This research examines the role of idiomatic expressions (IEs) in international business (IB) communication and non-native speakers’ (NNEs’) English proficiency. It investigates how IE affect IB communication’s effectiveness and whether IEs should be taught to NNE. We collected feedback from academics who confirmed the importance of IE and relevant business idioms from professional websites. We also assessed IE usage benefits for different cohorts working in IB settings. The results indicate that IE can enhance communication efficiency, cross-cultural social skills, monetary rewards, and satisfaction in IB. The findings support the need for teaching IE to NNE and justify inclusion in curricula.

This study examines strategies for emphasizing collaborative writing in a community engagement project. Doing so can enrich students’ experiences with ethical community engagement. Successful collaborative writing provides students with competencies—rhetorical knowledge, confidence, understanding of transfer, and appreciation for diverse perspectives—that are key building blocks in supporting students as they deepen their engagement with social issues. Current research demonstrates how collaborative writing and community engagement experiences provide overlapping benefits. Pairing them has the potential to amplify students’ learning, including their understanding of their ability and responsibility to use writing as a tool to affect meaningful change.

Background: With increased reliance on technology-mediated communication (TMC) minus the social cues, uncertainty management has become critical. This study investigates how usage of emojis/emoticons in professional communication contexts helps people navigate this uncertainty. Literature review: Prior works have focused on the benefits of emoji usage in TMC, particularly in enhancing message substance, emotive expressiveness, and perception. Research questions: 1. What is the attitude towards emoji usage among the upcoming generation of professionals, specifically Generation Z, as they prepare to enter the workforce? 2. What, if any, is the impact of emoji usage on how one perceives others and is perceived in formal work settings, especially for Generation Z? 3. How does emoji/emoticon use affect Generation Z's interpersonal communication at work? Methods: Three focus group discussions were conducted with a total of 29 graduate-level, business studies students with work experience ranging from zero to four years. Reflexive Thematic Analysis using Braun and Clarke's six-step process was conducted to analyze the data and generate themes. Results: Three salient themes emerged from the analysis: 1. Communicative Competence, 2. Identity Construction, 3. Socialized Patterns of Usage. Conclusion: Although emojis are helpful in specific linguistic functions, clarifying intent, and reducing uncertainty, they retain a great deal of fuzziness owing to the ambiguity in usage and interpretation. It is therefore prudent to design ways of incorporating them in instructional interventions to sensitize students around the nuances of emoji usage, to capitalize on the benefits they offer.

Background: Virtual reality (VR) has been studied as a potential tool for preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) practitioners to contribute to emerging technologies. However, no present research in TPC has focused on the methodological value of VR as a sociotechnical research site. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the methodological value of VR by documenting the processes and methods employed by a student researcher in understanding the ways VR affect community building. Literature review: Humanists have explored and theorized virtuality from various perspectives. Social researchers have explored the use of VR in multiple sectors. Yet, TPC has not established a steady agenda for studying VR as a research site. Research questions: 1. What can we learn from a student researcher's experience of conducting social research in VR? 2. What were the methodological challenges in VR interviews? 3. How can TPC scholars use VR for research? Research methodology: Using ethnographic approaches including interviewing, affinity mapping, and reviewing of VR environments, this study collected insights about performing research with VR and its implications for TPC researchers. Results: The study's participant shared their experience with using VR to conduct research. Five categorial themes were identified from the interview: interactivity, reach, usability, positionality, and tactics. Four VR applications were reviewed. Additional methodological strategies were discussed to prepare TPC practitioners for using VR as a research technology. Conclusion: TPC researchers should consider VR as a viable research technology to expand the methodological means of TPC studies.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, provides a unique opportunity to reexamine how affect, memory, authenticity, embodiment, and authorship are conceptualized and discussed in rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly significant as affective experiences resulting from communication with AI are increasingly normative due to the public-facing nature of many large language model chatbots. Drawing first on a recent case wherein an AI user produced a chatbot facsimile of her childhood self, this article suggests that affective changes facilitated by AI represent not only new avenues for exploring affect, but also how time itself is experienced.

This paper investigated the impact of direct unfocused written corrective feedback (WCF) on EFL students’ writing improvement, self-efficacy, and anxiety. To this aim, 52 Iranian male learners were selected as participants by using the Oxford Placement Test and randomly placed in an experimental and a control group. The participants completed a pre-test that included a writing task, the writing self-efficacy questionnaire (WSEQ), and the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) to assess their writing skill, writing self-efficacy, and writing anxiety, respectively. Having attended 15 sessions of writing instruction in which only the experimental group received WCF, the participants again completed a writing task, the WSEQ, and the SLWAI in the posttest procedure. The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in all three constructs, indicating that WCF has a positive impact on EFL students’ writing performance, self-efficacy, and anxiety. Implications of the study are presented.

This essay examines how medical rhetorics helped justify the recent torrent of anti-trans legislation. Beginning with the “legitimacy wars” between psychiatry and psychology, I trace how competing disciplines established their own expertise by denying trans patients’ agency and self-knowledge. After identifying the “trans trickster” trope that emerges from these rhetorics, I trace how the trans trickster haunts arguments used to ban gender-affirming health care and sports participation for trans youth. I draw from sociologist Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” to explain how medical logics affect public perception and how those understandings loop back into medical research. The binary, linear models of gender transition established by trans medicine helped justify cisnormative policies around transgender identity, which in turn restricted further scientific inquiry such that more imaginative gender formations remain illegible. To conclude, I argue that medical paradigms work in relation with trans imagination would expand scientific explorations of human diversity, and that those understandings too could loop through public policy and perception.

Recently, formative feedback in writing instruction has been supported by technologies generally referred to as Automated Writing Evaluation tools. However, such tools are limited in their capacity to explore specific disciplinary genres, and they have shown mixed results in student writing improvement. We explore how technology-enhanced writing interventions can positively affect student attitudes toward and beliefs about writing, both reinforcing content knowledge and increasing student motivation. Using a student-facing text-visualization tool called Write & Audit, we hosted revision workshops for students (n = 30) in an introductory-level statistics course at a large North American University. The tool is designed to be flexible: instructors of various courses can create expectations and predefine topics that are genre-specific. In this way, students are offered non-evaluative formative feedback which redirects them to field-specific strategies. To gauge the usefulness of Write & Audit, we used a previously validated survey instrument designed to measure the construct model of student motivation (Ling et al. 2021). Our results show significant increases in student self-efficacy and beliefs about the importance of content in successful writing. We contextualize these findings with data from three student think-aloud interviews, which demonstrate metacognitive awareness while using the tool. Ultimately, this exploratory study is non-experimental, but it contributes a novel approach to automated formative feedback and confirms the promising potential of Write & Audit.

An array of pictorial supports (e.g., emojis, geometrical figures, animals) is often used in studies assessing young students’ writing motivation with Likert scales. However, although these images may influence the students’ responses, sufficient rationales for these choices are often absent from the studies. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to investigate two different types of pictorial support (circles vs. faces) in Likert scales assessing first and third graders’ writing interest, self-concept, and spelling interest and self-efficacy. The samples consist of 2197 first graders (mean age 6.8 years) and 1740 third graders (mean age 8.4 years). Results show statistically significant differences among the scales indicating that when face-scales are used, first-graders skip motivation items more often, and students in both grades avoid the minimum values of the scale more often. Gender differences are also found indicating that when face-scales are used, boys in third grade avoid maximum values more often, and girls in both grades avoid the minimum values more often. These findings suggest that the use of circle-scales compared to face-scales seem more appropriate in scales measuring young students’ writing and spelling interest and self-beliefs.

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and

This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

We analyze diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reports from the top 20 Fortune 500 companies to particularly examine how these companies use visual design and representation to present an aspirational future that valorizes their current DEI efforts. We contend that if large corporations have the ability to affect outcomes among employees, stakeholders, and citizens, then educators have an obligation to prepare students to be well positioned to make change and to participate in conversations about change.

Abstract In this article, the author presents a theoretically oriented framework for teaching poetry that accounts for the role of affect. The author calls this framework reading for affective uncertainty, meaning an approach to affect and meaning that recognizes affects associated with the reading event as integral parts of the reading without expecting meaning to be inherent to texts and simply in need of interpretation, which is often a focus in teaching. Central to this framework are the notion of a poem as an object and Sara Ahmed's argument in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), that objects do not cause emotions, but emotions are produced in circulation with objects. As concrete examples, the author discusses Evelyn Reilly's Echolocation (2018) and Wendy Trevino's Cruel Fiction (2018), two recent poetry books that consider relations between the human and the nonhuman and the notions of race and borders, respectively. These works generate uncertainty as to how to relate to others and thus serve as examples of the way in which reading for affective uncertainty works in acknowledging that poems can be viewed as ordinary objects that participate in generating emotion.

AbstractWriting is both affective and ecological. Consequently, effective writing instructors need a deep understanding of writing's affective and ecological aspects, making composition one of the most complex and challenging areas of pedagogical endeavor. This claim is especially true in institutions whose product-oriented epistemologies make writing potentially traumatizing for many student writers. To assist writing teachers in meeting student writers’ needs, this article draws on a diverse body of research to explain writing affect, its role in ecological processes of composition within early collegiate humanities curricula, the relation of writing affect to writers’ identities, and the impact collegiate corporatization may have on composition instruction. Subsequently, this article describes approaches for making writing pedagogy more process oriented, trauma informed, and equity centered.

