, and activism for social justice at multiple scales.

To our readers in 2020: we hope you are not experiencing inordinate loss. We write this introduction in the midst of multiple events resonant with historical import-and with the possibility for positive, lasting change: worldwide protests for racial justice, the U.S. Supreme Court decision against job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and significant attempts to save lives and jobs in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Amidst these events, of course, we are all engaged in conversations exploring how education will need to adapt.

This article presents findings from a two-year mixed-methods study examining a partnership between a writing center and a community-building summer academic program for incoming students of color at a large Midwestern university that is a predominantly white institution (PWI). The study implemented surveys and follow-up interviews with students in the program to discover the benefits and drawbacks of requiring writing center visits for this student population. Building on extant research on required visits and how writing centers can contribute to social justice, this article uses frameworks from psychology and higher education scholarship on stereotype threat and validation theory respectively to explore how writing centers can provide academic and interpersonal validation to students of color who visit. Pairing stereotype threat and validation theory as lenses illuminates how writing centers can avoid othering students of color and instead affirm their senses of belonging within their institutions.

This program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.

While Writing Studies scholars have embraced research on multilingualism, writing scholars have not developed program assessment methods that are informed by that scholarship. This profile describes a program assessment design that was informed by research on multilingualism, super-diversity, and consequential validity. This design included student survey data, student interviews, scoring data, and institutional data with specific attention to language and mobility. Such a design allowed us to capture multiple sources of evidence to make valid inferences about the writing of a complex population. Moreover, the bottom-up collaborative process used in this assessment design echoed the program’s deep-rooted commitment to social justice in ongoing program research.

This program profile describes how teachers and administrators have collaborated in the design and implementation of a number of linguistic, cultural, and transmodal pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Strategies that writing teachers can implement to best meet the needs of multilingual students across a range of institutional contexts are discussed via a social justice lens. A focused examination of our First-Year Writing program’s layered response to increased international multilingual student enrolment as well as a brief discussion of campus-wide responses are offered to showcase how translingual, transcultural, and transmodal approaches to First-Year Writing can empower students, inviting them to learn from their existing linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.

Although writing scholars have increasingly emphasized the need for more equitable approaches to language (difference) in the composition classroom, specific examples of teaching praxis remain sorely needed. In this article, we offer three sets of activities that we have used in our own classes designed for multilingual students. In formulating these activities, we adopt a critical-pragmatic approach to linguistic social justice, inviting students to grapple with standard language ideology and its consequences while questioning the idea that students can or should be liberated by us. Focusing on notions of “standard” and “correct” English, our proposal is grounded in relevant debates, connecting insights from sociolinguistics and World Englishes/Global English Language Teaching with Jerry Won Lee’s theory of “translanguaging pedagogy.” We hope that these examples will inspire more concrete initiatives aimed at promoting linguistic social justice and student agency.

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power relations between languages, texts, writers, and readers. Critical translations by an international student and a resident multilingual student receive particular attention in this article in that they strategically utilize paratexts as discursive spaces for interrogating, resisting, and reconstituting academic English writing standards and conventions. Foregrounding such paratextual interventions in critical translations as forms of translingual and anti-racist practice can bring about social justice and change in multilingual writing and its teaching.

Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this variation. From our reading of over 40 published accounts of WAW courses, curricula, or programs, we articulate a WAW typology using an axiological heuristic that non-reductively but clearly identifies variations of WAW as well as the values that underlie the differences among them. We then explore the implications of these theoretical and axiological differences for the probable results of different WAW approaches, particularly related to claims that WAW effectively facilitates transfer of learning. We conclude with an exploration of questions regarding WAW and transfer that our typology and analysis raise that might be the focus of future research.

This study examines how African American adults attending a code bootcamp continue to learn coding literacy despite life challenges associated with racial oppression. Eleven out of twelve study participants drew maps of their support and discussed in one-on-one interviews how the people, objects, and animals in their drawings assisted their approaching learning computer programming. Applying ego network analysis, these interviews and drawings suggest that participants use various clusters of support in their network to provide the personal resources coders need to code and what is hard to come by in situations of racial injustice. These resources may have helped participants manage the risks of losing access to coding literacy. Instead of a universal approach to accessing technology, different kinds of networks and resources can lead to continuous access. This study furthers research on racially marginalized adults’ digital literacies and demonstrates how ego network analysis maybe useful for qualitative research on theories of ecological writing.

