AbstractThis article examines the value undergraduate research adds to writing centers in their role as anchor institutions within English and across college and university campuses. It focuses on a pilot project conducted by a team of mentored peer tutors who researched the accessibility of writing at Marquette University. Their successes and failures show how, beyond research findings, undergraduate research experience can be consequential for practitioners and their communities.

Abstract This article proposes that an unexplored avenue of pedagogy in undergraduate research lies in courses that merge English and the public humanities. These disciplines often have shared goals, including increased interest in the humanities and engagement with local communities, greater accessibility to scholarly materials, more research opportunities for and fewer burdens on instructors, and more frequent occasions for scholars at all levels to participate in knowledge making. Examining a course titled Writing About Public Problems, this article argues that undergraduates are capable of undertaking theoretical, creative, and practical writing and research when paired with empirical data collection on public stakeholders. Additionally, performance theory can facilitate experiential learning and a greater connection in undergraduate public humanities work between academics and the publics with which they seek to communicate.

This essay examines social panic surrounding trans youth, arguing that rhetorics supporting “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) emerge from and reinforce hegemonic scripts about race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Building from Jay Dolmage’s concept of “disability drift,” I demonstrate how anti-trans activists channel other social anxieties into transphobia. Arguments about ROGD frame trans people as infinitesimally rare and as threats to all other communities, but these claims rely on the same narratives used to stigmatize mental illness, to dehumanize people of color and queer people, and to police the bodies and behavior of cisgender women. Introducing the concept of “affective drift,” I consider how ROGD rhetorics draw from ableism, racism, and heteronormativity to fuel transphobia and vise versa. In direct opposition to the logics of ROGD, then, I propose that rhetorical studies is equipped to foster connections across contrived social divides, and to enact solidarity in one another’s struggles.

Scholars in disability studies have recently sought to account for fatness, claiming an inseparable link between disability and fat scholarship. Interrogating the stigmas of fatness as a sign of bad character or lack of discipline, rhetoricians have advanced this thinking, illustrating how to be fat is to be rhetorically disabled. Contributing to these efforts, this essay argues that eating disorders, too, are often framed through deficit thinking, positioned as antithetical to mental fitness—a disparaging view echoed prominently by Hilde Bruch. Challenging normative perspectives of rhetoric centered in her theories, I analyze Bruch’s The Golden Cage, tracing descriptions of anorexia and pain through a feminist materialist lens, ultimately revealing how the rhetoricity of fat stigma can be read not only as a product of cultural, patriarchal norms but also as a complex, lived, felt experience of mental disability, expanding theories of rhetoric to the material intersection of gender and embodiment.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

The authors present the results of a study of a three-way international collaboration project among one Hungarian class and two classes from Michigan and Washington, respectively. This multifaceted study focused on business planning, web design, and accessibility with the aim of investigating the effect of accessibility instruction on the production of business plans and websites. The distinguishing feature of this study was its emphasis to orient the three student groups on disability and accessibility issues from the perspective of the critical social model of disability advanced by disability studies theorists. The researchers collected quantitative and qualitative pre/postproject survey data from their three classes. They combined this data with the text of student emails sent among the project teams and instructor notes about their teaching to arrive at conclusions about the effectiveness of the collaboration using a mixed-methods approach. The results from the data analyses revealed significant benefit of the client–provider relationships among the three classes and the accessibility instruction provided by the Washington class to the other two classes on the business plans and websites.

Despite a recent interest in thinking writing studies alongside disability, there has yet to be much conversation about disability’s relationship to reading. I argue, however, that experiences of disability and neurodivergence in particular can expand our field’s understanding of what constitutes literacy and of who can be literate.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis,… Continue reading #CripTheVote: Disability Activism, Social Media, and the Campaign for Communal Visibility

My argument is that the ableist rhetorical framing of disability in the 2020 campaign trail has predominantly been used to delegitimize candidates for alleged disabilities—and in doing so, has contributed to an ableist project further stigmatizing disabled people and situating them as outside of the possibility of democratic agency. Furthermore, I argue that this ablenationalist project by which disabled bodyminds are delegitimized is more difficult to critique in a political culture of demagoguery which ultimately dismisses critiques of ableism as partisan critiques against a political party as well as uses authoritarian dismissal of disabled people as rhetorically suspect.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a vision of rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. This position contrasts with traditionally accepted views of rhetoric as phenomenological practice, evidenced prominently in contemporary rhetorical theory. I advance a framework that employs metaphorical accommodation and indicates a way that rhetoric can be situated as a perpetually productive force. The analytic tradition affords a method and vocabulary that when placed in conversation with rhetorical studies offers an alternative for viewing rhetoric as metaphysical enactment. I determine that rhetorical theory should engage with rhetoric as a measure of action, activity, and vitality that raises our awareness and connects us.