Vivian Kao is associate professor of English and director of the first-year composition program at Lawrence Technological University. She teaches courses in writing, literature, film, and the intersection of technology and the humanities. Her courses often feature multimodal assignments that challenge students to think about composition as activity, experiment, and craft. Her other publications include an account of students exploring essay form by building three-dimensional structures, and a forthcoming visual essay on virtual museum exhibits created in response to modernist literary texts.Jessica Masterson is assistant professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where her research concerns the intersections of language, literacy, and democratic teacher education.Sarah Moon is assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she teaches composition, writing about literature, environmental writing, and American theater. Her scholarly work has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts Quarterly. A playwright, she was the 2023 artist in residence for Eastern Connecticut Center for History, Art, and Performance, where she developed the original full-length drama Apostates.Molly Parsons earned her PhD in English and education at the University of Michigan. She is currently assistant director of the Center for Research and Writing at Keene State College, where she has the privilege of learning alongside talented undergraduate tutors. Her research interests include the ethics of writing center practice, grammar instruction for tutors, and, presently, the implications of artificial intelligence for tutoring and teaching. Find her other work in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, and Another Word, a blog from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's writing center.Kevin Piper teaches literature and composition at Madison College and is an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his PhD. His recent work looks at how teachers can use student feedback to improve their practice. His literary scholarship has spanned a wide range of areas, including ethnic and Indigenous literatures, postsecular literature, and literary modernisms. He can be reached at kcpiper@madisoncollege.edu.Malini Johar Schueller is professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has been the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine on her campus for many years and is a member of the organizing collective for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She is the author of several books, including U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998), Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (2009), and Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (2019). She has coedited Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism (2007) and Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (2009). She is the director of the award-winning documentary In His Own Home (2015) about police brutality and campus militarization. In 2019 she was selected to participate in a Faculty Development Seminar by the Palestinian American Research Council. Currently she is working on an essay collection, From Palestine to You. She teaches courses in comparative settler colonialism, including Palestine, and courses in postcolonial theory, Asian American studies, and US imperialism.Elina Siltanen was university lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku at the time of writing this article, and now works at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on contemporary American poetry, more specifically on the role of affect in reading complex literary texts, and her article is a part of her research project “Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry.” Recently, she has published articles on the connections between conceptualism and confessionalism in poetry in the Journal of Modern Literature and on metamodernism and New Sincerity in English Studies. She has a double doctoral degree from the University of Turku and Luleå University of Technology.D. T. Spitzer-Hanks is an early-career researcher interested in critical composition studies and in transatlantic critical classical reception in the long nineteenth century, specifically in North America and the United Kingdom. Spitzer-Hanks is particularly interested in analyzing how patterns of communication and perception create social structures in which inequity is fostered and sustained and seeks to find ways to intervene in such processes both as a scholar and as a member of society. Trained in gender and ethnicity studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Spitzer-Hanks earned a PhD in English studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In their private life, Spitzer-Hanks enjoys gardening, parenting, and running from their anxieties.

In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

Mental health challenges, notably anxiety, disproportionately affect graduate students, with research indicating a 41% prevalence rate compared to the general population (Evans et al.). Academic writing anxiety (AWA) stands out among these concerns, correlating with lower grades, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (Martinez et al.; Daly and Wilson; Goodman and Cirka). Traditionally, AWA has been viewed through a cognitive lens, neglecting its complexity. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive survey gathering both quantitative and qualitative data on graduate students’ AWA experiences. Our analysis of student narratives unveils how academic cultures alienate marginalized students, fostering impostor syndrome and AWA. We advocate for integrating mindfulness-based and contemplative pedagogies within feminist and anti-racist frameworks (Mathieu and Muir; Inoue; Graphenreed and Poe) to catalyze transformative change amid this pressing historical moment.

The United States is undergoing unprecedented religious change, including an increasing diversity of religious tradition, rapid disaffiliation from conventional religious institutions, and a rise in syncretic and sometimes corporatized spiritualties. Given the speed and scope of these changes, all of which affect our students, rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) must undertake the study of spirituality. Insofar as RWS seeks to prepare students for democratic citizenship, it should engage in public discussion and study of the practices that appear to be replacing traditional religious observance. RWS has a special claim on spirituality studies, which have often undertaken scholarly work on writing, reading, and speaking practices. In fact, RWS has already begun to pursue this kind of scholarship, even if it does not always go by the name “spirituality.” This essay will therefore discern the ways in which RWS is engaged in this work, and it will offer reasons why we must engage it further.

Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick’s account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic “allergy” to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory’s attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, “Algorithms for a Theory of Scale,” presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour’s “Irreductions,” (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio’s theory of scale. Part 2, “Configurations for a Theory of Scale,” returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, “Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale,” reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio’s theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader’s consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the “‘being’ of phenomena” and “the one who is measuring” (8). He argues, therefore, that “scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things” (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that “science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups” (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues that In order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference. (51)Thus, any given object only exists at certain scales where differences can be said to make a difference, and any given object also ceases to be an object at higher or lower orders where the differences no longer make differences. DiCaglio leverages the notion of “stability” or “stabilization” to refer to an object’s coming into being at any given scale. The metaphor of photographic or cinematographic “resolution” underwrites DiCaglio’s thinking in this area. Objects stabilize when they resolve relative to an observer’s perspective. While I find this account of stability thoughtful and compelling, it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so beholden to visual metaphors. Humans engage the world through many different senses, and not all humans engage the world with all senses.With his foundational ontology of scale established, DiCaglio proceeds to introduce “scalar analysis,” an approach to reckoning with objects, stability, and systems. The exploration of scalar analysis centers on a series of nested thought experiences and most prominently on a root cause analysis of a disease. Through oscillating our perspective between the whole human body and DNA mutations, DiCaglio shows how the dialectic of “zoom level” and “resolution” can further the analysis of complex systems. This analysis is engaging in many ways but suffers somewhat when addressing temporality. Scale analysis wants to “freeze time” (75) as an initial step, but then finds time “unwittingly introduced” (79) a few pages later. Ultimately, an analysis of causality in complex systems will probably require intentionally attending to the temporal dimensions. In fairness, at one point DiCaglio intentionally maps time to space (68) in an effort to maintain the visual metaphors of zoom and resolution. Indexing time to space is a common move, of course, and will likely only alienate a few passing Bergsonians.While the thought experiments in part 1 offer a number of interesting insights about scalar thinking, it is a bit troublesome that they exist almost exclusively in a vacuum. Aside from the occasional supportive reference to Bateson, part 1 is largely citation free. However, the insights provided seem linked in many important ways to prior efforts to understand complex systems and questions of scale. This includes both the work cited in part 2 and striking (albeit unexplored) parallels between scalar stability and accounts of stabilizing processes in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. The Whitehead parallel is, perhaps, not surprising given Bateson’s engagement with Whitehead and subsequent influence on Scale Theory. Nevertheless, this seems like an important connection and a missed opportunity. I would have very much enjoyed reading a discussion of this connection and/or an exploration of the potential synergies and disagreements between Scale Theory and Marilyn Cooper’s (2019) adaptation of Whitehead and Bateson for rhetorical new materialisms.That said, part 2 engages substantively with much of the related literature on new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics to explore previous attempts to grapple with many of the same issues of scale and complex systems. In so doing, Scale Theory argues that prior efforts to address these issues are hindered by undue focus on embodiment and embodied epistemology (in the case of feminist new materialisms), an inappropriate ontological flattening of scale (in actor-network theory), and lack of attention to holism (in cybernetics). With respect to feminist new materialisms, Scale Theory is particularly critical of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. While I agree with DiCaglio that too much reliance on epistemology is a problem for some areas of new materialism, I am not sure epistemology is as prevalent in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) as DiCaglio suggests. Furthermore, I ultimately agree with Annmarie Mol who compellingly argues that the primarily problems of (post)modern epistemology come from the ways it is rooted in perspectivalism (2003). Thus, given the inherent perspectivism of scale theory, the approach may well replicate some of the issues new materialists most wish to avoid when avoiding epistemology in the first place.DiCaglio’s critique of embodied situated knowledges is ultimately anchored in his penchant for holism. He argues that bodies are properties of individuals, and that they situate perspective in that individual, atomistic perspective. In so doing, he critiques Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge for its overreliance on bodies that only exist at certain scales. As he writes, In scalar views there is something like a transcendent view that moves away from the body itself (2.10–12)1, zeros out the perspective as “mine” (2.9), and dislocates any single perspectival configuration. Thus, when Haraway declares that “feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579), we ought to hesitate. (134)Thus, to understand the universe, as DiCaglio hopes you will, is to shed your corporeal form and embrace some transcendental perspective. Again, my response to this is something like “yes and no.” I am on record agreeing that it is possible for a theory to be too embodied, although I don’t think this applies to Haraway. I have previously criticized some strains of affect theory for their excessive embrace of embodied experience (Graham 2016). Specifically, I argue that affect theory duplicates the problems of epistemology by positing a more authentic infralevel of embodied engagement that replicates the problematic perspectivalism on which (post)modern epistemology is built. The subject-object binary is replaced by a more privileged body-world binary. If this critique is correct (and I think it is), Scale Theory makes a similar error. Specifically, it inverts affect theory’s normative orientation, privileging instead a putatively “higher” level of unembodied binary engagement, a mind-universe binary, if you will.Scale Theory’s rejections of actor-network theory and cybernetics are similar in both tone and content to its rejections of situated knowledges. ANT and related strands of sociology and geography do not account for scale in quite the same way as Scale Theory’s opening thought experiments. Thus “this inability to handle scale confuses the terms at the outset” (162). Similarly, while cybernetics and systems theory have much to offer scale theory, they are ultimately treated as lacking since they don’t provide appropriate tools for appreciating the aggregation to unity. Channeling Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, DiCaglio argues that while systems theory is useful for understanding bodies as ecologies, additional scalar (and perhaps mystical) elements are needed to pivot from bodies as ecologies to an apparently necessary identification of our equal oneness with bacteria and Gaia (173). Ultimately, part 2’s criticisms of prior efforts to address questions of scale proceed as though part 1 has successfully persuaded the reader on the merits of mystic holism. Part 2 takes the insights of the opening thought experiments as true, and recounts how feminist new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics fail to live up to the putative promises of scalar thinking. This is a risky rhetorical move, because for readers who are not entirely persuaded by the work of part 1, part 2 will come across as an exercise in somewhat uncharitable reading practices.Stepping away from the mysticism and my admitted allergies, Scale Theory also provides some thoughtful considerations on implications for rhetoric of science and science studies more broadly. As DiCaglio notes, “Because scale occurs outside of human experience, it must be re-presented at [human] scale. Inevitably, its representations will be partial and distorted” (183). Recognizing this fact points toward real challenges for scientific inquiry and scientific rhetoric which strives to account for notions of scale that cannot be contained at the scale of human representation. DiCaglio interrogates these challenges through an analysis of different modes of “specification” (193). When discussing specification, scholars of science studies most often consider what he dubs “ontological specifications”—that is, descriptions of objects, processes, and observed reality. We also (somewhat less regularly) attend to “epistemological specifications”—descriptions of knowing practices, sometimes methodology. But, since within scalar thinking, objects only exist at certain specific scales, neither ontological nor epistemological specification are sufficient to describe scientific activity. “Scalar specification” then becomes an essential additional rhetoric for both science and science studies. But scalar specifications are not without challenges.Here, DiCaglio draws our attention to “scale tricks” (228). Since scale must be re-presented, scalar thinking and scalar specifications may mislead readers through rendering scale invisible, presuming it infinite, or blending scales without acknowledging that they have been blended. For DiCaglio, transcending scale tricks is a question of accountability (231). Authors of re-presentations of experience have a duty to be consistent and precise in their scalar specifications. Precise specifications disrupt the potential confusions of scale tricks by making the scale intelligible, reminding readers or auditors that there is a scale, and preventing distortion through blending of scales. In some ways, DiCaglio’s theory of scalar specifications is a more encompassing version of the ethics of information design. Properly labeled x and y axes are critical to effective and ethical communication of charted data. Scale Theory reminds us that data need not be displayed graphically to be subject to scale and to require scalar specifications for interpretation.Part 3 of Scale Theory is devoted to the cosmos seeing itself. That is, it ruminates on possibilities for transcending corporality so as to achieve a perspective that all but transcends scale itself. DiCaglio does not precisely recommend specific techniques to achieve this transcendence, but he does point toward accounts of others that prominently feature hallucinogens, meditative practices, and methodical introspection. I will admit I find myself somewhat mystified by the mysticism that closes Scale Theory. Ultimately, I am pragmatic about theory. For me the utility of a theory lies in what work it does for inquiry, and that work needs to be indexed to a particular task at hand. Scale Theory might, perhaps, be considered pragmatic in this way, but the overriding task at hand is to understand the oneness of the universe. My scholarly aims are rather more modest. I put theory to work in an effort to address much more local tasks. As such, what I can take from Scale Theory for my own work may be more limited than what other readers can take. If you lack my allergy to holism and see the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, and drug-assisted disembodied consciousness as a potential pathway to universal understanding, then this may well be the book for you. Even so, if your aims are somewhat more modest (like mine), then there is still much of interest in the pages of Scale Theory. DiCaglio adds important new dimensions of analysis to new materialisms and related science studies. Readers might take these dimensions as intended, but I would argue that they are also flexible enough to be read more synergistically alongside Cooper and Whitehead or Barad, Mol, and Haraway. And even if you reject new materialisms entirely, Scale Theory compellingly argues that rhetoricians of science would do well to attend, in more detail, to scalar specifications and the problem of scale tricks.

