Background and research problem: The way in which work is done in digital contexts deviates from classical corporate, hierarchical, departmental organizations. Since digital microfirms are becoming more common, understanding the way members organize their activities through communication in this specific type of enterprise represents an appealing field to develop. Literature review: We discuss how the framework of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) allows us to analyze activity systems and trace disruptions in postbureaucratic digital work. We also review research using CHAT along with genre studies to understand, specifically, business communication and entrepreneurial rhetoric in a spaceless microfirm that provides digital services. Research questions: 1. In what activities does this microfirm engage? That is, what different objects and outcomes has it been developed to achieve? 2. How do the contradictions between these activities shape the microfirm’s organization and its orientation to clients? Methods: Guided by the components of activity systems, we coded interviews, questionnaires, instant messages, and databases. Discourse analysis allowed us to identify contradictions. Results: Both from the perspective of some team members and through artifact analysis, flexibility and closeness to the client are the firm’s value propositions. Consequently, they organize their daily activities around addressing the urgent, proximate needs of each client. Conclusion: Although the microfirm’s focus on flexibility and closeness sets it apart tactically from larger competitors, it also hinders strategic planning, requiring greater effort for group communication and decision-making. This insight helps us to understand why microfirms in general seem more tactically than strategically oriented.

Abstract In contemporary literature on argumentation, it is well-established that various genres of fiction can be used to present argumentation. For instance, in political satires, authors argue why a certain political situation is undesirable. Similarly, authors of fables argue—by means of animals as characters—that certain behaviour is desirable or unacceptable. Characteristically, authors of fiction create a fictional world in which their narratives take place. This collides with the sincerity conditions of the speech act complex of argumentation: preliminary conditions that should be satisfied for argumentation to be performed correctly. Firstly, these sincerity conditions require the arguer to believe that their standpoint is acceptable. Second, the arguer should believe that the statements they make to justify their standpoint are acceptable and third, the arguer should believe that these statements constitute an acceptable justification of their standpoint. As such, when argumentation meets fiction, the sincerity conditions do not align: how can authors—as arguers—actually believe that their uttered statements are acceptable, if these statements are oftentimes not true? The aim of this paper is to show both how proponents can accept propositions in fiction while still following argumentation’s sincerity conditions.

Abstract: Robert Herrick's central oxymoronic trope in Hesperides (1648) of diligent negligence has traditionally been understood in general aesthetic terms. This essay argues that this trope, particularly as evoked in the poem "Delight in Disorder," relates especially to the art of rhetoric and that it had special currency in the language of curiosity deployed in the rhetorical discourse of the period, especially in the area of preaching. The essay begins by situating Herrick's poem in relation to contemporary rhetorical thought distilled, from Cicero via Justus Lipsius, in John Hoskyns's Directions for Speech and Style and expressed in the sartorial metaphor of Herrick's poem. It then turns to contemporary homiletic discourse to tie these ideas into the language of curiosity as applied to questions of arrangement ( dispositio )—the central concern in the poem's examination of appeal in female "dress"—arguing that it is this rich rhetorical context that provides the energeia of Herrick's poem.

This article examines the relationship between politeness, culture, and speech acts in multilingual corporate communication. It emphasizes the role of second language acquisition (SLA) practices in teaching politeness strategies, with a focus on explicit instruction, immersion programs, and authentic language practice. The article also offers suggestions to enhance communication in such environments, using Luxembourg as an example of a multicultural business environment and highlighting the importance of understanding cultural norms and expectations surrounding politeness. By examining the interplay between these factors, this study aims to contribute to improved communication practices in multilingual corporate settings.

Kristin Pickering presents a valuable case study that focuses on how professional communicators and researchers make sense of the narratives and values between stakeholders who may be at odds with each other. This is especially important in land usage and environmental protection cases like the Grey Cliffs, where the practices of private citizens and government regulated organizations conflict. Through Pickering's well-structured case study, she shares a fascinating web of documentation practices, discourse expectations, and community narratives and how they affect the communication practices between organizations and communities.

In the past ten years, scholarship has increasingly directed attention to the intersections between disability studies and writing center work, emphasizing the importance of multimodality, Universal Design Learning (UDL), and academic support for students with disabilities. Though the literature on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in writing spaces highlights the personal narratives of student writers, tutors, and administrators (see for example, Garbus, 2017; Stark & Wilson, 2017; Zmudka, 2018), empirically-based research on the topic remains rare. This empirical study looks at how a seemingly invisible disability, like ADHD, affects tutors and clients in the writing center. Results from this study’s survey of existing tutors and clients, in conjunction with semi-structured interviews, revealed tutors and clients’ need for more conversations around neurodivergence, as well as better support and equity in the writing center and in other institutional organizations and academic resources on campus. Participants also highlighted the need to foster a culture of understanding and mutual listening rather than relying on disclosure, to provide accessible modes of tutoring for clients, and to include training around disability literacy in tutor education. Overall, this paper unwraps the often hidden stories of tutors and clients with ADHD and provides ways to (re)think neurodivergence in writing center work. As an international graduate tutor in my writing center, receiving my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis as an adult made me highly cognizant of the issues that neurodivergent [1] students like myself face in academic spaces, including how to navigate our classes, maneuver teaching and tutoring, and educate ourselves and others on the reality of disability (in)justice. Almost three years ago, I encountered a client who disclosed having ADHD in the middle of our face-to-face session. The first-time client had a poster on mental health concerns for her psychology course. She expressed needing help to organize her poster and make sure its content is clear. At one point in the session, she disclosed having ADHD, to which I blurted, “I have ADHD too!” I noticed her demeanor change, as she eased up in her chair. It was my first time disclosing that I have ADHD. In retrospect, my self-disclosure served as an act of awareness, understanding, and reassurance. I also wanted to normalize discussions surrounding disability in the session because it pushed us towards an open and honest conversation about what I could do to adjust my tutoring approach and best support her as a writer. Our overall exchange prompted me to consider what happens when disability comes into the equation in a writing center context. In the past ten years, scholarship has highlighted the intersections between disability studies and writing center work. Much of this work emphasizes the need to conduct more studies on disabilities and neurodivergence in the writing center (Babcock, 2015; Babcock & Daniels, 2017; Daniels et al., 2017; Dembsey, 2020; Hitt, 2012, 2021; Kleinfeld, 2018; Rinaldi, 2015). In particular, Babcock (2015) urges writing center practitioners to produce more empirically-oriented studies on less visible disabilities, including ADHD, one of the most common disabilities among college students. More importantly, this study challenges the problematic rhetorics of disability that show up in our writing center communities, as the writing center is one facet of how an institution functions. Hitt (2021) points out that dominant discourses of disability in writing center work are often concerned with diagnosis and accommodation, which coincides with a remediation model that treats disabilities as problems to diagnose and overcome. Dembsey (2020) sheds light on the discrimination that disabled individuals face in writing center instruction and environment, like questioning whether disabled writers need support, perceiving disability as something to “fix” in a writing center context, and placing burden and judgment on disabled writers and tutors who self-disclose. In response to the positioning of disability as deficit in the writing center, writing center practitioners have challenged this notion and taken the lead on rethinking the disability discourse (for example, Anglesey & McBride, 2019; Degner et al., 2015). This notion coincides with Denny’s (2005) call to think of writing centers as liminal spaces that can disrupt the norm and “destabilize conventional wisdom of what we do and who we are” (p. 56). In the same spirit, this study aims to challenge the problematic discourses that linger in writing center research on disability. Its goal is to also envision the writing center as a rebellious space that can amplify the voices of neurodivergent tutors and clients, promote a culture of intentional listening and accessibility, and adapt to the needs of its diverse tutors and clients. In this empirical study, I focus on the experiences of neurodivergent tutors and clients with ADHD in the writing center space. Using an initial brief survey, followed by semi-structured interviews with tutors and clients with ADHD, I explore how clients and tutors with ADHD recount their experiences in past tutoring sessions and how they describe their writing process(es). I also discuss how clients and tutors with ADHD can be supported in the writing center.