Abstract Public address scholars trained in U.S. communication departments have tended not to study rhetoric created by people with disabilities as much as they do other social movements. Here I attribute this relative lack to two ableist assumptions associated with communication’s emphasis on winning arguments: the presumed disqualification of people with disabilities from public argument itself and the normalization of this disqualification based on biases related to rhetorical performance and capability. Overall, I argue this disqualification is the product of how communication scholars have understood and reconstructed the role of the ideal arguer in public affairs and call for more expansive views.

AbstractUsing the murder of Magdiel Sanchez as a case study, we argue that rhetoric’s future must embrace practices of situated listening. While much of the field’s work has focused on speakers and practices of invention, we argue that a more just study of public deliberation must position this approach in conversation with an acknowledgment of situated reception. We follow scholars of color, feminist theorists, and disability advocates who have long argued for the practices of ethical listening, adding that the imperative to listen extends beyond the listening ear, accounting for the totality of the body and its environmental and contextual positions. By reaching beyond the demands of race to consider the intersecting axis of (dis)ability, we push the fields of rhetoric, sound studies, and critical/cultural communication studies to consider embodiment as a whole condition of rhetorical reception.

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At one of the last national conferences I attended, a panelist closed their presentation by stating that “ignoring X issue would handicap the field” The irony of using an ableist metaphor to argue ...

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This article centers disability justice, an ongoing and unfolding project of LGBTQA disabled BIPOC, to help understand and challenge the work of community literacy studies. By putting community literacy studies in con- versation with disability justice through three themes—"Nothing About Us Without Us,” “Access is Love,” and “Solidarity Not Charity”—this essay moves to unpack how community literacy can resist not only ableism but also the interlocking systems of oppression which support it.

The Queer Caucus created the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award to honor Anzaldúa’s impact on “studies of both rhetoric and queer theory” through forging “connections across difference and oppression in order to dismantle systems of privilege, whether that be heterosexism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism or ableism (as a non-exhaustive list).” However, the text of the Award, along with its impetus, belies these intentions. The Award erases Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad from her work and her person through the emphasis on culture-less sexual and gender minority experiences, the redefinition of Anzaldúa’s work as focused on generalized difference and oppression, and the omission of any substantive acknowledgment of her Chicanidad. This essay examines the erasure of Anzaldúa’s Chicanidad and the appropriation of Anzaldúa as a race-less and culture-less liberatory figure through the operation of homonormativity and whiteness. I analyze the text and impetus of the Award through an analytical framework rooted in the rhetorical concepts of Kenneth Burke and Gloria Anzaldúa’s own concerns about erasure and appropriation through homonormativity and whiteness. I argue that the meaningful change to the text and its authorship, as well as to meaningful inclusion of queers of color, is necessary for the Award to continue.

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

This essay examines the issue of learning disabilities among the incarcerated population. Studies show that approximately eleven percent of U.S. prison inmates self-report a learning disability, a rate nearly four times greater than that of the general U.S. population. The paper 1) addresses the obstacles in meeting this population’s needs, and 2) argues for the&hellip; Continue reading Learning Disabilities Among the Incarcerated by Terra White

The 46-line poem “Moon” grew out of my work at the Hampden County Correctional Facility in Ludlow, Massachusetts where I have been facilitating writing workshops with incarcerated women for the past five years. We employ the Amherst Writers &amp; Artists method for writing with underserved populations. Link to PDF

Marching in public, as members of a public meant to be seen in public, has been one of the most frequently deployed forms of collective social protest in the United States. For people with disabilities, however, this type of rhetorical action is fraught with normative assumptions that go beyond presumed needs for accommodation, access, and alternative modes of participation. This essay identifies the far less visible constraints created by previous historic and rhetorical practices, including some of the discourse of other progressive social activists. Both the prospect and the practice of marching as a rhetorical form of performative public argument are thus complex for people with disabilities who are too often not seen as equal citizens. The trouble with marching is thus ableism and its sustained invisibility.

Visibility is strategic. Visibility is insistent. Visibility is an argument—for disabled people, an argument for recognition and rights, a demand to be part of the public and participants in public...

This study explores how agency is distributed in an interaction among a child, a speech-language pathologist, and an electronic communication device. Using video-recorded data of the interaction, I consider how micro features of the participants’ communication such as gaze and gesture as well as material objects such as the device collectively shape possibilities for agency. This interdependent, posthuman approach shifts our understanding and practice of agency from gaining independence to improving collect action.