This essay applies Wood’s process model of emotional memory synchronization to better understand how public memory of the Battle of Culloden, an integral event in Scottish history, is created through two exhibits at the Culloden Visitor Centre. These exhibits create a shared experience by engaging audiences through immersive exhibits that utilize sensory elements. This use of immersive, sensory-laden, and emotion-provoking exhibits may be useful in the creation of public memory of historical events that did not happen within living memory.

When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.

Abstract The appearance of a spider in the classroom can disrupt the flow of teaching, often prompting strong reactions that unsettle classroom norms. Minor classroom disruptions like this might not seem worth theorizing, but this essay reframes such disruptions as rich sites for understanding the role of affect in humanities pedagogy. Ultimately arguing against killing a spider in the classroom, this essay theorizes the moment of disruption as an opportunity to model humanistic attention to both human and nonhuman actors in the classroom space.

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

This study investigated the extent to which lexical repetition in English passages developed in a content management system appeared to affect reading comprehension. Participants were 65 graduate students at a Midwestern public university, all of whom were native English readers. Instruments were two passages adjusted to maximize or minimize internal lexical repetition. Readers rated repetitive texts as significantly more cohesive than nonrepetitive texts, although repetition did not significantly affect the accuracy of task-based responses. Participants named lexical cues that had been repeated but also named nonrepeated, memorable cues, suggesting possible future research into managed content, lexical memorableness, and reader comprehension.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> During the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of teleworking has risen. Telework seems poised to remain popular even after the pandemic fades away. As a result, it is important to understand the humanistic effects of telework such as distress, coping responses, and related effects. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Uncertainties related to telework can lead to distress. When this occurs, teleworkers may employ a variety of coping responses, which vary across several important dimensions. These coping responses vary in the extent to which they affect telework outcomes. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What strategies do teleworkers use for dealing with telework distress? 2. How are various coping strategies related to humanistic telework outcomes? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Data from a survey of 504 American teleworkers were used to test a theoretical model. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Results suggest that teleworkers cope with telework distress through assistance seeking, technology experimentation, venting, and negative and positive emotions. Coping responses had differential effects on telework exhaustion and satisfaction, with negative and positive emotions and venting affecting exhaustion, and assistance seeking, task experimentation, emotions, and venting affecting satisfaction. Distress had a direct effect on exhaustion, but not on satisfaction. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> The effects of emotion-focused coping on telework satisfaction and exhaustion are notably stronger than those of problem-focused coping responses. Emotion-focused coping responses that are adaptive have beneficial effects, while those that are maladaptive have detrimental effects. Adaptive problem-focused responses have similar effects. The extent of communication focus does not seem to affect the impact of coping responses on outcomes.

This study presents findings and strategies found to be successful through encouraging reflective thinking about classroom practices related to access, equity, and diversity. We asked, ‘How does classroom practice change when teachers reflect on equitable instruction? Do teachers recognize biased practices in their classroom? How might a teacher’s instruction unknowingly create barriers for students, thus limiting student learning?’ Over the course of one semester, participants worked collaboratively to reflect on equitable classroom practices to affect student voices. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was conducted through virtual discussions and online platforms. Here, we share reflections that surfaced during the online discussions.

This essay uses the figure of pollice verso, the “turned thumb” gesture synonymous with Roman gladiatorial contests, as a speculative tool to account for Donald Trump’s use of ambiguity in his rhetoric. Specifically, the essay argues that translating Trump’s demonstrative rhetoric into a deliberative frame can lead to misunderstanding one of his chief resources as a rhetor: the ambiguity of his “thumbful” rhetoric. Through a discussion of Third Sophistic rhetorical theory, affect, and the comedian Sarah Cooper’s parodies of Trump, the essay argues why countergesture should be considered just as indispensable as counterargument for rhetoricians who teach about affordances of digital media.