English professional communication competence is crucial for fresh graduates to succeed in the workplace and has been identified as a national priority in Malaysia to enhance employability. This study explores key attributes of that competence based on interviews with 12 employers and 9 graduates. Using a basic interpretive qualitative approach, 26 attributes were identified across four areas: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. The findings highlight the importance of aligning educational outcomes with workplace demands and offer insights that support curriculum development, targeted instruction, and assessment—informing policy and future research to enhance graduate readiness.

This study examines metaphors in the hospitality discourse of Singapore (SG) and Hong Kong (HK) using conceptual metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. We identify the key source domains employed in luxury hotel websites across both regions and use quantitative methods to reveal metaphorical patterns in each corpus. The findings reveal that the SG corpus exhibits a greater inclination toward FORTUNE metaphors, whereas the HK corpus shows a prominence of MAGIC metaphors. Against this background, we argue the importance of a frequency-based collocational approach for analyzing conceptual metaphors, as it facilitates the exploration of the sociocultural dimensions embedded in hospitality discourse.

This article examines the often-overlooked role played by classical dialectics in managerial discourse, highlighting its enduring relevance in business communication instruction. Through comparative analysis, the article shows how Peter F. Drucker’s management theories draw on classical dialectics and how an applied liberal arts approach can inform interpersonal workplace dialogue and strengthen managerial effectiveness. The analysis suggests that, through the Druckerian lens, classical dialectic effectively bridges practical wisdom ( phronesis ) and action ( praxis ) in management. The article concludes that incorporating classical dialectics into business communication curricula and training can enhance modern management education.

In this study, we identify the pedagogical practices the science teachers use for successfully conducting their argumentation-based science lessons and examine the process of managing informal formative assessments. For this qualitative study, we collected data via video and audio devices from classroom implementations after conducting two professional development courses on assessment practices in inquiry settings and argumentation in science classrooms. We analysed the data from the conversation analysis (CA) perspective to conduct a data-driven study. Our results show that there are multiple pedagogical practices that teachers use to achieve lesson purposes and shape lessons. These are primarily the revealing of different claims and warrants or counterarguments about the same phenomenon or situation, prompting the class to discuss different arguments, including more than one student in interaction. Regarding the nature of answers produced by students, the teachers also make implicit or explicit positive and negative assessments, avoid explicit assessments, and give content feedback as pedagogical practices and use them for managing the informal formative assessment process. The results show that the teachers perform some pedagogical practices via the information gained by the informal formative assessment process. These pedagogical practices provide them with new road maps to achieve the lesson goal by increasing classroom interactions.

This study examines how metadiscourse resources are used to achieve persuasiveness in Apple's earnings conference calls from 2013 through 2022. Adopting a corpus-assisted discourse study approach, the study reveals that self-mentions, transitions, and boosters are the three most frequently used metadiscourse resources by Apple executives. The authors detail how different types of metadiscourse contribute to the construction of three interactive roles that enhance persuasiveness. The study contributes to current studies of persuasion as a form of strategic communication. Business practitioners may benefit from learning the language practices of leading companies in order to optimize their own corporate communication strategies.

ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers concerned that students might turn to large language models (LLMs) to write their assignments. Many of these models are able to create grammatically accurate and coherent texts, thus potentially enabling cheating and undermining literacy and critical thinking skills. This study seeks to explore the extent LLMs can mimic human-produced texts by comparing essays by ChatGPT and student writers. By analyzing 145 essays from each group, we focus on the way writers relate to their readers with respect to the positions they advance in their texts by examining the frequency and types of engagement markers. The findings reveal that student essays are significantly richer in the quantity and variety of engagement features, producing a more interactive and persuasive discourse. The ChatGPT-generated essays exhibited fewer engagement markers, particularly questions and personal asides, indicating its limitations in building interactional arguments. We attribute the patterns in ChatGPT’s output to the language data used to train the model and its underlying statistical algorithms. The study suggests a number of pedagogical implications for incorporating ChatGPT in writing instruction.

This design-based study occurred within a writing methods course in an urban teacher education program. We designed an intervention to develop student teachers’ meta-composing strategies, critical thinking, and justice-oriented reflexivity by revising a teacher-as-writer course assignment to achieve two pedagogical goals: (1) synthesizing antiracist and pedagogical content from curated source texts, and (2) explicating racial literacy as future writing teachers of K-6 students. Using discourse synthesis as both an instructional and research method, we analyzed the synthesis outputs of student teachers during a writing assignment designed to communicate their learnings to an intended audience. Outputs included graphic organizers, planning documents, and a range of final products. We employed discourse synthesis to analyze source and synthesis texts through propositionalization, template formation, and thematic categorization, identifying idea unit origins, progression, or omission. Additionally, content and thematic analyses evaluated instructional strategies and materials to assess whether pedagogical objectives were met. Results indicated discourse synthesis instruction facilitated student engagement with antiracism content, such as historical events, systemic trends, and awareness of racist practices in schools. Findings also highlighted areas for improvement, including modifying source texts, revising the teacher-as-writer assignment, and reevaluating assessment practices in antiracist writing pedagogy.

The police written witness statement is a major evidentiary document that has a direct bearing on the prosecution and adjudication of criminal cases. The present study examines the rhetorical structure of police written witness statements in Ghana as a genre by adopting Bhatia’s genre model to examine 120 statements on alleged criminal cases that were sampled from the Wenchi Division of the Bono Regional Police Command in Ghana. The findings suggest that the police written witness statement is typically characterized by five moves ( Disclaiming, Identifying the Witness, Stating Witness’s Involvement with the Case, Reporting the Facts , and Indicating Discharge of Legal Responsibility ) that bear facts necessary in the prosecution of crime in Ghana’s criminal justice system. The choice of lexicogrammatical features varied depending on the function of each move. The study concludes that the witness statements possess peculiar functional features that meet the legal demands of Ghana’s judicial expectations and police discourse.