Despite significant work on literacy as a situated practice (Brandt; Street; Gee), in the African American community (Banks; Richardson; Young) and in the LGBT community (Alexander; Alexander and Rhodes), only recently have scholars looked at literacy at the intersection of Black and LGBT people. A notable example is Eric Pritchard’s discussion of “literacy normativity” and the multilayered ways in which Black queer literacies function(Darnell). In this multimedia article, the social space I focus on is Washington, DC, Black Gay Pride 2013, where I discussed shade and shade narratives with seven men and one transgender woman. A main finding of this research was that participants typically relied on narrative to illustrate how shade was thrown; in fact, narrative is a necessary component of catching shade. These narratives provide situated examples of throwing shade while foregrounding the subjectivities or backstories that give throwing shade traction. In this way, throwing shade as a part of a larger “fierce literacy” talks back to literacy normativity and speaks to Black queer people’s relationships with one another, with language, and with the larger culture.

Background: In this article, we address the use of metatags as a form of community knowledge formation and gatekeeping within digital platforms. Situating the case: The subReddit KotakuInAction is a well-known hub of the GamerGate community on Reddit, but one that has avoided the bans common to other aggressive subReddits and GamerGate communities on platforms such as 4chan and GitHub. We contextualize the aggressive nature of the subReddit and the reasons why participants' uses of metatags are meaningful for understanding subReddit culture and moderation practices. Methodology: To better understand the destructive behavioral patterns of KotakuInAction, we coded for the frequency of certain behaviors, such as linking and tagging, as well as the shift in certain keywords and vocabularies between the front facing or predetermined tags and the user-customized or admin-altered tags. We also examined how tags shifted over time and whether certain users dominated particular tags. About the case: What we found was a hybrid culture on KiA that applied Chan culture values and flaming, but increasingly localized the behavior to KiA rather than direct readers out of the site. We also found key shifts in topics away from gaming and activism toward broader complaints about social justice. In addition, we found that a tiny core group of nine influencers (out of tens of thousands of users) accounted for 20% of the top conversations. Conclusions: We suggest a closer examination of how communities self-organize around meta naming structures. Knowledge of this activity can help with predicting and engaging with aggressive and hostile communities by describing how topics shift over time, how they adapt to platform moderation, and who the influencers within a community might be.

This study examined the perceptions and expressions of learning of 18 undergraduate students who participated in case study competitions through qualitative inquiry. The participants articulated learning outcomes based on their participation in a case competition, including enhanced communication, critical thinking, and analytical skills; viewing diversity as an educational benefit; and gaining a deeper understanding of business fields such as consulting. These findings suggest case study competitions are a viable tool for business educators to aid students in preparing for competitive work environments.

Abstract Opioid addiction and overdose are widely recognized as a contemporary “crisis” across the United States. To address rapidly increasing mortality rates related to this substance use epidemic, the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office announced in January 2018 that it would encourage the development of supervised injection sites or “Comprehensive User Engagement Sites” within city limits. Official communications cited select moments from the region’s past to frame these sites as urgent while constituting a supportive, unified public. Through remediating disidentification, a mode of rhetorical contestation and reformulation, local community members used an alternate historical framing to resist dominant ideology and revise the terms of the related public discourse. By further developing the concept of rhetorical disidentification, this essay demonstrates how the deployment of historical analogy in response to proposed public health interventions can enable the public recognition and potential address of systemic racial inequities.