E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place. . . . As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy of nature. Following the route Wister presents in his journal, Cram details the social ecologies of sexual modernity as they emerge in Chicago as the racialized White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the train ride to Wyoming, and Theodore Roosevelt’s much touted rehabilitation from enervated neurasthenia through the “West cure.” The violent inheritance, the land lines, traced in this chapter link together the racial-sexual dynamics of heredity, rail’s connectivity, the logic of climatic therapeutics, the relations of electricity to sexuality, and the articulation of energetic friction between urbanity and nature. In these lines, Cram finds a capacitive network that cultivated settler sexuality as energy regulation for the purposes of reinvention.Chapter 2 queers settler sexuality and its relation to the land by considering the life of Grace Raymond Hebard, “a historian, suffrage activist, and progressive” who was crucial to developing pioneer mythology, particularly the White mythos surrounding Sacajawea, and who also shared a home and a life with historian Agnes Wergeland (62). Cram studies how archival practices at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming establish “relationships between memory and imagination” that mediate Hebard’s life and love and, in turn, shape the violent inheritance of sexual modernity. Cram queers the affective possibilities of archival mediation by reading how Hebard’s and Wergeland’s lives are connected through Hebard’s sentimental “love for land and woman” within archived materials and against a “narrow vision of settler feminism” that inscribed “extractive world making into her labor” (65). Cram’s intention is to undercut recuperation (here of the New Western feminist woman) and instead foster what they term regeneration. First, they examine Hebard’s racial biopolitics of pioneering, including her sentimental incorporation of Sacajawea into a settler imagination of racial vitalization through extractive, colonial relations to Western land and climate. Then Cram performs queer detective work to disrupt the landline of pioneer womanhood by inspecting Hebard’s efforts to preserve Wergeland’s papers, Hebard and Wergeland’s side-by-side burial plots, Wergeland’s love poetry, a handwritten endearment on the back of a photograph, and embossed lettering on Hebard’s briefcase that suggests Hebard had Wergeland’s name placed opposite hers after Wergeland’s death. Cram’s sensitivity to working against the materials’ normative mediation of Hebard’s memory is admirable for modeling an attunement to traces of queer life in an archive that proceeds as if their love for each other were unthinkable or irrelevant.Chapter 3 shifts again, taking the reader to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, where Cram stresses “the importance of engaging in situ encounters with settler aesthetics of violence as an entry point to witnessing violent inheritance” (92). The organizing interest for the chapter is controversy over the CMHR’s muted account of Canada’s residential school system, which was “explicitly designed to rupture the kinship ties and languages of Indigenous children stolen from their families” (91). Attending to administrative discourse, they contextualize the systemic educational violence of the residential school system within colonial biopolitics, namely the forcible sexualization of Indigeneity through the figure of childhood. Doing so, Cram situates children as resources within the extractive logic of sexual modernity, noting the abusive, paternal absorption of childlike “Natives” to revitalize the settler nation. Then they elaborate the controversy surrounding the CMHR’s handling of residential schools, centering on the museum’s justification that it was protecting (settler) children from “difficult memories” regarding the schools (92). They read two of the museum’s exhibits, the permanent Childhood Denied exhibit and a temporary one, Witness Blanket, to demonstrate the infrastructural violence of incorporating Indigenous sovereignty through Witness Blanket while also erasing it as a special instance within a persistent aesthetic, narrative architecture of settler inheritance. Cram offers a subtle, delicately written, experiential analysis of the two exhibits to contrast a settler vision of reconciliation in the permanent exhibit with that of the temporary exhibit, designed by Carey Newman (Kwagiulth and Coast Salish), which “reconfigures the metaphysics of witness” (126). This counter-installation offers a remapping of Indigeneity through “regenerative aesthetics . . . that do not presume the integrity of nor Indigenous incorporation into the settler state” (127, emphasis original). Cram closes by noting that as of 2019 the CMHR entered a nonpossessive, collaborative stewardship arrangement for Witness Blanket, thus opening future regenerative possibilities. The entire chapter is richly detailed and, against the brutality of the schools, draws transformative inspiration from the power of alternative aesthetic practices.Chapter 4 reflects again on the contested memory of the land, this time through the Minidoka National Historical Site in northern Wyoming, which memorializes the Japanese internment camp that was sited there. It is perhaps the most complex and unexpected chapter in a complex and often unexpected book. Using detailed participation of a pilgrimage to the site, interviews, and historical methods, Cram resituates the politics of internment without disrupting the memory work of its survivors and descendants; in fact, they provide nuance that leaves one humbled. Specifically, they analyze the state’s 2012 allowance of Big Sky Farms to place an eight-thousand-animal concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) just over a mile from Minidoka. Cram uses the legal logic of affected persons, determined by property and residence status (which thus denied survivors and descendants standing to object), to “narrate the overlapping and conflicted relationships it encompasses” (132). Affected persons trace the land lines of this chapter, allowing one to follow the “inherited consequence [cumulative impacts] of earlier appropriations of land from its earlier uses prior to contact, land grabs, and later appropriations” (133). Cram maps how the War Relocation Authority articulated Japanese detention within “histories and spatialities of Indianness” (134) by situating detention sites in federal lands of dispossessed Indigenous people and within imaginaries of future land development, in particular how Japanese forced labor was used to cultivate seized land to be “later transferred to private homesteaders” (134). The chapter outlines a complicated memoryscape by detailing the experience of the pilgrimage (filtered through voices of pilgrims), the history of locating Minidoka on public (dispossessed) land, the camp’s physical layout, pilgrims’ witnessing practices, the intimate environmental dimensions of the memorial, and the smell and pollution of the CAFO. Cram traces these through the way sexuality weaves through capital’s racialized, extractive biopolitics, where land seizure, cultivation by forced labor, and large private bovine agriculture operations make affected persons a window onto the violent inheritance of Western land’s relation to national, whitened vitality.Chapter 5 shifts from sites to mobilities, specifically to Interstate 80 as “a landmark of national and bicoastal queer mobility, a mid-twentieth century route for small-town queer dreams of moving to the Big Gay Bay or Big Apple” (164). To “speak of queer automobilities means thinking through processes of dwelling and constraints on movement” and also taking “seriously the vast energy infrastructures that make such social space possible” (164, 165). Cram makes a strong case for queer scholarship to attend to petroculture because “petroleum and carbon byproducts literally scatter throughout queer migration stories” (166). The chapter follows the connection between urban and rural spaces along I-80, notably through interviews conducted in Laramie and Boulder, to demonstrate the “regional affect” of queer and trans life inhabiting “settler colonial structures” of “‘living oil’” (169, 166). Because the chapter is based in interviews, the regional affect Cram is trying to show us is encountered through “intimate atmospheres” of “queer regional stories” (169). In Laramie, which is defined by petroculture, Cram listens to the suffocating, slow, ambient violence that “petromasculinity” prosecutes and how it creates isolation, vulnerability, and a deep sense of misattunement for queer and trans people. In Boulder, suffocating misattunement becomes a kind of misfitting amid pervasive emphasis on fitness and outdoor life that is ableist, white, and heteronormative. The overpowering desire to just get out created by such toxic, intimate atmospheres pushes people toward the affordances of automobility—“the promise of white selfhood connected to unfettered movement”—in which such mobility depends on consumptive, violent inheritances (183).Cram closes chapter 5, almost like a coda, by taking us to Queer Nature in Colorado in search of an alternative, regenerative form of atmospheric intimacy. As a kind of sanctuary, Cram situates Queer Nature within the longer history of intentional communities of the “lesbian land” movement of the 1970s and 1980s (187). Queer Nature’s mission “overlaps and departs from these models” with the goal of “tending to nature connection as responsive to the violence of settler colonialism” (188). The philosophy of Queer Nature focuses on ecological awareness and grief, which Cram argues is a form of “transing of the erotic,” drawing from Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “energy for change” (196, 194).To say this book is an accomplishment is understatement. Methodologically it is brilliant, demonstrating the significant potential of painstaking regional, case-based scholarship. Conceptually it is discerning, unbound by rigid expectations to hew to schools of thought and consistently profound as a result. As a “read,” it is engrossing. And, most important, as a perspective, exploring violent land relations as an inheritance of energy extraction, settler coloniality, racialized biopolitics, and queer life and insight, it is inspiring. Cram models a kind of environmentally minded scholarship that defies simple categorization but adds to every conversation they enter.Further, because the book is built around case studies brocaded with detail, Cram also generates further lines of inquiry that can build on their work. For example, while the case studies focus on extractive and violent relations, Cram continuously remarks on the ironies of responding to such violence from within its inheritances. How to transform violence into a differently regenerative ethics in opposition to the consumptive regeneration that marks a Whitened settler world is a critical question—one of the broad questions today. Across a range of critical literatures, scholars have considered how to foment new possibilities amid deep structures of violence, and such possibilities come not from establishing a pristine, alternative space or by seeking refuge from vulnerabilities that are necessary to life, but by understanding how one is integrally bound up in, as Cram describes, the inheritances that layer even the simplest actions, like driving to escape your intolerant, hate-filled hometown. Cram helps readers understand that such desires are a form of queer decoloniality, or “dwelling in a decolonial ancestral imagination that abides in the political imagination of eroticism” in the transed sense of Lorde’s erotic (199). The book does not provide answers but rather, from a different vantage point, returns to an important, long-standing question about the necessity and limits of resistance. What is regeneration if it is tied to the land and tangled in lines connecting violence, energy extraction, and modern sexuality? What does regeneration look like if (against individual, whitened bodily vitalization) it is pursued environmentally and attuned to violent infrastructures of feeling?As is evident, I greatly admire Cram and their book. Violent Inheritance does not forge a scalpel to do specific analytical work. As a model for others, Cram writes into the contexts presented, being more evocative than precisely conceptual, sometimes to the point of being elliptical, but gradually you come to feel what they mean in a very concrete way. In that, the book enacts what Cram has previously called queer orientational scholarship in order to advocate for “queer collaborative stewardship.” Such stewardship “models a different kind of queer politics routed not through liberal imagination but though an ecological imagination” that “resists a scarcity framework of settler modernity in favor of abundance” (204, 206). To make this stewardship imaginable, Cram produces concepts that are not instruments so much as they are doorways for readers to enter a different, regenerative inhabitation of their world, by which I mean their bodies, their thoughts, and their feelings in relation to all that makes up “place.” You must sit with this book to understand it; you cannot extract from it easily. And that, I suspect, is part of what Cram means by queer orientational scholarship—to study and connect in affirmative ways that resist the extractive sexualities of modernity, including the modes of scholarship to which all of us are inured.

This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Technical writing is a critical professional skill for engineers, but engineering students often perceive writing as less important. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Research suggests feedback, revision, and reflective writing support conceptual learning. However, just as student beliefs about intelligence impact engagement and learning outcomes, beliefs about writing may likewise affect how valuable writing is to learning. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. Do student beliefs—expressed in reflections—depict writing as a learning process or as a deterministic artifact? 2. To what extent do these expressed beliefs explain variance in their conceptual learning in a chemical engineering laboratory course? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> A design-based research study was conducted in three semesters of an upper division chemical engineering laboratory course to jointly study the use of feedback, revision, and reflection, and to develop contextualized theory about the relationships between these and students’ conceptual learning. Students’ writing was analyzed qualitatively. Regression modelling explained variance in scores of students’ conceptual understanding. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> We found that students who elaborated on errors and corrections scored significantly lower on conceptual understanding in their final submission, while students who described writing as an ongoing process scored significantly higher on conceptual understanding in their final reports. We found a similar trend for students who completed a second cycle, and especially that a focus on perfecting a written artifact corresponded to lesser gains. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Our findings lend support for assisting engineering students to approach writing as a developmental and learning process and for engaging them in multiple rounds of feedback, revision, and reflection across their programs of study.

Within the sociocultural theory of writing, texts are seen to result from cultural and social practices that affect the structure, content, and production of them in different knowledge communities. Accordingly, writing is not the same across subjects or contexts. Focusing on writing in subjects other than Language arts, this special contributes to understanding subject-specific writing involving both discipline specific knowledge, knowledge of representation, and production of knowledge in different, subject specific writing contexts. The issue advocates that disciplinary writing can start at an early age in primary school, that students have a range of preparedness for it, and that writing skills can be developed to support the learning objectives of the subject. The introduction considers the perspectives of writing to learn and learning to write as the underpinnings of writing across and in subjects. Consequently, the studies in the issue are related to these perspectives. The content areas scrutinized are Craft Education, Civics, Environmental studies, Science and Science orientation. This issue reflects the multifaceted, contextual, and hybrid forms writing can take, and, how writing can support learning in changing contexts and with different contents.

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples’ experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as “an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation.”1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, “Reconciliation as a way of Seeing,” Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, “Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle,” Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors’ memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, “Conceal,” “Desire,” “Grateful,” “Attempt and Remain,” and “Purchase, Wealthy” (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, “Images of Contact,” Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of “everydayness” in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of “looking past,” Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might “challenge how images have been assigned meaning” (58). This act of resignification is a kind of “sifting” through collective memory for “colonial debris” which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of “contact” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the “before and after,” depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the “before” pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is “The Long Goodbye.” Deploying the “civic skill” of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person “I” throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A “rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation,” this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, “Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter,” Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the “colonial debris” of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a “palimpsest, layered and textured by memory” (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and “unsettle” colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or “milieux de memoire” (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of “dancing with ghosts” to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as “a beating heart of episodes,” physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.

Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World are models for bringing feminist rhetorical studies to bear on the current turbulent political and cultural times. As we write this review, we are experiencing an ongoing global pandemic; an extension of Cold War hostilities that are breaking down global trade—causing increased food insecurity and scarcity across the globe; attacks on women's rights in the United States; continued danger of asylum-seeking at borders in the United States and abroad; and violent attacks on racialized groups worldwide. These books offer glimpses of how rhetors carve out possibility within seemingly impossible situations. Read together, they can help rhetorical scholars theorize new forms of agency, coalition, belonging, and hope. While Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope traces hope and belonging in U.S. national contexts, and is especially situated in higher education, How to Belong focuses on patterns of agency and coalition-building transnationally. These books provide a better understanding of feminist rhetorical practices within and beyond nation state borders. Likewise, together, they show how rhetorical agency and coalition-building can explicitly respond to the uneven structures of power that frame all rhetorical action.Glenn's and Southard's monographs resonate with recent conversations in the field that take up how to do rhetorical work as we continue to navigate legacies of injustice and unprecedented instability. For example, as demonstrated in Rhetoric Review's most recent “Octalog IV,” considering how current instability has shifted how we all teach, research, study, and “do rhetoric” requires new approaches that are, like the ones Glenn offers, anchored in hope. Yet as the authors in the Octalog make clear, the urgency of our time requires us to question our taken-for-granted and established knowledge (see Martinez and Rois), expand beyond the academy (see Skinnel), and imagine new texts and methods (see Epps-Robertson and Van Haitsma).1 Like these authors, Glenn and Southard offer a hopeful glimpse of how rhetorical scholars can find unique forms of belonging and connection, even during seemingly hopeless situations. In response to Glenn's and Southard's monographs, we ask rhetorical scholars to consider how they might engage with hope and coalitions in their scholarship and teaching during fraught times.In Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope, Glenn forwards what she calls “rhetorical feminism” (4). She develops her theory of rhetorical feminism by tracing key feminist rhetorical practices, including those of women from outside of Western culture. The goal of the book is to equip the field with a new feminist lens that brings forth dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration. Through these practices, she theorizes alternative means of persuasion—a questioning of traditional rhetorical practices and attention to silence and listening. Throughout the book, she offers grounded instances of rhetorical feminism and hope for a new and open field of rhetorical studies.Examples of this hopeful rhetorical analysis begin in the first chapter. Glenn identifies “Sister Rhetors,” such as Maria W. Miller Stewart, Angelina Grimké, and Sojourner Truth, who exemplify how feminist rhetoric can be used to pursue the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, “the greatest good for all human beings” (5). Modeling agentive rhetorical action, she analyzes how these Sister Rhetors’ public speeches advocated for suffrage, expanding theories of rhetorical feminism. While identifying how individual exemplars’ rhetorical practices can broaden understandings of rhetoric as Glenn shows, the focus on individuals means that the book omits an extended analysis of the ruptures in the suffragist movement, caused by the virulent racism of white suffragists. This choice is significant given Glenn's focus on how rhetorical feminists can reach across difference. Nevertheless, the chapter “Activism” provides historical examples of how rhetorical feminism can guide activist movements, which Glenn further explores in chapter two, “Identities.”The chapter “Identities” focuses on rhetorical feminism's connection to lived experience and difference. With historical examples, Glenn demonstrates how coalitional work across difference is difficult. She analyzes an infamous public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. Glenn takes the lesson that white feminists must acknowledge their privilege by practicing “silence and listening to Others” (42). While this focus on lived experience and listening are indeed important points for scholars of feminist rhetoric, this chapter does not address what this complicated, important work of dwelling in difference requires, most notably attending to histories of racial, ethnic, and gendered inequalities and violence. This dovetails with broader conversations in the field, particularly from Karma Chávez and Sharon Yam, scholars we return to later who address how coalitions can productively form across difference. Glenn's focus on rhetorical feminism gestures towards the possibility of coalition built on shared hopes. For example, in the chapter “Teaching,” Glenn explores how feminist teachers can honor their own and their students’ different lived experiences. This sort of rhetorical feminism, Glenn suggests, can help students cultivate the rhetorical awareness needed to navigate and intervene in structural injustices, including patriarchy.Likewise, in “Mentoring” and “(Writing Program) Administration,” Glenn critiques the “masculinist models’’ of mentoring that are used as gatekeeping mechanisms in academia to create exclusionary spaces (150). Glenn encourages rhetorical feminists to work on “disidentifying” from these norms and instead use familiar feminist rhetorical practices such as “dialogue, silence, and listening” to create relationships that are non-hierarchical, mutual, and networked (150). With these tools, feminist mentors can make room for more women and feminists in academia and begin to change the structures of the academy altogether. In fact, Glenn sees how on-the-ground academic administration can be a place where mentoring and coalition-building can happen. The final chapter, “This Thing Called Hope,” returns in time and space to the consequences of the Trump presidency. Glenn reflects on how rhetorical feminism should guide political action but spends much of the chapter pondering the academic successes of rhetorical feminism. For Glenn, the continued challenge of the Trump presidency (and now legacy) is why we need “this thing called hope” to guide us in working together (212). Like the scholars in the Octalog IV referenced above, Glenn demonstrates hope and new methods of bringing rhetorical feminism to bear on precarity in academic institutions. Extending Glenn's political commitments beyond the United States, Southard brings this sort of rhetorical analysis to global political contexts in How To Belong.In How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World, Southard explores how contemporary women leaders curated forms of belonging and agency that “[n]egotiated gendered and geographic boundaries” across “transnational flows of political and economic power” to move beyond citizenship and nation-state inclusion (3). She defines agency as a person's “can-do-ness” and, as such, considers how contemporary power relations might affect a rhetor's ability to be an agent of change (7). Southard looks to women leaders globally, turning most prominently to West Africa to better understand how women's agency has been constrained or enabled by political upheaval. Importantly, these leaders articulated belonging based on gendered violence and displacements by factional and national conflicts. Southard's observation extends work by transnational feminist rhetorical scholars who over a decade-and-a-half ago noted how “with few exceptions, scholars in rhetoric . . . have not systematically engaged the complex material and rhetorical dynamics of transnationality or questioned the nation state as a unit of analysis.”2 Her project does precisely this: shows how women denizens actively demonstrated the limits of the nation state.The book begins by examining the rhetorical practices of West African women who rearticulated notions of belonging based not on citizenship but instead through their relationships as “denizens of homes, landscapes, peace conferences, and politics” (Southard 18). Southard argues that these women redefined belonging and demonstrated how they, as rhetorical actors, were central to creating functioning peaceful communities. Southard highlights “dwelling practices,” such as seemingly powerless women forcing themselves into peace talks organized by men who are political leaders, establishing alliances between Christians and Muslims, and protesting when formal peace talks ignored them. While Southard situates her analysis in the recent political upheavals of West African nations in the 1990s, she does not address the longer history of European colonization in the area. Given Southard's project of engaging transnational work that decenters the nation-state, it would be productive to address this colonial history, which is responsible for the conceptualization of the nation-state as it currently exists in West Africa.3 As readers, we were drawn to thinking about how women denizens were engaging a decolonial project through their organizing.Southard moves on to examine how these women made it possible for Liberia to elect their first woman president. Southard reads Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's autobiography and public addresses to demonstrate how Sirleaf articulated women's national leadership as a necessary part of membership in a global community by normalizing women's rights within supranational and regional governing bodies, advocating for a national policy that protected women educators from sexual assault and crafting Liberian women's agency as a national and cosmopolitan ideal. While Southard demonstrates how Sirleaf and others became agentive rhetors, this focus on individual women who are empowered by existing political structures is complicated. We see the individualized nature of agency as similar to Glenn's discussion of this concept, a pattern that we discuss further below.Towards the end of the book, Southard presents the outcomes of African women's rhetorical agency, namely the success of creating a security resolution mandating that women be part of and protected in any peace talks. Yet, as Southard importantly points out in relation to the formation of UN Women 2010, this resolution did little to address the ways that supranational organizations privilege First World understandings of what it means to enact feminist change. Southard traces how the rhetorics of belonging espoused by Michelle Bachelet, the first Executive Director, reshaped the power relationships among global elites and the women they claimed to represent.As these brief summaries demonstrate, the ways that Glenn and Southard address the concepts of rhetorical agency and coalition-building productively shift scholars’ attention to how rhetors enact change on local and global scales. They offer ways to place the role of identity formation, agency, and hope within historical and contemporary feminist intentions. Glenn's theory of hope as a way to create more feminist futures and Southard's vision for rhetorical agency as “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” are places where feminist rhetors and activists build understandings of belonging and power (Southard 10).Questions of agency form the backbone of both Rhetorical Feminism and How to Belong. For both writers, agency is fundamentally linked to claiming a voice, working together, and taking action. According to Glenn, agency is “the power to take efficacious action” (4). She elaborates that agency “is always contingent . . . adopted strategically,” and can be used “to redefine rhetorical history, theory, and praxis” (4). This orientation could “represent more ethically and accurately the dominant and the marginalized alike (even as we rethink this metaphor); and . . . prepare the next generations of rhetorically empowered scholars, feminists, teachers, and citizens” (Glenn 4). Thus, agency is how we enact hope.Agency, for Glenn, is not just the ability to act but to imagine the radical possibilities of new social orders. Through a transnational lens, Southard adds that agency is “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” (10). Put simply, rhetorical agency is “what enables one to do rhetoric and how, where, and when one can do rhetoric” (Southard 7). Like Glenn, Southard links agency to “embodied social praxis” that is possible amid the constraints of the institutions and hierarchies we live in (12). Southard explains, “rhetorical agency [is] a negotiation between a rhetor's choices and their discursive contexts, such that interventional strategies are thought to shape and be shaped by transnational flows of political and economic power” (84–85). While Glenn's of agency at the of in to take action, Southard is particularly with how structures of power shape rhetorical Southard's of agency adds to Glenn's is a understanding of how women to together, such as through their shared of coalitions how different feminist have up agency in her of in rhetorical feminist thinking in chapter For example, in the of scholars such as who have for lived experience as a of Glenn and and into agency, a of or instead voice, even As scholars, we should the of the of and question how colonial structures that women were and from of Glenn agency, or the as a between silence or for individual She and rhetorical to agency in this of her which us such a does not that agency is both and this of agency as a means of claiming on a global is by the examples of agency by For example, in her chapter on as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Southard explores how Sirleaf redefined national in to address women's as on women's of and Southard how Sirleaf adopted at transnational conferences, such as the World on that as change of supranational and national Southard traces how a public as a for rhetorical agency to but women Glenn and Southard to understand rhetorical agency as and in social to focus on individual rhetors it for to understand the and networked nature of We see this between individual agency and attention to and transnational economic structures as a project that more rhetorical scholars might take In we that both Southard's and Glenn's understandings of agency as within an individual who is empowered by their within political that can agency to individuals who are outside these one form of rhetorical We how agency is what we as agency in contexts not be agentive for Extending Glenn's discussion of the that what agentive for white not for to in the of rhetoric should be of the histories of and an awareness can Southard and Glenn's work to consider how agency is in legacies that forms of Glenn's of agency legacies of for why this has been made impossible across different and demonstrates awareness of new forms of rhetorical agency when she shows how West African women in legacies of power by forms of belonging that outside the concept of the The of belonging by the Liberian Women's and as Southard identifies who used rhetoric to create “dwelling both discursive and where they could with and their as of to with different for are unique and In this focus on the of rhetorical Southard for the ways that these peace women the of men and women by networked and with leaders to within Liberia as a and made space within public places to and for on these women's rhetorical Southard practices can places and nations from the or of the into places and nations where the marginalized and the can their We find this of agency in that existing political make it impossible to agency to rhetors can move and these to take action. Glenn focuses on to an existing Southard is how agency for these denizens outside of the colonial nation-state This networked and contingent understanding of agency not coalitions but it to change an of we in our on agency, of how feminist can form coalitions through both Glenn's and Southard's Glenn's understanding of rhetorical feminism is grounded in an that lived shape their to rhetoric and In her of rhetorical feminism as a theory and Glenn approaches this as a of identity is such that they an who are to consider in Glenn how rhetors can work productively across identity to form agentive In she a few different rhetorical strategies for including concept of and Glenn returns to historical examples to demonstrate how this coalitional work can be For example, she points out the of identity in U.S. feminism by the public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre an open a feminist for her to for all were constrained by her and the experience and of women and marginalized Glenn takes the lesson that all feminists must do the work “to open up across difference and that white feminists in need to consider their and in to Glenn's of the limits of feminist is Yet feminist on a coalition that the of is In her book, The with from a of feminist thought including and critiques feminism” for on within a and that must be in with for racial, and and to be by those most by these of working in coalition with through the question of how coalitions can form when we take identity difference as a of Glenn rhetoric and rhetorical listening as strategies for understanding and political focus on listening to lived experience is indeed an important for scholars of feminist this of listening of the complicated, necessary work of dwelling with an awareness of relations of power and to the between and Glenn provides an of what when coalitions form the hierarchies in Glenn does not offer a where rhetorical feminists used these listening strategies to form coalitions that used their networked, agency to change. While listening is an important of coalition with those who are marginalized about of power is for feminist This is that Southard focuses on her book and, in chapter as Michelle Transnational this chapter, Southard how Michelle used rhetorical agency as of UN Women to the of possibility for transnational and and as rhetorical While the transnational Southard looks at in this chapter are in a by at the that through UN and by leaders like Bachelet, Southard points to the coalitions that women across national borders and hierarchies through these This is where Southard's understanding of agency as and out in to Southard shows, for example, how address to the on the of Women made space for women's rhetorical For example, that must be by the local and lived of of and state violence the space for others to their in at the UN (Southard Glenn and Southard the of rhetorical silence and but Southard points to the power of listening as a form of for rhetorical scholars might as in this book are the strategies Southard points to for which for transnational and action, even as the book the local contexts of rhetorical and lived experiences. This is the of connection that can make transnational and change concepts of belonging and hope both We that these are and that can in our We these concepts as we for how rhetorical scholars can enact these in our Glenn identifies hope as a feminist way to us through of activist change. Rhetorical scholars across can from Glenn's of hope as a for activist research, and Glenn that the most feminist teachers are those who students to with analysis of the hierarchies and structures of power they move through in their Glenn identifies practices that must be in this of such as which frame students’ approaches to understandings of and agency, and action in response to this provides a hopeful at transnational feminism most rhetorical scholars in this at constraints on rhetorical agency, Southard looks at new for belonging rhetorical practices . . . in ways that and national As we Southard focuses on women as transnational who new ways of belonging as through and within transnational These forms of belonging help us the agency and rhetorical of those who outside and in between the of and the and of rhetors who are the rights of we are drawn to in Southard's book is that the goal of agency is not to within the structures of citizenship but instead in alternative institutions by women with shared and for the Southard and Glenn us to see hopeful of community within and outside of and together, Glenn and Southard show us that hope is and for to build belonging across difference. from what Glenn and Southard offer us in their monographs, hope and belonging should respond to existing structures of power and us to work and them. These books us with How do we form coalitions to pursue hopeful How can we transnational forms of belonging that in the of different lived of local can rhetorical scholars from these monographs and take up in their own research, and through Glenn and Southard's we how hope and belonging could create possibilities for change in our current While their on agency and coalition the field of rhetoric and to these the examples Glenn and Southard use to their of these could be For example, Southard's of agency as this as a of individual The way that transnational relations and these rhetorical possibilities is that scholars in the field have productively as we have above, Glenn's of agency and coalition, at difference and does not for the ways that different lived and within histories of white and we Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World with scholars who are work on agency and coalition, such as recent work by Karma Chávez and Sharon scholarship provides a of how different and groups form coalitional with one even For example, of it possible to build fraught colonial histories and creating the for relations and across in the possibility for agency and rhetorical action, both and outside established of political this understanding of coalition reads into the relationships between and In a recent given at the of extended her of coalitional possibility to address the most recent in and the transnational of with the and Likewise, what Karma work on coalition adds to this is an understanding of as always to and nation-state of Southard and Glenn's notions of agency to about how the rhetorical of are always marginalized necessary coalitional among the marginalized Chávez coalition the of the the the activist and to demonstrate how U.S. policy has to citizenship for the need for belonging outside of nation-state The book how working these violent and structures made possible of Glenn and Southard's texts can help scholars to the conversations about what agency and coalition can or should like in our local spaces and within in a fraught books demonstrate hope and scholarship work is working to coalition and belonging, these texts can help us cultivate new of in our work and our We scholars, as transnational feminist scholars and feminists of have called to rhetorical agency as always and