In the United States, the 2010s saw a significant, organized wave of public philanthropy among the very wealthy. We conducted a discourse analysis of legitimation in The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic endeavor that began in 2010 in which billionaires encourage each other to publicly pledge to give away the majority of their wealth in their life or upon their death. We approach these texts with the questions, “Why do these individuals make these public pledges?” and “What rhetorical work is being done by them?” From the perspective of legitimation theory, how do these public, rhetorical acts constitute the social and economic orders into which they are made? Our discourse analysis of the pledges finds that they constitute two parts of an economic system of wealth, both wealth acquisition and the philanthropic giving of wealth. These constitutions in The Giving Pledge reify an institutional order by appending a promise to give back.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric concerning migrants in Polish social media based on the category of topos, as in Discourse-Historical Approach, in order to evaluate the threats and dangers generated rhetorically. The research material comprises a corpus of far-right anti-Ukrainian comments and posts collected from Facebook and Instagram profiles. Based on quantitative insights into the corpus, the paper conducts a qualitative study to classify the topoi and highlight specific rhetorical strategies employed by the far-right toward Ukrainian migrants. The analysis shows the patterns which the users of extreme discourses employ to verbalize and rationalize their disdain for the migrants. These present the Ukrainian migrants as a threat to Polish independence and social order, argue that the support they receive is undeserved, and present ruling politicians as inept and ignorant of the needs of Poles.

While disinformation is often equated with fabricated content, its impact extends beyond falsified information to the way narratives are linguistically constructed. This article explores the role of argumentative structures in disinformation strategies, focusing on how linguistic devices shape the reader’s interpretation of events. By analyzing argumentative operators and connectives in articles published on the Spanish-language pro-Kremlin news portal Sputnik Mundo, the study demonstrates that manipulation is not only a matter of content but also of discourse structure. The research is based on Anscombre and Ducrot’s theory of argumentation within language (1994) and framed within an interdisciplinary perspective, combining linguistic analysis with insights from disinformation studies and military theory, particularly the notion of disinformation as a weapon in hybrid conflict. Through an examination of selected articles covering NATO’s Steadfast Defender exercises in Europe, the study reveals how argumentative mechanisms are used to challenge official Western narratives, delegitimize NATO’s actions, and promote a Kremlin-aligned interpretation of geopolitical events.

The article examines how the Ukrainian language has become a strategic battlefield in Russian propaganda, acting as a front in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It reports on the analysis conducted within the Discourse-Historical Approach of media statements made by Russian politicians and propagandists. It shows how current attacks on the Ukrainian language are a continuation of historical practices of linguistic repression. It reveals that the rhetoric of delegitimization of Ukrainian is based on recurring topoi, such as artificiality, primitiveness, and hostility, and on well-established mental models that legitimize Russia’s takeover. The results confirm that Ukrainian is not seen as a neutral communication tool but as a hostile element in the narrative of the uniformity of the “Russian World.” Russian depreciations and delegitimizations aim to deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian national identity as a neo-imperialist strategy to subjugate Ukraine.

This article examines various dimensions of persuasive communication during protest actions undertaken by Polish farmers in public spaces in 2023 and 2024, thereby disrupting social order. The source of information regarding the strikes is the popular general news portal rmf24.pl, which prepared a special report dedicated to these events. The analysis draws on the paradigm of the rhetoric of anger, which is conceptualised at the beginning of the article and compared to hate speech, rhetoric of violence, and similar concepts. The study employs several methodological approaches from the intersection of social sciences and humanities, including discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, and action analysis. The last section summarise how the Polish farmers' protests can be situated within the rhetoric of anger and point out fields for further research.

Building on a critical study in Cap (2024), the present paper broadens the framework of critical cognitive discourse research with tools drawn from rhetorical theory to explore patterns of conflict-charged communication and legitimization discourse used by Polish political parties to claim and enact state leadership. The first part studies the discourse of Law and Justice, a far-right party ruling Poland in the years 2015-2023. It examines its strategies of leadership legitimization involving ideological polarization, strategic generation of internal and external conflict, threat construction and crisis management. The second part analyzes the more moderate and cooperation oriented discourse strategies implemented by three opposition parties in the lead-up to the October 2023 elections, in which the party lost power. The aim of the paper is to apply the broadened discursive-rhetorical apparatus to compare and contrast the two kinds of discourse to speculate about the longevity of an essentially conflict-charged rhetoric. It is argued that radical populist discourse can be an extremely powerful tool, able to grant long-term political leadership. However, in a yet longer perspective, such a discourse runs a considerable risk of “wearing out” and becoming vulnerable to more forward-looking and pragmatic leadership rhetoric.

Background: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are essential for companies to persuade stakeholders of their commitment to social, economic, and environmental responsibilities. This persuasion is to a large degree determined by how companies construct their stance in discourse. Literature review: Among efforts in academic discourse, stance analysis of shipping industry CSR reporting remains unexplored. Research questions: 1. How are stance resources distributed in COSCO Shipping and Maersk's CSR discourse? 2. How do similarities and differences between institutional speakers instantiate their stakeholder-oriented communication strategies? 3. Which stance markers show significant changes over time, and what factors drive these changes? Methodology: This study employed corpus linguistics and discourse analysis of CSR reports (2016-2022) of COSCO Shipping and of Maersk. Python and WordSmith 8.0 were used for stance feature retrieval and frequency analysis, and hierarchical clustering analysis was conducted on hedges and boosters. Chi-square tests evaluated differences in stance marker distribution, while diachronic analysis examined changes over time. Results and conclusion: Maersk employs more stance markers of hedges, attitude markers, and general self-mentions, reflecting a more personal communication style, while COSCO Shipping favors boosters and formal self-references, indicating an authoritative approach. We argue that these features are informed by the contrast between European rationalism and Eastern empiricism in corporate communication. Our novel four-category classification of self-mentions (general, specific reference, group, and affiliated) addresses the complexities of shipping corporate discourse. Diachronic analysis shows stance marker usage fluctuations, particularly during global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings develop a stance framework, offering insights in terms of stance construction for effective cross-cultural CSR communication to foster global cooperation on shared social responsibilities.

Background: Instructors in STEM fields help prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace, partially through instruction of professional genres such as client-facing reports. At the same time, class sizes are increasing, and writing assessment often falls to teaching assistants (TAs). Literature review: Research suggests that TAs possess a maturing but inchoate sense of writing in their field, which potentially complicates their ability to deliver quality feedback. This study uses frame semantics, a form of discourse analysis, to probe TAs for their beliefs about writing in statistics. Research questions: 1. When asked to describe the function and role of writing in statistics, what lexical verbs do TA informants use? 2. What frames are invoked by those verbs? 3. How do the invoked semantic frames position writing in relation to disciplinary and professional work in the field? Research methodology: This study interviewed three TAs from an introductory statistics course about their perceptions of writing in statistics. Frame semantics was used to analyze TA responses. Results: Less experienced TAs tended to perceive writing as a means of presentation, which entailed a weak sense of the role of rhetoric in technical communication and a muddied understanding of writing assessment. The more advanced TA perceived writing as a means of contextualizing statistical evidence for particular audiences. Conclusion: Due to their maturing perceptions of writing in their disciplines, TAs might not possess the ability to deliver quality formative feedback. One means of support for these TAs may be opportunities to discuss assessment decisions with one another, thereby calibrating against available expectations and rubrics.