In this article, we argue that HBCU composition faculty members impact the composition field through our innovative and unorthodox tactics that we label cross-boundary discourse, discursive homeplacing, and safe harboring. Our goal is to show that HBCUs are unique sites of inquiry and poised to be at the forefront of conversations about race and writing because of our institutional contexts and the student populations with whom we work each day.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Pragmatism's star in the field of rhetorical studies continues to rise, with more and more scholars mining the depths of figures such as Dewey, James, Addams, and beyond for rhetorically useful material. Part of the challenge comes from the complex historical context that such thinkers are embedded in; another challenge stems from pragmatism's own commitment to praxis over the production of abstract—and all too often academic—theories divorced from the historical-material conditions of their emergence. Often, its best thinkers are those who both engage in political practice and guide criticism instead of those who exclusively write scholarly books removed from the world of praxis. Steven Mailloux is one of the current group of scholars attempting to recover and promote this pragmatist tradition, both in his activities as a theorist and as a critical practitioner, especially as it affects rhetorical studies and implicates allied disciplines. Rhetoric's Pragmatism is his latest attempt to flesh out what pragmatism means for those thinking about, and often practicing, the transdisciplinary arts of rhetoric and criticism, and how we are to make sense of pragmatism in its theoretical guises and in concrete practices of interpretation and sense making. Mailloux's book is a wonderful new entry in the growing body of work that explores what pragmatism means for rhetoric, and what rhetoric means for those who study pragmatism.Rhetoric's Pragmatism collects fifteen of Mailloux's previously published essays, largely focused on the interplay between rhetoric and interpretation, and forms a new exploration of “rhetorical pragmatism.” This becomes a “rhetoricized form of neo-pragmatism” that extends the philosophical thought of figures such as Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and others (1). In the introduction he indicates that the work as a whole explicates the idea of “rhetorical hermeneutics,” or the orientation that “claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric (we make our interpretations through figure and argument) and all rhetoric involves politics (power relations both condition and are affected by our arguments)” (18). The complexity and methodological diversity of the chapters that follow are explained in short order by Mailloux in the following catchy, but perhaps perplexing, slogan—“rhetorical hermeneutics often uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (1). What this maxim gets at is Mailloux's engagement with history, a history of thinkers and theories and practices of communication, all of which require his interpretive activity and that putatively shed light on larger and more abstract questions about the nature of interpretation in general. Both the compact statement and his explorations in this book reveal the various integrations that Mailloux strives to present his readers with, many of which involve interpretative maneuvers such as reception studies and close readings of specific texts, as well as more abstract philosophical theorizing. This transdisciplinary and diverse approach makes the book both a challenging and a rewarding read.The book is divided into four main sections dealing with a range of topics that include rhetoric and ontology, rhetoric and interpretation in global contexts, comparative rhetoric and Jesuit “theorhetoric,” and rhetorical pragmatism's connection to reception history. The first section is loosely defined by the intersecting concerns of human ontology, rhetoric, and interpretation. The first chapter investigates the challenges of interpretation and hermeneutic activity (taken to be largely the same sort of activity for Mailloux) from the complementary realms of rhetorical action and legal judgment. Mailloux's approach in this chapter employs his strategy of engaging specific texts and practices to both use interpretative frameworks and to theorize such frameworks (and their entailments) in a more abstract sense. This explains why he explicates the theoretical dividends of rhetorical pragmatism by turning toward the historical events that form a line from Huckleberry Finn, and its reception history, to influential court decisions on equal rights. Mailloux insists that our theoretical claims and interpretative judgments recognize the dependence of our claims on historical contexts: “Rhetorical hermeneutics claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric … and all rhetoric involves politics” (18). We run into trouble “only when these rhetorical moments get extracted from their historical context of persuasive activity and become the basis of foundationalist theorizing” (19).The next three chapters comprising this section expand on this commitment to the humanistic contexts that rhetoric so often inhabits. What does it mean to be human and to be implicated in contexts that are