According to Lisa Meloncon (2014), “…TPC [technical professional communication] practitioners and academics have few resources to understand issues related to disability studies and accessibility, ...

Neutrality is often impossible when disabled teachers are at the front of the classroom. This article unpacks three domains in which neutrality needs to be cripped: in response to students’ resistance to disability content, when considering the audiences for our pedagogy, and when teachers need accommodations.

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While service learning can be compatible with feminist objectives, if the service does not contribute to structural change or help students understand their role in facilitating change, it can replicate patriarchal goals and run counter to feminism (Ludlow). In this article, we show the way we utilized a feminist lens when designing and implementing a&hellip; Continue reading Service Learning as Social Justice Activism: Students Help a Campus Shift to Bystander Awareness by Irene Lietz &#038; Erin Tunney

As Editor of Reflections, I am pleased to introduce this special issue focused on Disability Studies. I have had the pleasure of working with Allison Hitt and Bre Garrett, the Special Editors to this issue, these past few months. Their commitment to this special issue shows through in the dedication and hard work they’ve exhibited&hellip; Continue reading Editor’s Introduction by Cristina Kirklighter

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes disability as “the most human of experiences, touching every family and—if we live long enough—touching us all” (5) For Allison, disability has always been a lens through which I’ve viewed and understood people and environments, my family, and myself: growing up with an autistic older brother who my mom constantly advocated for,&hellip; Continue reading Special Editors’ Introduction: Engaging the Possibilities of Disability Studies by Allison Hitt &#038; Bre Garrett

As the field of disability studies expands, a question that is cropping up in theoretical discussions more and more often is whether or not Fatness falls into the category of disability. Theorist April Herndon gives a compelling argument for the inclusion of Fat within disability studies, making an especially interesting connection between the idea of&hellip; Continue reading Overcoming the Odds: Disability Studies,Fat Studies, and Rhetorics of Bodily Control by Laura Thacker

For five years of graduate school, I avoided studying disability because I thought it would require confronting the idea that I have a disability. I was first introduced to disability studies during my master’s coursework. I mustered the courage to take the course on disability because deep down, I knew that this thing I was&hellip; Continue reading Why Study Disability? Lessons Learned from a Community Writing Project by Annika Konrad

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

This article examines how normative assumptions about disability, family, and care perpetuate barriers to social services in cross-cultural contexts. It reports on an 8-month case study of how a county-sponsored, person-centered disability grant targeted but failed to meet the needs of Somali applicants. I identify four impasses that alienated applicants and demonstrated the grant's process relied on culture norms, including medical definitions of disability, institutional expertise, and normalization of self-sufficiency. I develop three recommendations for future technical communication and policy interventions. This study offers insights into how person-centered initiatives can engage the contexts and expertise of diverse users within institutional structures.

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Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals’ ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals’ opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to ensure “communicative access” by reducing barriers to communication. This article, through an analysis of the communicative practices of participants in a memoir group for people with aphasia, develops a nuanced conception of communicative access as a process of negotiation across individuals and modes and not just as a process of reducing barriers. The study shows, specifically, that rather than the mere presence of multiple semiotic resources enabling communicative access, individuals enact access by flexibly shifting between modes to take advantage of various kinds of affordances that best suit their needs. This willingness to use modes in atypical or nonnormative ways importantly challenges the very idea of “normal” communication. The theory of communicative access developed in this article melds (a) a CSD understanding of communication as social and tied inextricably to identity with (b) a disability studies conception of access as an ongoing, negotiated process and with (c) a writing studies emphasis on literate, communicative activity as complexly layered, distributed, negotiated, and (multi)semiotic.

This article offers a case study of the development and implementation of a free activist and leadership course for members of the community planning on running for elected office. The article describes how the course was developed, including an explanation of the partnership between the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) and the University of Central Florida’s&hellip; Continue reading “An Open Mesh of Possibilities”: Engaging Disability Studies as a Site of Activist and Leadership Possibilities by Stephanie K. Wheeler

This article argues for understanding Kenneth Burke’s linguistic pedagogy as a teaching practice rooted in the appreciation of disability. It explores connections between the Cold War cultural context and the present day, describing how a nuanced approach to disability pedagogy can resist impulses toward competition and conflict in the classroom and on the world stage.

Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

This article shares findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing and writing-intensive classrooms. I argue that normative conceptions of time and production can negatively constrain student performance, and I offer the concept of crip time (borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists) as an alternative pedagogical framework.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.