This case study investigates how two ESL graduate students, Ian and Sam, use ChatGPT in their research writing after receiving a comprehensive tutorial based on Warschauer et al.’s (2023) AI literacy framework. We analyzed their engagement with ChatGPT across prompt categories including genre, content, language use, documentation, coherence, and clarity. Data were collected from research paper drafts, ChatGPT chat histories, and interviews. Data analyses included coding ChatGPT prompts, textual analysis of drafts, and thematic analysis of interview transcripts . Results show that while both participants utilized ChatGPT for understanding genre conventions and content development, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their individual backgrounds. Ian selectively used ChatGPT for specific assistance needs, while Sam engaged more systematically, particularly for APA style and coherence checks. Both approaches maintained academic integrity and scholarly voice, demonstrating that Generative AI tools can be effectively tailored to individual needs without compromising ethical standards. This study highlights how advanced ESL writers can adapt GenAI tools to their unique writing processes, offering insights into the diverse ways AI can enhance academic writing while preserving individual agency. The findings suggest that AI integration in academic writing can be customized to support diverse writing goals and backgrounds.

The language movement in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was a social movement that seeded Bangladeshi consciousness and is often considered as prefiguring Bangladeshi independence in 1972. It underscored the centrality of linguistic identity in modern nationalism. Developments in the language movement also provide a generative example of how development and modernity can frame discussions around language reform and literacy in contexts characterized by a multilingual norm and postcoloniality. This article examines the rhetorics of language reform in the movement through a reading of a set of recommendations for developing a simplified register of Bangla, called Shahaj-Bangla, within a sense of the overall language movement and its discourse. I argue that the new register simultaneously presents a scientific and cultural view of language to suit the needs of the region. This study contributes to current scholarship in the field by showing how an example of language reform assumes a fluid nature of language while also arguing for a form of standardization aligned with modern nationalism. It also adds to our developing conversations around language and literacy transnationally through its focus on a language debate about a non-European language set in a non-Western context.

Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

The reports the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) requires of its members provide an opportunity to study the shifting role of the private sector within the regime of human rights discourse. Using British Petroleum as a case study, I combine technical communication theories of power with Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine the rhetorical strategies in UNGC-BP communications, finding a disconnect between human rights principles and company reporting that validates rather than rejects corporate violence.

ABSTRACT In the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt mistakenly depends on judgment for the creation of a common world. (Linda Zerilli’s work is the best account of this strain in Arendt’s thought.) Instead, this article argues that Arendt’s accounts of promises in The Human Condition and of constitutions in On Revolution point to the preconditions for all acts of judgment. In other words, the world must be constituted prior to judgment. And that world-creation relies on collective speech acts. Only with that framework in place does the process of judgment, understood as the intersubjective exchanges that involve wooing the consent of the other, become possible.