based upon and demand interpretation? What does it mean to consider—and to be affected by—reception histories, or the account of the rhetorical consequences of various interpretations of specific texts over some historical time period, of communicative objects and practices? Chapter 2 engages the neo-pragmatist movement, featuring figures such as Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Stanley Fish, and attempts to find room for rhetorical pragmatism in its confines. Mailloux ranges from the early pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller to Stout's work on religious communities and communication to posit his own version of pragmatism as a “mediating rhetoric” that finds the middle ground “between pessimism and optimism, between idealism and realism” (31). Chapter 3 continues the explication of Mailloux's theory of rhetorical pragmatism by engaging Heidegger's anti-humanist strains from Ernesto Grassi's revisionist interpretation of humanism. Showing his facility with a range of theoretical orientations, Mailloux deftly moves his discussion of Grassi's humanism to include Michael Leff's rhetorically sophisticated “Ciceronian humanism” and its critics. Chapter 4 shows the contemporaneous and constructive value of his approach to doing history through engaging histories of rhetorical effects. Here Mailloux uses Hubert Dreyfus's creative Kierkegaardian critique of the internet—and its critical reception by neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty—as a means to delineate his own rhetorical pragmatism. A new approach that builds upon Dreyfus's critique, Mailloux argues, prioritizes calls for self-reflection about our own vocabularies of self-creation as well as our own “passionate commitments” as online agents (51).The second part of the book is comprised of three chapters, each expanding the discussion of rhetorical pragmatism to more global and intercultural contexts. Chapter 5 explores the vexing question of whether cross-cultural communication is possible without traces of ethnocentrism. Unlike Rorty who quickly accepts the supposed inevitability of ethnocentrism in interpretative matters, Mailloux searches for a version of pragmatism that can escape significant and harmful strains of ethnocentrism in contexts of cross-cultural interpretation. He explores the challenges of different power dynamics and the question of interpretative standards in cross-cultural situations by interpreting these questions through the example of a Star Trek episode, and eventually concludes that “ethnocentrism is unavoidable in cross-cultural comparisons. Practically, the particular shape that any comparison takes in a specific case depends on the particulars of that case” (70). While the Star Trek episode served as a useful thought experiment, some may wish for actual instances of cross-cultural interpretation to serve as a way to explicate the pathways of cross-cultural interpretative activity. The next two chapters do just this, featuring Jesuit missionaries and their interpretative practices as a case of cross-cultural rhetoric. Chapter 6 presents Jesuit “eloquentia perfecta” as a rhetorical encounter with guiding themes for encounters with other cultures, balancing appropriation with concerns about missionary hermeneutic metapractice. Chapter 7 provides a brief commentary on this Jesuit rhetoric as an example of “theorhetoric” that foregrounds “rhetorical accommodationism” (87)—it utilized the arts of rhetoric in an attempt to account for local practices of interpretation and to assert various meanings and conceptions of the good to local audiences in turn.In the third section of this book, Mailloux further explores the orientation to comparative rhetoric he extracts from the Jesuit theorhetoric that aims to accommodate indigenous cultures as it understands and persuades. Chapters 8 and 9 serve as an extension of this project, ruminating on hermeneutics, allegory, and deconstruction in thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul de Man, and Kenneth Burke. Chapter 10 returns to the Jesuit-inspired inflection of rhetorical pragmatism in the context of the challenges posed by rhetorical education. According to Mailloux, rhetorical education “has been portrayed in contradictory ways, sometimes as conservative defender of tradition and at other times as progressive advocate of change” (115). Mailloux indicates that this is a false dichotomy for the educational approach of rhetorical pragmatism—“‘what works’ must be defined to encompass not simply what is procedurally effective in a specific rhetorical context, but also what is consistent with great educational purposes across multiple contexts” (115). In other words, certain strategies or approaches might seem to work fine, but become increasingly problematic when viewed from other contexts; alternatively, some approaches can be limited to just those arenas in which they work, with no promise that they hold across multiple other contexts or areas of application. Burke's “theotropic logology” is then employed to highlight the promise of the approach taken by the Society of Jesus over its complex history. Jesuit pedagogy and spiritual exercises are rendered rhetorical on Mailloux's reading, a gain in itself outside of the conversations over pragmatism and rhetoric. Chapter 11 