There is an assumption in education that allowing students to choose their writing topics and positions is beneficial; however, there is little research to support this belief, particularly from the students’ perspectives. In the present study, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with students at a large university in the Southwest of the United States after they completed two in-class argumentative writing assignments in a course on exceptional children, one where they chose their writing position and one where they were assigned their writing position. As a group, these 20 students (13 female, 7 male) were above average writers in their first to third year of study, and the majority of them were education majors (70%), followed by arts and sciences (25%), and design and the arts (5%). The interview protocol focused upon their shifting perspectives on the underlying motivational construct of choice related to this and other writing assignments. Taking a grounded theory approach to thematic analysis, findings indicated that having choice in writing was important because it allowed students to write about topics that they find easier, more interesting, and possess greater knowledge. Choice also allowed students to demonstrate their autonomy, which they believed, influenced their motivation and writing quality/grades. While the university students in this study generally preferred choice, a majority of them identified benefits of not choosing, including opportunities to improve writing tenacity, enhance their writing skills, and achieve new perspectives.

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

Multispecies rhetoric functions as an umbrella for diverse approaches to more-than-human communications that invoke distinct varieties of relations among human and other creatures. Amid that diversity, rhetorical engagements in which all creatures “speak” with others in mutual, iterative exchange can become lost. My argument is, first, that this particular variety of multispecies conversation is rare in discussions of multispecies rhetoric because rhetorical engagement “with” other creatures is often underspecified, and because it is incompatible with Aristotelian foundations that still often underpin rhetorical inquiry; and second, that it should be cultivated so that humans can invite other creatures to be more interesting than the anthropoexceptionalist lens may suggest, such that we can accomplish more together. A multispecies rhetoric wherein humans speak with other creatures, not only speaking for, about, or around them, requires drawing a distinction between capacities to affect/be affected and assumptions about any creature’s internal state of mind.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> A robust body of research supports the use of team charters to purposefully create a team culture with shared norms and expectations. However, student teams often treat this requirement as busywork and fail to invest the effort needed to create team charters that prepare the team to adapt for obstacles that they may encounter. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> Teams that do not engage in effective planning for their collaborations are likely to encounter a range of problems including slackers, domineering teammates, curtailed learning opportunities, and general exclusion from the project work—problems that are often exacerbated on diverse teams and that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> We created three online modules that help students uncover their own tacit expectations for teamwork, share and merge these expectations, and then construct a team charter and task schedules with their teammates. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> We used a quasiexperimental design comparing team charters from control and experimental groups to understand how our modules affected students’ charters at a university with a highly international population. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Analyses revealed that control group charters tended to invoke universal team norms and assign punishments for failing to uphold those norms. By contrast, experimental group charters were more flexible, acknowledged competing priorities, evidenced greater planning, and articulated processes that could accommodate individual goals, values, and constraints. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Charters created after the modules showed more accommodation of difference; however, more research needs to be done to determine whether the more flexible and elaborated charters improve team behaviors.