It is common for those who live in democratic societies to talk about the importance of speaking to others. But what about the desirability of speaking to others? At first glance, the question appears false, since the answer seems obvious: Of course speaking to others is desirable! Engaging with others who disagree with us is part and parcel of the democratic way of life. And yet, we need not look too far to find the public sphere mired in intense polarization, divisiveness, and a general breakdown of civil discourse. In practice, we appear to set aside what we say we believe and proceed as though we know that dialogue is pointless.What should we make of this gap between, on the one hand, our accedence to the idea that speaking across difference is good and, on the other, our demonstrable lack of attunement to that good in practice?We differentiate two ways of conceiving the gap. One might understand the gap as between a belief in the importance of open dialogue and the willingness to engage in it. Here, the discrepancy between our commitment to the principle and acting on it is easily cleared up by pointing to things that make dialogue ineffective today. We could say that, while we do firmly believe in the principle of dialogue, reality makes it impossible. In this case, the retreat from dialogue is inevitable. We propose an alternative understanding of the gap as one between believing that dialogue is desirable and desiring dialogue. We make the case that while the first framework can excuse the evident tendency to avoid disagreement as a realistic, prudent, or practical choice, it also makes embracing pluralism indefensible. The second approach, we argue, has the potential not only to remind us that the desirability of dialogue is coextensive with the desirability of capacious thought and judgment, but to reattune us to pluralism as an ideal for realizing those desires.Increasingly, citizens, scholars, and civic institutions lament that it has become impossible to disagree with each other. This notion—that democratic dialogue has become an impossibility—comes in different forms. For some, the impossibility is due to contextual developments. We live in a new world in which the conditions that once made speaking to others potentially productive are gone. So, even if we make the effort to speak across difference, our deliberations in the current digital and transnational public sphere cannot consolidate public opinion as they used to. Such explanations, which attribute the impossibility to contextual developments, might be called externalist to distinguish them from ones that attribute the putative impossibility of open dialogue to inherent causes.From an internalist view, developments like the rise of social media, globalization, and the growing role of “big money” in politics have not exactly made the democratic process impossible; they have merely magnified the fact that it was always too flawed to be viable. If it once seemed that democracy—as a pluralist way of life, based on free and shared self-governance—was possible, now we can see more clearly that speaking to others is ineffective in consolidating, or ensuring the legitimacy of, public opinion. Similarly, if it once seemed that the challenge was how to make life in pluralism better, it has become clear that human beings, insofar as we are essentially tribalistic, may prefer not to have to negotiate between different values and worldviews.Whatever form it takes, the idea that democratic dialogue might have been good if it were not impossible—as an explanation of the gap between what we remain committed to in principle, on the one hand, and our readiness to act on it, on the other—has circumscribed our response to the crisis of democratic dialogue by making the importance of democratic dialogue effectively moot.Reflection about the democratic crisis has devolved into a deterministic problematization of free speech itself. In politics, free speech has become a partisan issue, and in academic scholarship, the validity of committing to the protection of free speech has become a matter to interrogate. For example, which views are acceptable to “platform” on college campuses? Does Justice Brandeis’s slogan that the “truth will out” or Mill’s idea of the “marketplace of ideas” have any actual empirical validity? Does free speech in the age of the internet make its abuse too rampant to justify its protection? And so on. However, this concern with the defensibility and parameters of free speech is confused about the stakes of the protection of free speech. It neglects the fact that the commitment to protect freedom of expression is based not on the principle that speech ought to be free, but rather on a commitment to pluralism that, in turn, demands that speech be protected. That is to say, the actual stakes of any argument in support of or against free speech go to the ideal of living with others with whom we are likely to disagree. Concern with the defensibility of free speech fails to recognize, in short, that it is the pluralism itself that needs to be defended.Accordingly, our aim is to shift the conversation about the dysfunction in public dialogue by framing the desirability of speaking to others as an aporia that can be ignored only on pain of rendering pluralism indefensible.To present the desirability of dialogue as a problematic seems odd, especially because the commonplace idea that talking across difference is important seems to already entail its desirability. And yet, if pressed to explain why anyone would want to talk to others, we find ourselves describing instrumental goods. Which is to say, we find ourselves listing things that talking to others is good for: be this cultivating civility and respect, refining our individual beliefs, or arriving at better solutions to collective problems. Indeed, it is easy to recognize the potential benefits, be they civic, social, epistemic, or moral. At that point, the distinction between believing that something is desirable and desiring it for itself becomes clear. In the first case, being in dialogue need not be a desirable prospect so long as the outcome of the process is desirable. In the second case, it is the prospect of dialogue itself that is desirable, notwithstanding its challenges. This distinction is important because the instrumental benefits of dialogue for stability, civility, and cooperation are recognizable in any kind of society or political system. Democratic societies, however, uphold pluralism as an ideal: Disagreement is not merely an instrument to resolve differences; living in difference is an opportunity to disagree. As the timing of this special section suggests, we live in a moment that calls on us to contend with the implication of this distinction for pluralism.The desirability of talking to others is a problematic that emerges specifically from a mismatch between a theory and its practice. Consider the monist-pluralist debate in Anglo-European literary theory from the 1960s up to the 1990s. The debate, which was framed as a contest between critical pluralists (represented by Wayne Booth) and monists (represented by E. D. Hirsch), opened up a discussion about the parameters within which interpretation would realize its aims and optimize its results, about how the aims are to be defined and what the ideal result might be. For Booth, the project of pluralism is one invested in “the public testing of values” through conversation, whereas for Hirsch validity in interpretation required imposing order on “the chaotic democracy of readings” (1979, 4–5). Of course, the debate was not limited to a quarrel between pluralists and monists; it expanded to include critics from numerous emerging “fields” that have since become institutional mainstays (like feminist studies, postcolonial studies, African American studies, queer studies, and comparative literature) who criticized it for various alleged ideological blind spots.What is noteworthy is that, in the exchanges between critics representing presumably irreconcilable views of how best to conduct the critical enterprise, everyone could count on others to be invested in contesting other views. When a monist like Hirsch insisted that critical inclusivity stands to compromise interpretive validity, Booth could, despite warning of monist exclusiveness as a form of “critical killing,” point to how the monist position gains clarity and force when it stands within a plurality of critical views (1979, 259). And Ellen Rooney, who criticized Booth for modeling his vision of interpretive pluralism on liberal paradigms of public reason as persuasion, wrote an entire book to persuade readers otherwise—a critique that was possible and necessary in a historical moment when a rationalist-liberal pluralism could be plausibly posited as hegemonic, whereas a public sphere paralyzed by irrationality and post-factualism calls for a foundationalist, or at least positive, theoretical intervention.Put differently, today a pluralist rhetorical theory like Booth’s would not be in a position to model itself after the openness of public discourse without first explaining why one would want to model critical discourse on a paradigm in dysfunction. Likewise, Rooney could not argue that the same ideological baggage attached to the “colloquial meaning of the term ‘pluralist’ shadows all our theories of interpretation” (1989, 17), not at a time when pluralism is no longer part of our political vernacular. She would have to find positive grounds on which to present an alternative vision of critical discourse. And Hirsch might not want to call for untethering the principles of persuasion in public discourse from the grounds of validity in scholarly criticism, not when translating the value of what literary critics do has become a paramount concern for literary studies as a discipline. In short, at the time of the monist-pluralist debate, the most exclusivist monist could afford to be so because it was possible to take fellow critics’ practical commitment to argue and disagree for granted. Booth, the avatar of critical pluralism, dedicated himself, in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, to differentiating all the different varieties of monism and pluralism, delineating the advantages and liabilities of each of these critical “attitudes,” and to arguing the faultlessness of critical disagreements, as he did when he proposed Andrew Paul Ushenko’s thought experiment, which imagined “a fixed cone placed among observers who are not allowed to change their angle of vision” (1979, 31), as an apt analogy for “the challenge of pluralism,” all without having to consider what motivates critics to share their opinions. Meanwhile the past two decades have seen literary criticism and theory not just defending the value of interpretive knowledge (literary studies’ perennial institutional challenge) but calling into question the very point of producing interpretations (Lehman 2017).It takes a particular historical moment to push a question like the desirability of speaking to others to the forefront. Hannah Arendt raised the question in the middle of the twentieth century when she believed that the defense of pluralism was at risk, and her search led her to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.When we invited our contributors to help us articulate the desirability of speaking to others as a problematic, we presented them the foregoing conceptual framework and offered, as orienting figures, Immanuel Kant, who articulates one of modernity’s most influential philosophical accounts of why disagreeing is good for people irrespective of the result, and Hannah Arendt, who critically revived Kant’s philosophical framework after the rise of fascism.In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant puts forward the maxim to “think in the position of everybody else” (1790/2000, 5:294). Appearing in the context of his aesthetic theory, the normative requirement to “reflect on [one’s] own judgment from a universal standpoint” is taken to be constitutive of the judgment of taste (5:295). In other words, to declare something to be beautiful presupposes “putting [one]self into the standpoint of others” (5:295). Moreover, our declaring something to be beautiful is to demand that you think so too (5:237). And yet the force of the aesthetic “ought” does not consist in the fact that you will come to agree with us. Rather, the demand makes clear that taste is an inherently social affair, and our judgments on such matters necessarily consider what our interlocutors would say when confronted with the objects that we might designate as beautiful.It is this capacity for perspective taking, exemplified in the aesthetic sphere, that Arendt famously gravitates toward as forming a basis for the political. “[T]he capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant” precisely because it is the faculty of the mind by which we take into account the perspectives of others (Arendt 1968/2006, 221). In her well-known Kant Lectures (delivered in the Fall of 1970 at the New School for Social Research), Arendt draws out the implications of Kant’s claim that to “restrain our understanding by the understanding of others” is, in fact, a “subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our judgments generally” (Kant 1798/2006, 7:219).Building on this idea, Arendt puts forward the related notions of “representative thinking” and “enlarged mentality,” which involve the ideas not only that it is good to think from the standpoint of others and take their thoughts into account, but that “thinking . . . depends on others to be possible at all” (1982, 40). Whatever her differences with Kant, Arendt is to be credited for highlighting the radical force of Kant’s “belie[f] that the very faculty of thinking depends on its public use,” because it was “not made ‘to isolate itself but to get into community with others’” (40). Kant further warns in his Anthropology (1798) about the dangers of “isolating ourselves with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private representations” (1798/2006, 7:219).Here, the value of dialogue, disagreement, or modes of engagement that involve “thinking from the standpoint of others” does not lie in making our lives with others who are not like-minded manageable, nor even in the prospect of improving our thoughts and opinions by sharpening them against others, but rather because our ability to think and make judgments is most capacious when we are in conversation with others, especially those who might differ. The essays collected in this special section reflect on today’s democratic crisis by returning to the work of Kant and Arendt or proposing alternative sources and frameworks of conceptualization. They approach the problematic we set out from different fields in the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, political science, cultural studies, history, literature, and education, offering a range of historical and theoretical accounts of dialogue and disagreement enriched by interdisciplinarity. Together, they point about the of is, about what or how speech ought to be the question of the desirability of talking with others in the first That this question is is by no taken for granted. As would likely speaking with others may be but it is might to but something that only after have made up mind about after have an opinion about how things in the or about how the world should to others can if is to be by the other. Does it make in that case, to just to In of Democratic takes as her point of the of especially in the context of However, that the of speaking with others is not to but to For Arendt, speaking to others is not only important but for political is the of having a shared public world at In view, we have a world in common only to the that we it from different that for persuasion to our sense of a shared or common it also be world just to you but to In other words, it how the world appears to sense of what is by how it. from the prospect of persuasion the that might see things account, from persuasion as a rhetorical at to it as a kind of and to see the of judgment as a common world that people who have very different opinions to the with others is if we cannot agree on what objects or we are talking In his for in the of Hannah that a better, if not for democratic in a society could be in on and institutions in as opinion a set of that us in conversation with each other in the first of thinking has been used to a form of political in which we reflect on of common concern by the of as others as and alternative frameworks that how we of the of interlocutors within such In with to account of and understanding of and others as that are by a particular of speaking with each other. In with a long to which we understand each other best by with each from our own us the to see how that understanding people a of that is and or between us of this way of speaking with each other because of the free yet of the human which makes an model of this and the the of how we of the other from perspective we are to For example, do we take up the standpoint of an other, the should we to engage with particular others? For what matters is that we others in their rather their This across the more distinction between and In other words, what is is not the other or but we them in all of their that the of perspective depends on how we the our willingness to them in their and the of interlocutors to In the in draws on the work of Arendt, as as her with to argue that thinking has a particular in In such it may not be possible for people to take views into account in how they judge political as Arendt because to the of who people take to be. But what thinking can do in such is others into as of This through understanding why are for and, in so that others from a different from the that political can be by the or of the other Such can support the to include those others in democratic the to those with whom we Hannah Arendt on and draws to claim that free speech is only when others to what have to this is that speech is not just a but a that makes engagement with others desirable and However, free speech it to a the conditions which speech may become in the first on of the term at once to as as conditions which a lack of what Arendt calls the of the social of a the of in politics, and a social from and the idea that our speech be not as exchanges but as within social and institutional conditions that dialogue. As their the with judgment conditions our normative with the and of democratic and differentiate between and to speak to others. be we should not want to to persuade on a that two of can come into when we engage with others who different views. the one hand, for us to present them with of our own the other hand, for practical us to our so as not to demand too of their and In how we speak with others, we them as interlocutors who our practical as as our for their It to to to the of the debate on the retreat from dialogue in Anglo-European arguing that the solutions they to the dysfunction of public discourse are The is in of an to the of disagreement, or a to the to change their dialogue possible once potential interlocutors to get through conversation or them to good to engage if persuasion is taken out of solutions she because the is not one of but one of to to others with whom we disagree. will not be to talk to others since they can or because they do not being want to talk across differences they be to the of for returning to the literary of the public sphere, about and to political and cultural first made the of Together, and us to think about what motivates and the to speak across it might be reason that us to out dialogue, our willingness to remain in it may on our ability to and aesthetic is that democracy is not so a reality as an ideal to to. This special section is presented with the idea that this may societies that are committed to pluralism as a way of life to the conversation about the to across