explicates the modern adaptions of Jesuit rhetoric in American colleges, including the educative texts and novels produced by Jesuit thinkers that aimed to inculcate the skills of eloquentia perfecta in young pupils.The fourth part of Rhetoric's Pragmatism explores the act of reception, a topic not unremoved from Mailloux's past scholarship on reception histories. In the act of reading, we interpret and practice rhetoric; the theory of rhetorical pragmatism must provide some guidance in this enacted interpretative realm if it is to be a reliable guide to the vicissitudes of meaningful practice. In chapter 12, Mailloux explores “the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture” (138). Using Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as its globalized artifact, Mailloux explores the political situatedness of our interpretative judgments, and the extent to which they can transcend ideological entanglements in diverse cultures and contexts. Chapter 13 further investigates the process of reading and interpreting by looking at the embodied intensities available in nineteenth-century travel narratives of visitors to Rome. Using these “walking narratives” alongside modern narrative theory, Mailloux interrogates the travel memoires of Herman Melville, Orville Dewey, and Frederick Douglass as attempts to produce a “composition of place” (156) among their interested readers back home. Chapter 14 marks a break with the format of the rest of the book, being composed of an interview Keith Gilyard conducted with Mailloux. The informal and dialogic tone of this exchange is helpful, especially as it serves to flesh out the “idea of cultural rhetoric” (158) in Mailloux's rhetorical pragmatism. The discussion ranges over a variety of topics, but one interesting part concerns whether or not “pragmatism” taken in its most general meaning entails specific political commitments. After indicating some putative ways that it may not be determined politically, Mailloux concludes that pragmatism lines up with “radical democracy,” since both “share tropes of conversation and dialogue; they share arguments about the primacy of empowerment and protection of minority rights; and they share narratives about the way that you come up with knowledge of truth: through deliberation” (165). The final chapter returns to Mailloux's exploration of reception, reading, and interpretation, and explores the political theologies resident in textual attempts to come to terms with slavery and abolitionist narratives. Here Mailloux's approach is showcased in its rich contextual detail and attentiveness to close reading of texts when he investigates how Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and others received the burden and vocabulary of abolition in their own writings.Mailloux's Rhetoric's Pragmatism is a grand addition to the growing wave of research that explores the value of the pragmatist tradition for those in rhetorical studies. It deftly combines theorizing, close reading, and reception histories to make its case that rhetorical pragmatism is a valuable way to engage the promises of rhetorical action among critics and practitioners alike. Like any project, it makes strategic decisions that garner some gains, but that inevitably entail some lacunae. For instance, the collated nature of this work—along with the lack of a synoptic conclusion—sometimes leaves the reader wondering how all of these parts and episodes fit together in a way that provides general guidance for the next instance of interpretation, be it the reader's or Mailloux's. But perhaps this is Mailloux's point in leaving rhetorical pragmatism an open narrative. As I read through this book, I also found myself wondering how this story might have went if Mailloux had engaged the extensive range of us working in and through the separate areas of pragmatist rhetoric and comparative rhetoric. Of course, some of the pieces collected here predate much of the current work in these areas, and Mailloux's approach has a reason for prioritizing the displaying of the value of his application of rhetorical pragmatism to specific lines of inquiry over engaging the full range of past work of others. Still, as the areas of pragmatist rhetoric and comparative or intercultural rhetoric fill with more and more studies, as well as theoretical disputes over the best methods for such work, our accounts of rhetorical pragmatism must grow to fully engage this diversity of readings and readers. Even the guiding term of “pragmatism” demands interrogation and a pluralistic approach to unpacking it: pragmatism is not one thing or theory, of course (as Mailloux acknowledges with his diverse operationalizations of “rhetorical pragmatism”), and versions of it have spread to (and evolved in) cultural contexts as different as Italy, China, and India over the past century. Current scholarship is recognizing this pluralism and global diversity of pragmatism more and more. All of these challenges, however, can be left for future explorations of rhetorical pragmatism. With its rich diversity of topics and playful approaches to reading and theorizing, Rhetoric's Pragmatism does an admirable job of collecting Mailloux's past and present thoughts on and applications of the complex pragmatist tradition to the ephemeral realms of rhetorical practice.