The late Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor, compared the discourses that govern the affairs of this world to the stickiness of chameleon remains. For Awoonor, when one steps into the chameleon's gluey byproduct, it is difficult to wipe it off.1 This imagery represents the rhetorical potency of capitalism, its affective circulation, and how its influence over our lives makes it challenging to emancipate ourselves from the grips of market forces. For Catherine Chaput, the market is a powerful rhetorical force. The market's inherent trait to habituate our experiences means when “we place our faith in this all-knowing construct, we displace our own agentive powers” (2). In Market Affect, Chaput critiques capitalism with the conviction that other anticapitalist critiques could not dislocate the “affective circuits” of capitalism (18). Taking on Michael McGee's challenge to rhetoricians to investigate the link between rhetoric and social theory, Chaput rethinks affect to explain how we might unmask, demystify, and challenge capitalism by reclaiming human rhetorical agency.Since market forces obscure the exploitative powers of capital and have “fused with the energetic power of affect . . . thinking and acting,” anticapitalist discourses, Chaput asserts, constantly find themselves trapped and subsumed by procapitalist discourses (29). Chaput believes scholars are increasingly frustrated with the impotence of prevailing ideological analyses that sought to help us avert the influence of capitalist instincts in our lives (28). Chaput presents affective rhetorical critique as a paradigm in this endeavor. Affective critique, Chaput argues, empowers scholars to locate the “agentive capacity in our traditional rhetorical theories, enhance it with contemporary materialist perspectives, and develop a practice through which to glimpse, and later engage, the affective sensibilities” (18-19). Affect operates as an “organic power” (29); it is not a “theoretical abstraction or an illuminating metaphor, but a concrete, physiological force circulating into, and out of bodies through their sensuous interaction in the world” (30). Through affective critique, Chaput offers scholars new ways of discerning liberatory strategies against the aegis of capitalism.Chaput explains how procapitalists exploit the potency of affective desires to illustrate how capitalism operates and its ramifications for society. For Chaput, in the same way capitalism became an impregnable force, so is the principle that could derail its strategic maneuvers. Chaput rereads the rhetorical traditions of the classical, medieval, and enlightenment periods and exposes how forces of enlightenment crippled the affective resonances of rhetoric. In recovering this lost rhetorical power, according to Chaput, scholars ought to account for the omissions of the affective dimensions in the traditional rhetorical discipline and the “non-agentive impersonal operations that function so inconspicuously as to bleed into the natural background of life activities” (23). Chaput claims this notion of affect “has existed alongside and underdeveloped within” the rhetorical tradition (23). To convalesce this lost critical framework, Chaput's affective critique seeks to “expand and augment, rather than displace” rhetorical theory's valorization of the Aristotelian conceptualization of rhetoric. Across four chapters, Chaput reviews how economic theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Milton Friedman and John Galbraith “intuited and engaged the living power . . . of affect” in their positions for and against capitalism (37). In the final chapter, Chaput weaves their arguments and brokers them with Foucault's work on biopolitics and neoliberalism, packaging Foucauldian ideas as the most formidable salvo on capitalism.In chapter two, Chaput stitches the conflicting epistemologies of affect in Adam Smith's analysis of capitalism and Karl Marx's critique of capital. Chaput reasons that Smith and Marx are primarily immortalized as the “founding fathers” of discourses involving two opposing political systems—capitalism and socialism. Considered the father of capitalism, Smith postulates the “invisible hand” doctrine to account for the circulation of capitalist desires. For Marx, capitalism alienates us from our agentive powers. While both understood that labor, not commodities or gold, is wealth, they proposed “differing conceptions of the power structure propelling human relationships” (39). Smith sees the market as a natural force that represents traditional designations of affect. For Smith, capitalism pulls us into the market and constitutes us just as nationalism transforms us into nation-states. This way, the market's “invisible hand” directs societal and human affective desires.For Marx, an empowering agent exists internal to human beings, and capitalism works because of commodity fetishism— the ability to transfer a specific human power into things. Power circulates among people and things, orienting human decision-making. Affect is depleted through exploited labor because capital is “a process of coercive labor that traps naturally fluid lie energies or affect, within commodity form” (57). Capitalism depletes our personal power because commodities transform our “creative, energetic social beings into mechanical, lifeless, individual beings” (57). For Marx, “affect is that which adds value to life, and it is the essence or the core of our being as humans to participate in such value-adding activities” (46). Chaput observes that “for Marx, capitalism closes people off, making them less and less receptive to social potentialities; it repels or pushes away identities other than capitalist and worker; it depletes life energy of both identities, making them mere caricatures of capital” (57). In effect, our sensory capacities are subsumed by capitalism.In chapter three, Chaput examines how John Maynard Keynes and Thorstein Veblen's divergent but resonant thoughts fail to provide a robust framework for rethinking the problems of capitalism. A fundamental defect in their thinking is their valorization of rationality. Chaput realizes that the two shared many thoughts on the interconnectedness of the global market and the illogical human behaviors that drive economic attitudes. Capitalism, for Keynes, is global, but individual sympathies are national. In this case, “affect circulates locally while capitalism functions globally, forging a gap between our inner feelings and the outer reality of economic operations” (68). Keynes substitutes the “perfect invisible hand” with “imperfect visible arguments and grounds the need for greater economic deliberation among the public” (74). Veblen, likewise, believes in argumentation but not an explicit role. While Marx allows us to see how language produces a dominant ideology, Veblen extends this assessment to commodities. Because humans have little capacity to “outwit capitalism,” Veblen classifies workers as change agents (85). Both Keynes and Veblen neglect capitalism's affective dimension, which renders their theorizations inadequate to account for how affect circulates.In the immediate post–World War II environment, Frederick Hayek and Theodore Adorno turned their attention to the epistemic consequences of affect. They critiqued the scientific rationality logic as governing human decision-making processes. For Hayek, a rationally managed capitalist state, as envisioned by Keynes, produces poverty akin to modern-day slavery. “Managed capitalism” weakens individuals and does not allow for the assertion of human agency. Adorno rejects the persuasive force governing human desires, extending Marx and Veblen with Freud by realigning affect with rationality (97). Hayek vindicates the “self-regulating nature of capitalism, while Adorno discounts the “role of nonrational motivation” of “administrative society” to emancipate itself (91). As Chaput observes, Hayek envisions the market as working through our sensory orders clandestinely or unconsciously. As a result, we participate in capitalist orientations without realizing its corrosive maneuverings. For this reason, Adorno recommends “aesthetic interventions” that shock us out of our slumber (111). Instead of engaging in active “political and economic questions of the day, individuals turn to mass-produced entertainment, channeling their entire libidinal energies into consuming practices” (111). Chaput reasons that Hayek seems to be endorsed by recent democratic engagements even though he espouses and orients us toward antidemocratic tendencies.Chapter five addresses Milton Friedman's (pro-capitalist) and John Kenneth Galbraith's (anticapitalist) meddling with the politics of the right and left. Although these scholars are not economists by training, they offer perspectives on capitalism's pervasive power. Chaput's reading of them stamps the rhetoric of inquiry—reiterating the need to have rhetorical scholars import interdisciplinary literature into our critical projects. Friedman postulates that, guided by historical forces, “human behavior, particularly within nation states—functions with a high degree of consistency and requires an equally consistent monetary policy to maintain market stability” (114). Galbraith locates reality in contemporary political economy, consumer culture, long-term planning, and the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy, creating a “corporatized marketplace” (114). Friedman believes in rational choice, while Galbraith sees corporate power as the most important way to think about human decision-making. Chaput argues that Galbraith's postulations appear overstated since they leave unexplored “anticapitalist discourse bound to a false binary between rational and irrational” (137).In the concluding chapter, Chaput details what she considers the most formidable confrontation of capitalism. Relying on Foucault's late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberalism, Chaput recognizes that procapitalist discourses appropriate the “affective force corralling human behavior before and alongside rationale decision making” (137). For Foucault, procapitalists maintain a superior “rhetorical edge” because they rely on a theory that combines the complexity of physiological effects and the discourses that govern humans. This understanding, Chaput maintains, prompts procapitalists to envision humans as subject to the market's governing rationality. Consequently, the market's “superior” affective sensibility inoculates it against critiques that ignore its affective dimensions and operations. Chaput reasons that anticapitalist offerings must consider humanity's thought-making processes and our natural instincts. Chaput directs us to the Foucauldian praxis that unlocks an unceasing resistance to capitalist governmentality. She believes a “free to choose” doctrine with a grounding in “courageous truth-telling,” or parrhesia, is potent to reconstitute and reinvent the governing praxis of our lives (150). Admitting that capitalist governmentality is impervious to “rhetorical deliberation” (142), Foucault's doctrine permits us to locate the “persuasive power of modern political economy in the market's invisible vitality” (144). Through it, we might see the formation of human agency as a “continuous ontological becoming” that must be orchestrated from within (144).Chaput concludes that the Foucauldian praxis is rooted in Greco-Roman practices of individual governance based on the apparatus of the “care of the self” and the desire to dissect the relationship between power, subjectivity, and discourse. This perspective is to create a confluence between “subject formation, bodily instinct, and truth” (150). Chaput states that “whereas biopolitics reflects the indirect manipulation of predictable instinct-driven bodies, care of the self consciously realigns automated bodily responses so as to oppose institutional injustice through the eruption of parrhesia or courageous truth-telling” (150). For Chaput, parrhesia's discursive apparatus grants agency and transcends courageous truth-telling to “adherence to a particular lifestyle designed to cultivate the kind of person who could “spontaneously confront injustice” (154). Through this attunement, we can distinguish bad parhessiates from good parhessiates. The telos of Chaput's call is “to produce people compelled to confront injustice even at the risk of retribution, requiring a practice of everyday life that constantly adjusts one's knowledge, behavior, and instincts” (157). Parhessiates, Chaput continues, identify as “sociopolitical and economic critics” even in the face of strict opposition (157). As cynics, parhessiates identify with all humanity and act altruistically. Chaput charges critics to “assess the persuasive work of our bodily instincts . . . to invent an alternative affective milieu . . . to assert newly cultivated agencies, ones simultaneously empowered by our conscious and unconscious choice” (159).Chaput's intervention comes at a time of global conflict: the Israeli-Palestinian strife, Russian occupation and aggression, movements and surges for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #Anti-racism, and the curricula of critical race theory. Chaput nudges scholars of rhetoric to examine the various affective circuits governing public debates. We might, for example, look to scholars and activists such as Ales Bialiatski, Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones, etc. Specifically, attention to parrhesia charges media organizations and those in positions of power to give attention to vernacular discourses and ideas that dislodge oppression. Market Affect emphasizes that criticism of governing ideas goes beyond examining popular cultural products, innovations, and authoritative discourses. Market Affect prompts us to deconstruct the ideas that underlie and govern our world. Chaput prepares us to decipher and challenge the organizing force of human society and the creation of ideal material worlds that better serve the human commons.

Abstract Higher education faces dramatic transformations in demographics, politics, culture, labor, and technology—all of which are compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chaos theory offers perspectives for weathering these changes, though ultimately, as the future remains unpredictable, the best instructors can offer is doing their best in their jobs.