This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

The widespread adoption of GenAI tools has the potential to reproduce hegemonic and colonial discourse as the writing process is radically disrupted. As a writing center in an Indigenous-serving institution, we address GenAI’s reproduction of privileged discourses through framing writing as a conscious political act of survivance and work to re-establishing writers’ rhetorical sovereignty through place-based pedagogy. In this praxis-oriented piece, we demonstrate how writing centers can use their values as a foundation to develop strategies that empower GenAI users to re-enter the writing process and reclaim agency.

This ethnographic case study provides authentic insights into the intertextual negotiation processes for a particular merger-and-acquisition (M&A) transaction in the context of international legal practice, involving interdisciplinary legal and business professionals. Using genre and discourse analytical methodology, this study focuses on the interactional discourse practices and textual products used for negotiation of the primary sale and purchase agreement. By providing sociolinguistic insights into the M&A negotiation process, these research findings can promote a better understanding of the professional discourse activities and interactional role behaviors for this very important area of international business law practice.

Adopting text mining and semantic network analysis, this study compares employers' expectations for UX and UI design-related jobs. Analyzing a total of 3,269 job ads on LinkedIn, it discovered notable convergences in titles, seniority levels, industry types, and expectations for some competencies and deliverables, indicative of a significant interconnection between UX and UI design. Nonetheless, distinctions emerged in desired skills like research, development, coding, and background knowledge. Furthermore, specific tools and power skills received varying degrees of emphasis across the two domains. This nuanced understanding sheds light on the landscape of UX and UI design through the recruiters' lens.

Abstract Bolivia captured international headlines (and a bit of notoriety) in 2014 when it became the first country in the world to relegalize child labor for ten-year-olds. Originally, the legislature was going to raise the minimum age for child labor from fourteen to sixteen to align with the International Labour Organization's recommendations, but as the Parliament deliberated, they encountered seemingly unlikely opposition, child workers themselves. Child workers led what the New York Timeslabeled the “first ever demonstration by child laborers in Bolivia,” and their advocacy shifted Parliament's trajectory and secured legislative change. This article examines their activism, paying attention to children's voices that are frequently ignored. By examining discourse from the Bolivian Union of Child and Adolescent Workers, local Bolivian news outlets, and international media coverage, I argue that Bolivian child workers privileged their rhetorical agency by redefining childhood, a construct that traditionally denies their voice. They accomplished the redefinition by using dissociation to carve out space for nuance and to combat the incompatibilities mapped onto their position as child speakers. Through their strategy, the child workers recast an Andean childhood in relationship to a Western childhood around the notions of practical needs, work, protection, and education. Their dissociations moved childhood from a temporal frame tied to an individual's age into a cultural frame rooted in place, relationships, and community.

This contribution aims to address the following question: "What types of linguistic units constitute a step in writing process?". The authors propose a pragmatics of the textualization process, emphasizing the significance of operations in constructing meaning during the production of text. Using the example of "enunciative irruptions", they explore the difference between edition (i.e. mental elaboration of the linguistic signs to be emitted) and emission units, revealing instances where verbal elements are born during emission. The study concludes with a phenomenology of textualization, interpreting these operations as meaningful behaviors that reflect the writer's process of discovery and self-construction. The authors argue for a closer examination of production writings, despite the lack of direct temporal data, as it aligns the analyst with the writer's use of this type of documents experience and emphasizes the importance of textualization operations over pauses in understanding the dynamics of written production.

Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

The problem of discourse marginalization in intercultural meetings is usually attributed to linguistic or pragmatic shortcomings of marginalized second language English speakers who are seen as either “learners,” in contrast to first-language English speakers, as uncommunicative, or even as professionally incompetent. The influence of culturally oriented participation styles, distinct patterns of turn-taking behavior, has so far not been considered as a contributing factor. The present study examines intercultural meeting discourse and reveals how diverse participation styles can lead to marginalization. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Over the past few decades, Plato’s Phaedrus has become an important text for scholars interested in tracing new materialist approaches to the history of rhetoric and writing. Drawing on rhetoric and plant studies scholarship, this essay contributes to this conversation by arguing that trees disclose an important layer of irony in the dialogue, producing a deep, if not ambivalent, unity that brings together rhetoric, writing, and discourse. Through a study of trees in the dialogue, this essay demonstrates how the Phaedrus offers rich connections between spatial, nonhuman, and ecological dimensions of writing, rhetoric, and discourse.

Using a mixed methods approach that relies on conceptual metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis, the study investigates the use and function of metaphor in a self-constructed corpus of U.K. bank chairman’s letters to shareholders during the study period, covering a state of relative stability (2002-2007), financial crisis and scandals (2008-2019), and the coronavirus pandemic (2020). We find evidence that bank chairmen use conventional metaphors to communicate with shareholders. Additionally, the choice of metaphors is conditional on the contextual environment in which banks operate. Further qualitative analysis of the metaphors supports a persuasive role that depends on the contextual environment.