Read and considered thoughtfully, Safiya Umoja Noble'sAlgorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racismis devastating. It reduces to rubble the notion that technology is neutral and ideology-free. Noble's crushing the neutrality myth does several things. First, this act lays foundations for her argument: only if you recognize and understand that technology is built with, and integrates, bias, can you then be open to her primary thesis: search engines advance discriminatory and often racist content. Second, it banishes a convenient response for many self-identified meritocratic Silicon Valley "winners" and their supporters. Post-reading, some individuals may retain their beliefs in a neutral and ideology-free technology in spite of the overwhelming evidence and citations Noble brings to bear. Effective countering of Noble's claims is unlikely to occur. For professionals working in technology, information, argumentation, and/or rhetorical studies,Algorithms of Oppressionis refreshing. Agonistic towards structural racism and its defenses, single-minded in its evidentiary presentation, collaborative in its acknowledgement of others' scholarship and research, Noble models many academic, critical, and social moves. Technology scholars and writers will find inAlgorithms of Oppressiona masterful mentor text on how to be an activist researcher scholar. Noble also makes this enjoyable reading. It is uncommon to find academic books that can simultaneously be read, used, and applied by academics and non-academics alike.

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

editors intro

This article examines the fingerprint biometric technology adopted by Ghana to enhance its electoral integrity and argues that although this technology is touted to be value-neutral, objective, and accurate, it is inherently discriminatory. Reports show that the biometric rejected those individuals who are engaged in “slash-and-burn agriculture.” Therefore, the mass subjection of elections to the logic of the biometric technology in resource-mismanaged contexts is welcoming, but its use raises social justice and localization concerns.

This article presents the racial politics of circulation as a critical concept for elucidating how whiteness, nationhood, and doxa intertwine to reinforce and amplify white supremacy within a context of white nationalist postracialism. As a case study, the authors investigate how two popular slogans associated with Donald Trump drive the production and circulation of digital doxicons called Trumpicons and how such Trumpicons, in turn, feed back into a socio-political loop of white supremacist logics. In studying how Trumpicons become embroiled in such racial politics of circulation, the authors disclose how new media images contribute to an affective economy of whiteness in contemporary American culture.

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

Review Article| October 01 2019 Composition’s Linguistic Diversity: Challenging the Emphasis on Standard American English Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy. By You, Xiaoye. Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 300 pages. Allison Giannotti Allison Giannotti Allison Giannotti is a third-year PhD student in composition studies at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in writing in the sciences and narrative medicine. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2019) 19 (3): 579–584. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7615621 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Allison Giannotti; Composition’s Linguistic Diversity: Challenging the Emphasis on Standard American English. Pedagogy 1 October 2019; 19 (3): 579–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7615621 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 by Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article outlines findings from a case study investigating attitudes toward English as the dominant language of scientific research writing. Survey and interview data were collected from 55 Latin American health and life scientists and 7 North American scientific journal editors connected to an intensive scholarly writing for publication course. Study findings point to competing perceptions (scientists vs. editors) of fairness in the adjudication of Latin American scientists’ research at international scientific journals. Adopting a critical, plurilingual lens, I argue that these findings demand a space for more equity-driven pedagogies, policies, and reflective practices aimed at supporting the robust participation of plurilingual scientists who use English as an additional language (EAL). In particular, if equity is indeed a shared goal, there is a clear need for commitment to ongoing critical self-reflection on the part of scientific journal gatekeepers and research writing support specialists.

I am grateful and honored to have served as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric for four years (2016–2019). A valedictory is an occasion for expressing gratitude, here to all who have made my four-year stint as editor meaningful to me.First, I express gratitude to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) and its Board. During Katya Haskins tenure as editor, the ASHR board voted to devote one issue of the journal to the best papers presented at the ASHR symposium. This policy ensures that the journal represents the interests of ASHR members. In the absence of such a policy, the contents of journal would depend entirely on what came in willy-nilly through the Taylor and Francis portal. If the editor was one who, let us charitably say, was not famous for stretching the boundaries of the discipline, the journal might soon reflect only an editor’s narrow interests. During my tenure, the ASHR policy generated special issues “Rhetoric In Situ,” curated by Kassie Lamp, and “Diversity in and Among Rhetorical Traditions,” curated by Scott Stroud, thus ensuring that Advances documented current interests in visual and material rhetoric and in rhetoric outside of the Western tradition. This policy and Kassie and Scott’s good work helped me to meet my pledge on assuming the editorship to continue Katya Haskins effort to expand the journal’s purview. I should also thank the editors of the other special issues published during my tenure, one on Quintilian, edited by Jerry Murphy, on the occasion of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the discovery in St. Gall, Switzerland by Poggio Bracciolini of the first complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; and a most interesting special issue on Rhetoric and Economics edited by Mark Longaker.Under my tenure, Advances also inaugurated the policy of publishing book review forums – three – and book reviews – sixteen – over the four years. The forums enabled me to ensure that the journal continued, in a tradition begun by Robert Gaines in his tenure as editor, to be a place for debate and focused discussion. For the book review forums, I owe special thanks to Heather Hayes, who helped organize them. A forum on a critical edition of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 Address at Carnegie Hall by Tiffany Lewis and the publication in this issue of a translation of work by Chaim Perelman by Michelle Bolduc and David Frank ensured that Advances remained a depository for primary material, as Robert Gaines hoped it would. For help with this focused issue on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, I thank Andreea Ritivoi for work on the introduction and for her critical eye and good advice.From its beginning under the editorship of the journal’s founder Rich Enos, Advances has taken seriously its commitment to publishing the work of emerging scholars. Sometimes what that means in practical terms is issuing a “revise and re-submit” for manuscripts that the editor knows will require two, three, four revisions on its way to meeting the journal’s expectations. When I committed to such manuscripts I pledged not only my own time but the time of reviewers as well. Reviewing even the most polished of manuscripts requires critical intelligence and tact and takes hours of uncompensated time. We could not continue as a scholarly community without the commitment of talented, conscientious reviewers. I am most grateful to all who served as reviewers for manuscripts I sent them. I don’t feel I can thank all here (though I considered it) but I will single out Glen McClish, Dave Tell, James Fredal, Michele Kennerly, Brandon Inabinet, and James Kasterly for their help and, especially in Glen’s case, sage advice.I certainly would be remiss if I did not thank those who readied manuscripts for production: my three editorial assistants, Allison Prasch, Tara Wambach, and Brittany Knutson, and the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota, embodied in its Chair, Ron Greene, who paid for their help. I thank Taylor and Francis for supportive collegiality and the Press’s Megan Cimini, who, in response to queries, was always helpful, always professional, and always immediate.