The title of this book is concerned with the axis between pedagogy and theory, creating a productive interaction and synthesis of the two, and so this review also focuses on these interrelations. Of all the major figures involved in the advent of theory on the American shores, Robert Scholes was the only one who had a burning concern with connecting the new ideas with teaching. When Jonathan Culler, acclaimed for his Structuralist Poetics (1975), visited my campus shortly after his book was published, I invited him to my graduate pedagogy seminar. He was tactful and gracious in talking to the future teachers, but he made it clear that at that point theory could and should not be applied to pedagogy any more than quantum mechanics should be taught to beginning physics students. Scholes, on the other hand, is in the line of pragmatic thinking that maintains abstract ideas have existence and meaning only when applied to concrete situations, where they can be clarified, tested, and revised. His early tetralogy, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985b), and Protocols of Reading (1989) all deal with this back and forth movement. At the end of Textual Power, Scholes writes, “My enterprise in this book has been to take the teaching situation as a theoretical position from which to look at other theories that impinge upon the study and teaching of texts. Large sections of my own text were written first to clarify things for myself, my students, and my colleagues” (166). Later he places as his inscription to Protocols this sentence of Roland Barthes: “And no doubt that is what reading is: rewriting the text of the work within the text of our lives” (1). This approach resonates with John Dewey explaining to his wife that he was creating a school for children because the classroom is to philosophy what a laboratory is to scientists. Scholes's later works further entwine critical theories with educational structures and forms: The Rise and Fall of English (1998), The Crafty Reader (2001), English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality (2011), and Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language (1988), coedited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer.One service that Ellen Carillo has performed for us in this well-edited and conceptualized volume is to include—and this is unusual for a Festschrift—generous examples of the subject's best work, not isolating them in an appendix, but strategically placing them among the essays most relevant to Scholes's concerns in his own. In rereading Scholes's pieces in this context, I am somewhat mystified that a writer as clear and persuasive as Scholes was not able to affect any widespread practical change, especially since his own writing outshines everyone else's in the volume. Although Scholes was able to create a new department, Modern Culture and Media at his home institution, Brown University, this department remained separate from the English department, and there seemed to be little interaction or collaboration between the two entities. At the end of After the Fall (2011), Scholes wistfully admits that he does not know of a single university that has adopted his suggestions for reshaping the teaching of English (142). This is partially due to the glacial rate of change in our educational institutions, but more because so many of those in the profession either have biases against his vision or do not fully comprehend it. Put briefly, that vision is what we would now call constructivist, student- and reader-centered, and radically democratic. The last two words are rarely put together but relevant now when too many politicians and Supreme Court justices appear to find universal suffrage obsolete.Scholes's vision is based more on immediate experience and process than definitive formulations and axioms and attempts to transcend or reconcile binaries such as theory/practice, consumption/production, analysis/creativity, concepts/specifics, and writing/reading. In this sense it is wholistic in the tradition of other educational thinkers such as bell hooks, who writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 85), What forms of passion make us whole? To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest of knowledge that enables us to unify theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.Ironically, Scholes's own commitment to the primacy of teaching is a central reason that his works have not found wide acceptance among many traditional academics, although most of them are teachers themselves. To begin with one of the apparent dichotomies, we can take one that Carillo embeds in her title, Reading and Writing, and quotes from the introductory chapter of an early Scholes book, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982): There is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read, we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation, we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. (4)Before it is written or spoken, our knowledge remains in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. This understanding of the interweaving of reading and writing echoes through Scholes's corpus, reappearing in a later book: “In all of this, I have assumed that reading is a constructive process, a kind of writing. . . . Learning to re-weave the texts we encounter in the texts of our lives is the process I have been trying to describe, and, in particular, I have tried to show how teachers may share the process with students” (2011: 14). This resembles what Dewey meant when he urged the necessity of having any intellectual proposition “reinstated into experience” to be realized.Several of the pieces in Carillo's volume seek to place Scholes's work in its place in the historical contexts of our disciplines. In the best of these, “How Scholes Helped English Departments Confront the Death of the Author, the Loss of Readers, and the Emergence of Intertextual Literacies,” Thomas P. Miller describes Scholes's career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism and his intellectual commitment to using pedagogy to validate theory in practice. The pragmatic perspective was fundamental to his integrated model of literary and literacy theories. . . . Scholes pointedly critiqued the self-validating binaries that structured the “arche-institutions of English”: the hierarchy of literature over non-literature that positioned consumption over production in ways that divorced academic inquiry from the “real world.” (171)Miller goes on to note, Scholes's engagement with the creative potentials of work with literacy is critical to understanding the distinction between his pragmatic concern with knowledge in the making and the rather disengaged stance that often has been assumed by cultural studies and literary criticism. Scholes's pragmatic engagement with the creative process of reading to write was fundamental to his efforts to reform the discipline to connect with the interactive literacies that have given rise to the maker movement and the active learning pedagogies that have become a mainstay of curricular reforms in the last decade. (175)In other words, Miller's work can lead us to view Scholes as a connecting link between a powerful but often subterranean current in our past educational history running through Transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott, pragmatists like William James and Dewey, and the Free School movement of the 1960s and 1970s forward to current trends like reader response criticism, constructivism, and active learning strategies such as the “flipped classroom.” In his more extensive earlier study, The Evolution of College English: Literary Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (2010), Miller elaborates in more detail: The marginal standing of teaching helps to explain why the theoretical challenges of the 1970s were rarely translated into new programs of undergraduate study. One proposal for curricular reform was Scholes's Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Scholes acknowledged that the “apparatus” of the discipline needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up, because it was founded upon binaries that had broken down—most notably the hierarchies of literature and “non-literature,” consumption and production, and the academic and “real” worlds. According to Scholes, once the autonomy of literature was called into question, the boundaries of the study came to seem contrived. . . . For an alternative framework, Scholes developed a pedagogically engaged vision of the transactional relations of writing and reading. . . . To break out of the “institutional sedimentations that threaten to fossilize” college English, Scholes looked to the classroom as a site of collaborative inquiry, with the model being the stance of the reader as a composer of meaning. (229–30)Although Miller does not make this connection, I see this marginalization of Scholes's viewpoint as similar to what happened to Louise Rosenblatt's progressive early work of reader response criticism, Exploring Literature (1938), which was buried by the increasingly hegemonic acceptance of the New Criticism and its master textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, published in the same year. Rosenblatt, fortunately, has come back in fashion. The MLA has now republished the fifth edition of her book and a later work of hers adopts the term transaction as the central relation between reader and text. So there are hopes for Scholes's work too, not just as a citation in the history of theory, but as a living force in restructuring our disciplines.To circle back to the first quotation from Miller, I want to underline his comment about Scholes's “career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism,” an aspect of Scholes's work that has not been given the attention it deserves in Carillo's collection. Text Book gives us the most specific sense of how Scholes applied his vision to the daily work with students and also suggests that this kind of work is best done in collaboration with both student feedback and with colleagues: all three editions were co-edited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book intersperses literary works with creative exercises focusing on the students’ own lives, tracing how their experiences can be transformed into narrative structures and vice-versa. The achievement is elaborated in rich detail in Robin Dizard's “Stranger than Friction: Learning and Teaching Literary Studies Using TEXT BOOK” (2010). The article's extensive use of selections and assignments from the book is supplemented by extended responses of students and Dizards's teacherly work with them in deepening and interpreting these responses. Contrasting this article with Scholes's own writing suggests one fault in the latter; Scholes rarely includes student voices either in the classroom or from their writings to further clarify and support his ideas. He does quote from students in The Crafty Reader to show that they are befuddled by New Critical expectations, but he does not demonstrate the positive reverse of real students encouraged to connect poetry to their own lives. There is some of this in Carillo's volume, but too often we hear more from the somewhat hermetic dialogues of academics conversing with each other in staking out their own positions than an attempt to speak directly to teachers, administrators, parents, and even students. I call this style “Dissertationese,” where this writing is often found, but some critics have yet to outgrow it.To unfairly choose just one example, I find particularly hard to read Kelsey McNiff “From Argument to Invitation: Promoting Empathy and Mutual Understanding in the Composition Classroom” (117–32). The essay is a sound empirical analysis of an essay assignment designed to test Scholes's ideas on using reading and writing to extend empathy. But the writing is clogged by passive constructions and the almost compulsive need to use citations from the academic literature in support of almost every assertion, such as “Like Scholes, many have argued that educators therefore should seek to cultivate students’ empathic imaginations (Von Write 2002; Fleckenstein 2007; Gerdes et al. 2011; Leake 2016; Damianidou and Phtiak 2016; English 2016; Tomlinson and Murphy 2018; Mirra 2018) and that the humanities in particular encourage this habit of mind (Nussbaum 2010; Jurecic 2011, 13–15).” This reminds me of a colleague's spouse who once said, “Howard thinks I should speak for myself.” McNiff has done a solid piece of work, but I must ask, as I do often in dissertation defenses, who is the intended reader and what kind of work is it supposed to do in the world? A good counterexample to this kind of writing is that of Alfie Kohn, whose more professional books appear in mainstream presses but are also offered as articles in the popular press or turned into shorter audio versions that can be played in the car by teachers and parents.In contrast to McNiff's article, I would like to mention Douglas D. Hesse, who wrote an “Afterword” (253–60) using a much more accessible and personal style but just as insightfully rigorous as anything else in the volume. His appreciation of another of Scholes's textbooks, The Practice of Writing (1981), coauthored with Nancy Comley, is articulate and concise: What's remarkable to me about the book is the way it invites students to exercise the full range of language with a creative mélange of texts of all sorts with experiments whimsical and serious and serious, at levels from sentences to self-contained texts. It challenged, already forty years ago, the kind of fractured model driving English departments, not only in literary but also in writing studies. In the name of specialization and expertise, literature and writing kept genres and purposes and historical periods separate, leaving students to figure out (if they wanted, and most didn't) what any of these highly defined courses might have to do with one another—or the nonacademic world beyond. Scholes challenged those divisions and wasn't afraid to use tools of serious play to engage student writers. If students learned anything canonical, it would be an indirect effect of the main enterprise: cultivating textual power through interpretation and production intertwined. (255)In this deft description of only one of Scholes's projects, Hesse suggests how he reconciled all of the dualities discussed in this review and the volume itself. Further, Hesse's penultimate paragraph provides a helpful guide to the best insights of the other contributors to this volume. In his last paragraph, Hesse sees himself tending toward pessimism, “a consequence of having been long enough in the profession to see Scholes's ideas roll in, then out, like waves on Dover Beach,” but is also able to eloquently endorse Scholes for his enabling and constant optimism: “It was an optimism born of plentitude and play, impelled by a multitude of texts to be interpreted and texts to be made, those basic yet inexhaustible activities of reading and writing” (260). It is this optimism that helped sustain Scholes through his long and varied career, elaborating a fairly constant vision through a variety of materials and perspectives.We are at an inflectional point in educational reform now where radical innovators have to face the forces of anti-intellectualism and timidity. In a book that has become “conventional wisdom”—an oxymoron to my mind—Tinkering toward Utopia, the historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue that teachers and parents have a basic conception of school—graded classrooms, separated subject matters, high-stakes testing, and so on. And to violate any more than a small number of these elements is to be charged with something other than “education.” I think exactly the opposite approach is called for. For one thing, the authors suppose in their use of utopia that the current system is getting incrementally better, when it is clear that the opposite is true. But more seriously, that it is a “system” and not a historically fossilized set of practices that often do not fit together. We can begin to scrutinize every aspect of what we do in terms of viability, effectiveness, and humane concern and begin to rebuild from the ruins through better thinking in constant dialogue with actual practice.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

Research shows that writing motivation decreases throughout schooling and predicts writing performance. However, this evidence comes primarily from cross-sectional studies. Here, we adopted a longitudinal approach to (a) examine the development of attitudes toward writing, writing self-efficacy domains, and motives to write from Grade 6 to 7, and (b) test their longitudinal and concurrent contribution to the quality of opinion essay in Grade 7, after controlling for quality in Grade 6. For that, 112 Portuguese students completed motivation-related questionnaires and composed two opinion essays in Grade 6 and 1 year later, in Grade 7. Findings showed that, while attitudes and all motives to write declined, self-efficacy did not. Additionally, opinion essay quality in Grade 7 was associated with essay quality in Grade 6 as well as with self-efficacy for self-regulation and intrinsic motives in Grade 7. In other words, current motivational beliefs seem more important to students’ writing quality than their past beliefs. This conclusion means that, in order to fostering students’ writing performance, middle-grade teachers should nurture their positive beliefs about writing by placing a higher value on writing motivation in the classroom.

Viewed through an antiracist lens, the policies and rules that many Canadian writing centers place on their websites perpetuate commonplaces that can disempower staff and writers from raciolinguistic minorities [1] .The four authors of this article (a racialized student writer, two staff members—one racialized and one white-passing—and a racialized administrator) draw on our diverse positionalities and lived experiences to argue that seemingly “fair” and race-neutral policies (such as the limited number of appointments allowed to a client per week, or the discouraging of directive advice about grammar and usage) can disproportionately and negatively affect minoritized stakeholders. Using narrative to explicate how we have navigated writing center policies, and airing our discontents with the compulsion to make one-size-fits-all policy, we suggest that writing centers could become more inclusive if they carefully reviewed these everyday expressions of their ethos. We also propose that enduring changes will only emerge from a radical critique of the white academic habitus that provides the context for policy, rather than from tinkering with the details of specific policies: i.e., from a critique of the ethos itself as well as of its molecular expressions. Keywords : writing center, policy, rules, antiracism, commonplaces, positionalities, tutoring, oppression, white habitus The power of whiteness continues to shape contemporary forms of management and control of practices and writing center scholarship. –Romeo Garcia, “Unmaking Gringo Centers” Policy. The rules. The law. The last line of defense in unconsciously racist thinking, is a way to shift the blame for what’s right onto a document and thus deflect anger and judgment onto that supposedly immaterial arbiter of success. An unconscious justification through misdirection, as if one was saying, “look, it’s not my fault. I’m just following the rules.” –Bradley Smith, “I’m Just Following the Policy”

This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.