Abstract Considering the recent erasure of LGBTQ+ representation in school curricula in states like Texas, this article explores the benefits of pairing medieval flytings (verbal battles with homophobic insults) in “Loki's Quarrel” from The Poetic Edda with recent homophobic discourse over rapper Lil Nas X's controversial music video “Montero.” It suggests that teaching such pairings of past and present queer texts and utilizing a range of inclusive practices and activities in the college classroom can highlight queer experiences and foster inclusion through representation. Through comparing insults that the trickster god Loki is ergi (a bottom) with Lil Nas X's Twitter defense reclaiming his agency as a “power bottom,” the article shows as well how homophobia and misogyny intersect in practices of medieval and modern bottom shaming. Moreover, it demonstrates how queer figures, whether in Viking culture or American pop culture, have always drawn power from queerness to challenge heteronormative masculinity.

This article explores four different topics of conversation in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship that overlap and connect with contemporary issues in generative artificial intelligence (AI): process and iteration, theory and power, actors and activity, and the social justice turn. The authors offer four nonexhaustive reviews of these conversations, offering insight into key issues and texts that have animated discourse in the field and can directly or indirectly address the complex relationship between TPC work and generative AI.

Students are expected to interpret the complexities and nuances of literary texts yet might struggle with interpreting texts in ways that are valued in literary studies. Examining students’ language choices can support instructors and students with developing concrete, explicit understandings of the ways language creates meanings in discourse. This study draws on the Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze essays from two introductory writing about literature courses. Findings illustrate that more proficient writers interpret possible significances using Appreciation and Engagement resources and construe subtle shades of significance using Graduation resources. This linguistic analysis illustrates the ways abstract qualities of literary interpretation including nuance can be seen in students’ specific language choices. By exposing the fine-grained elements of meaning in students’ writing, this study creates pathways toward stimulating students’ and instructors’ metalinguistic awareness of how specific language choices create disciplinarily-valued qualities of writing.

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non–Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland’s metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.

Scholars in the field of writing center studies have previously, and continue to, criticize writing centers for upholding unjust systems, arguing for more practical, equitable, and inclusive anti-racist pedagogies–namely through means of linguistic justice. Within this is a call for more attention to the practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) tutors and to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). In this small, IRB-approved project, we interviewed three BIPOC tutors employed at an MSI and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), exploring how these tutors conceptualize linguistic justice and how they practice it within their work at their university writing center. By listening to the experiences of these three tutors, we gained insight into the nuanced and complex ways in which their lived experiences and histories influence how they conceptualize linguistic justice, both for themselves and in their work in the writing center. Our research revealed how the multiplicity, complexity, and nuance of identity—specifically self-identification and belonging, the use of multilingualism and code-switching, and the defining of one’s authentic voice—affect how a tutor understands and performs linguistic justice. We hope that sharing these tutors’ voices will highlight a need to recognize the intersections and multiplicity of language, discourse, and identity that shapes tutors’ experiences with linguistic justice work as well as acknowledge the labor they perform when engaging in that work in the writing center.

My intent in this qualitative study was to illustrate if and how inequalities in power and authority exist in interactions between tutors and multilingual (ML) tutees set in a university writing center in a predominantly White institution (PWI). Using Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a guide, I analyzed selected transcripts to uncover how “language shapes and positions” tutors and tutees (Fernsten 45). I propose that using CDA to examine writing center transcripts can be an effective training tool for tutors working with multilingual writers. By analyzing how their discourse choices may unintentionally bolster linguistic dominance and diminish ML students’ voices, tutors can adapt their approaches while also identifying discourse choices that lead to constructive, collaborative interactions.

Writing center antiracist and linguistic justice statements, like mission statements, articulate the values and beliefs of an organization, and can be powerful tools for social and institutional change. However, they can also be ineffectual or meaningless if their calls are not actualized or they do not have buy-in from writing center staff. This study explores the linguistic features of antiracist and linguistic justice statements posted on the websites of R1 university writing centers in the United States. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis, a theoretical and methodological approach which centers the political and powerful impacts of language, we analyzed the pronouns, verbs, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) language among these statements. This analysis revealed that such statements use we/our language referring to writing centers and they/them language referring to students/writers; use writing center-relevant action verbs, such as help , develop , and support ; and use modal verbs such as will, connoting future, and potentially present, actions. We also observed a discourse orientation towards DEI efforts rather than specifically centering racial justice. Taken together, these findings present a model of the linguistic choices of antiracist and linguistic justice statements which other writing center professionals could consider when writing their own statements; however, we also argue that writing center staff and researchers must be aware of the ways in which their well-intentioned language may inadvertently hedge their commitments to racial justice.