ABSTRACT An analysis of Stokely Carmichael’s dissociation of “racism” attempted at UC Berkeley on October 29, 1966 extends the utility of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “dissociation of concepts” for those seeking racial justice. I offer a new term “subversive dissociations” to theorize the foundations of racist dominant narratives as what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call “linguistic common property.” This move reframes dissociative challenges to dominant narratives as attempts to counter other dissociations and thus makes available a set of tools outlined in The New Rhetoric for that purpose. Dissociation emerges as a dynamic anti-racist strategy.

Introduction: Professional communication instructors in transnational contexts face unique challenges when helping students transition into the workplace. These challenges include preparing students for multilingual workplaces and educational settings, as well as multicultural communication in English at transnational workplaces. About the case: The authors, working at an international branch campus (IBC) in the Middle East, wanted to revise their assignments in a technical writing course for engineers in order to better prepare students for the realities of professional communication in the region. Situating the case: Engineering students matriculate into an increasingly diverse workplace, but instructors may not adequately understand the needs of employers in transnational corporations. Methods: Semistructured interviews were conducted with students and alumni of the IBC, and transcripts were coded for common themes. Results/discussion: Students and alumni had different perceptions of workplace communication genres, expectations for detailed writing, and the ability to adapt rhetorical strategies for different contexts. Alumni experienced a gap between their professors' and their workplaces' expectations for business genres and level of detail. They also reported that one of their significant challenges was adopting a flexible mindset toward written and spoken communication practices. Conclusions: Professional communication instructors should emphasize the strengths of multilingual writers, particularly their sense of language difference and rhetorical attunement, to better prepare them for the transnational workplace, in both the US and abroad. The authors describe changes in their pedagogy to help students adopt a more flexible and industry-oriented mindset toward technical communication.

This article offers readers 13 My Favorite Assignments that were presented at the Association for Business Communication’s 83rd annual conference held in Miami, Florida, in 2018. The teaching innovations offered include assignments that present quick, fun icebreaker exercises; visual communication and diversity; rhetoric; email; and informational interviews. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

AbstractIn this essay, I offer a reception study of the varied responses to and interpretations of a burning church in the town of Eldoret following the 2007 Kenya presidential election. Specifically, I study responses from the U.S. and British media, U.S. officials, and Kenyan politicians. My analysis illuminates how different uses of the term “genocide” mobilize particular sensibilities about the relation between ethnicity and politics and demonstrates how the label of genocide constrains interpretations of violence. In the media and discourse of U.S. politicians, the identification or denial of genocide was made by setting ethnicity and politics as opposing explanatory factors of the violence. Discourses in Kenya, however, demonstrate that understanding the violence required understanding the intersection and permeability of these same categories. This analysis has important implications for understanding how conflicts are and are not named genocide. It demonstrates the importance of attending to the nuanced rhetoric of genocide and calls our attention to the contingent relationships among ethnicity, politics, and genocide.

Two-year college faculty have begun articulating ateacher-scholar-activistprofessional identity. After tracing the emergence of this concept and calls for solidarity in two-year college writing studies, we draw on two case studies to advocate for cross-sector disciplinary alliances that expand educational opportunity, improve professional equity, and advance social justice.

This article discusses strategies by which compositionists can use Kenji Yoshino’s theory on “covering” to identify rhetorical moves white compositionists make to “pass” as allies, so they can revise the moves effectively to support colleagues and students of color.

This essay examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for the “conservation of races” as an instance of an ecological legacy in African American thought that challenged traditional divisions between humans and nonhumans. Evoking contemporary models of rhetoric, I show that Du Bois implicitly figured blackness as an inventive rhetorical ecology that was distributed through material things and environments. Promoting the conservation of that ecology, his sociological work gestured toward a worldly, more-than-human ideal of justice. I explore how his ecological articulation of conservation resonated with Progressive Era environmental conservation in its rejection of ideals of purity but pressed beyond its economic materialism and human essentialism. Ultimately, I argue, Du Bois leaves us with a unique picture of conservation as a cooperative practice of identification in which both human and nonhuman participants come to articulate as interdependent parts of a larger ecology, a process that involves memory at a lived, material level.

In April 2017, Minnesota experienced the state’s largest measles outbreak since 1990. The outbreak primarily affected Somali children and was attributed to declining vaccination rates in Minnesota’s Somali population, specifically. Examining empirical data from ethnographic interviews with Somali parents who experienced the outbreak, this article identifies four themes that shaped participants’ vaccination decision-making: 1) an experience-informed belief in vaccine effectiveness, 2) concerns about non-inclusive clinical research, 3) belief in personalized, flexible immunity, and 4) experiences of structural vulnerability. Findings show that race and ethnicity, migration history, and structural precarity in resettlement influence Somali parents’ vaccination decisions and should inform existing explanations for vaccine hesitancy and models for responsive public health outreach. Participants’ practices of vaccine hesitancy are often refusals: constrained and embodied acts of resistance and generative openings to collaboratively re-envision healthcare relationships and communication. Refusals can redirect public health efforts from vaccine compliance toward institutional change and resource redistribution as means of disease prevention. This possibility has yet to be fully explored, and this article uses rhetorical publics theory to study medical refusal as a public participation strategy.

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor united most workers regardless of craft or trade. They also organized African American workers and women. This essay uncovers how the Knights maintained unity by analyzing speeches given at their annual conventions from 1885-1890. Leaders defined male Knights as chivalric, self-sacrificing, and battle-tested. After identifying the elements of the rhetoric of knighthood, I then explain how the rhetoric offered only ironic inclusion to white women and excluded Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. This argument builds rhetorical scholarship on inclusion and exclusion in social movements by theorizing its partial and ironic modes.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the importance of decolonization theory/practice outside of Latinx and indigenous literatures to understand how the African diaspora has produced rhetorical and philosophical interventions that have been understudied and ignored. The books reviewed all contribute to understanding the limitations of Western, white humanism through the concepts: Black reason, the undercommons, racial liberalism, the idea of the spill, and ontological terror. These texts function as entrees into a deep excavation of the limits of Kantian freedom and Rawlsian justice that recenters anti-Blackness as an animating force of governmentality (particularly governmental structures and regimes that enforce possibilities of life and death), rhetorical invention, and philosophical engagement.

Divisive rhetoric abounds in the United States on the topic of racism. Finding productive and holistic ways of analyzing and discussing racism are vital. This essay proposes the use of the pentad method (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) and dramatic framing from Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism as useful toward that end. A case study of analyzing a racial narrative is performed on Nelson Mandela’s famous 1964 Rivonia Trial speech. In this paramount speech, Mandela advocates for a pragmatic transformation through agency and uses a comic frame to address the problem of racism in Apartheid. This essay concludes with a discussion of how the pentad and dramatic framing can be used to address racism by encouraging constructive dialogue and creative rhetorical approaches.