The Force of Truth is the author’s own significantly revised and expanded translation of La Force du vrai, which was published in French in 2017. The French text bears the subtitle, De Foucault à Austin (from Foucault to Austin), reflecting the book’s engagement with performative speech act theory. The American subtitle—Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault—gestures instead to new material, including most substantively a final summative chapter, “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy” (chap. 5), as well as a brief conclusion, “Rethinking Critique.” It is worth emphasizing that six years had elapsed from the publication of La Force du vrai to The Force of Truth. I would note as well that the French text appeared in the early days of Donald Trump’s first presidency in the United States. Since this time, we have witnessed a staggering relativization of truth, including post-truth, “alternative” facts regarding pandemic policy, insurrection and repeated claims of electoral fraud, judicial manipulation in the Supreme Court, and Truth Social. Globally, we have also witnessed the rise to power of right-wing populists in other nominally liberal democracies. Lorenzini’s English translation has been framed with these urgent social and political exigencies in mind. And, with these stakes as its subtext, the book advances “a new reading of Foucault’s project of a history of truth”—most saliently as a genealogy of our own “contemporary regimes of truth,” from which Lorenzini seeks to derive “an ethics and politics of truth-telling” (9).Lorenzini is a meticulous reader of Foucault, and the ease with which he navigates and marshals Foucault’s enormous corpus is humbling. He resists the widespread reductionist—or indeed, reactionary—“(mis)reading” of Foucault on the history of “truth.” This (mis)reading tends, in broad strokes, to paint Foucault as a postmodern relativist who is hostile to objective facts and whose ideas have come to inform the contemporary phenomenon of post-truth. In the opening pages, Lorenzini offers a short list of prominent political theorists and philosophers who have, variously, criticized Foucault in this vein: Nancy Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Daniel Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. These critics base their interpretations on early works in Foucault’s oeuvre, falsely claiming that Foucault more or less believed that truth is an illusion. Foucault never made such a claim, as Lorenzini makes clear: “What is an illusion, in Foucault’s view, is rather ‘the Truth’ understood in a Platonic fashion as a timeless and suprahistorical Idea” (3). As a historical—and, as I suggest below, guardedly rhetorical—corrective, The Force of Truth focuses on Foucault’s “later lectures and writings,” which “significantly developed, clarified, and in part transformed his way of conceiving of a history of truth” (3). And Lorenzini is one of the few scholars to appreciate Foucault’s “dialogue with early analytic philosophy of language, and in particular with ordinary language philosophers” (8), including Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin (see also 46–49, 63–64; Foucault 2023). He convincingly demonstrates, moreover, that Foucault’s “turn” to ethics in the 1980s is a coherent development true to his earlier interest in politics and power/knowledge, and that these are joined across his oeuvre in his abiding critical methodological commitment to archaeology and genealogy.There is plenty here to engage rhetorical scholars, even if rhetoricians are not quite guilty of the reductionist (mis)readings of Foucault that Lorenzini criticizes in these pages. Following Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970), many of us will understand “the Truth” as a rhetorical accomplishment at the intersecting axes of labor, life, and language. Moreover, rhetoricians are sensitive to the discursive conditions under which something might appear to be true and can take on a truth-function in a particular historical and rhetorical situation (or “game of truth,” as Foucault would say). After all, a history of truth and truth-telling implies far more than logical or epistemological conceptions of truth, although we might argue what this looks like or how it might be mobilized in a “defense” of Foucault’s ethico-political relevance today. But this is not to say that Lorenzini’s opening gambit should be lost on rhetorical scholars. Indeed, we should be mindful of the philosophical and political traditions that are invested in a misreading of Foucault, and why. These include some philosophers in the Anglo-American (or “analytic”) camp, as well as political theorists (or “scientists”) committed to an unreconstructed notion of liberal-humanist subjectivity, which is of course critiqued by Foucault and other poststructuralist thinkers. Rhetoricians might also be familiar with the homophobic ad hominems directed at Foucault and his work (a perennial pastime, it would seem), and more recently the (to my mind) outlandish accusations that Foucault was a closet neoliberal, or somehow even responsible for neoliberalism itself (you can easily Google this; I refuse to add citations to these authors’ indexes). Most of all, perhaps, rhetoricians will be concerned with the history of our present, and the fate of truth and truth-telling in recent years, given the troubling rise of political populism, white nationalism, violent rhetorics, neofascism, and demagoguery. The book also has clear rhetorical implications for what Foucault called “ontologies of veridiction” (2010, 309–10), even as Lorenzini remains somewhat skeptical of rhetoric and studiously avoids the term “ontology” (see Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020)—but more on this below.In his early work, Foucault had concerned himself with the subject’s relation to particular “games of truth”: “truth games that take the form of a science or refer to a scientific model,” on the one hand, and truth games that one finds “in institutions or practices of control” (1996, 432), on the other. Across the nineteenth century, for example, medicalization, psychiatrization, and criminalization represent sociodiscursive practices that were effectively coercive and “disciplinary” in their truth-functions. In Foucault’s later work, however, we note a decisive shift away from coercion and toward the practice of a subject’s self-formation, “an exercise of the self on the self, by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being” (433). Self-formation is an ascetic practice (askesis) in which the emphasis is no longer on what one does, one’s behaviors, but on who one is, which today is fashioned (most problematically) as the “truth” of one’s identity. This later work of Foucault’s has proven remarkably prescient, anticipating today’s identity politics and cancel culture, our obsession with the inner truth—presumably irrefutable—of personal feelings and experiences, the basis of what Lauren Berlant once called “feeling politics” (1999). The apparent “truth” of who one is belongs, as Foucault might say, to the “confessional sciences,” a secular form of “salvation.” And so, it might be said that ours is a moment of free speech on steroids, yet stripped to its barest form, where I am free to “speak my truth,” and you yours, passionately foreclosing in advance any serious critique of what this might mean for a politics or ethics of truth, let alone an ontology of veridiction.Lorenzini identifies in Foucault three principal regimes of truth: the scientific, the confessional, and the critical. The first two are among “the most pervasive contemporary regimes of truth” (103), whereas the latter has been neglected, Lorenzini contends, and emerges from Foucault’s analysis of ancient parrhesia. As Foucault writes, “In analyzing . . . parrhēsia, I would like also to outline the genealogy of what we could call the critical attitude in our society” (2019, 63). This “critical attitude,” intimate with parrhesiastic practice, is what Lorenzini characterizes as the “possibilizing” dimension of Foucauldian genealogy, namely, the productive, world-making capacities of critique to disrupt reigning regimes of truth. In Lorenzini’s words, to write a history of truth entails “tracing a genealogy of these regimes of truth in order to open up the conceptual and political space that allows us to ask after their effects and value” (6). And, of course, the value of any truth, its effective force, is not “unconditional”; it is historically contingent, and “can never be explained solely on the basis of its reference to or correspondence with reality” (6). Rhetorically, truth is always tied to truth-telling, to veridiction (even when this is nonverbal). It matters who “can and actually does” speak or act, “in what circumstances, and at what cost” (7). For Lorenzini, then, the critical thrust of genealogy will be the counter-conduct it “possibilizes” in and as veridical speech/acts: “Even though genealogy does not legislate the specific content of these counter-conducts, it does define their form, since each aims to criticize and destabilize a given power/knowledge apparatus, a given regime of truth” (105; his emphases). Rhetoricians will be quick to pick up on Lorenzini’s italicized distinction between “content” and “form,” and may understand by “form” something akin to what we might call rhetoricity. For Christian Lundberg, rhetoricity is defined as “the functions of discourse that operate without, and in advance of, any given context”—in other words, “a kind of negative constraint, hindering the presumption that any definition of rhetoric can capture the functions of discourse without remainder” (2013, 250). Critique is possible because regimes of truth are not closed systems of power/knowledge. It is possible to prise them open productively and put them to work politically and ethically.The political and ethical dimensions of truth-telling become clear, Lorenzini argues, when Foucault’s exploration of ancient parrhesia is theorized through Austin’s understanding of speech acts, and in particular, the perlocution. Herein lies one of the book’s significant original contributions to Foucault scholarship, rhetoric, and philosophy. The book asks, “Under what conditions is ‘telling the truth’ an effective critical activity?” (9). The short answer is: none at all, if by “truth” we mean “facts,” such as statistics. Indeed, facts may be veridical, and they may be truths that correspond with reality, but they do not necessarily carry what Lorenzini calls the “force of truth.” In rhetorical parlance, and borrowing from Austin, we might say that the truth-telling of facts is a constative utterance, rather than performative speech—a descriptive claim, rather than a normative one. And as we know only too well, saying something all too often does nothing; an “is” is a far cry from an “ought.” Taking the ongoing European migrant crisis as a brief example (see also Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020), Lorenzini points out that we can and must repeat the facts—e.g., the reported number of dead and missing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea—but he notes that this alone has done little to stem the tide of xenophobia and racism or to “disrupt” European Union policy. “Unfortunately, truth and facts alone are not enough to sustain an effective critical practice—and they are not enough because they have no force in and of themselves” (10; his emphases). A critical and generative practice requires the force of truth, Lorenzini argues, and truth’s force—the force of Foucauldian parrhesia—carries truth as one of its perlocutionary effects. It is that force by which we not only “accept certain truth claims, but . . . submit to them and give them the power to govern our conduct” (120; his emphases).While Foucault rarely engaged directly with Austin’s work (the few published instances are carefully cited, e.g., Foucault 2023), for Lorenzini the perlocution is a useful tool to understand the rhetorical force of parrhesia.1 Most readers will be familiar with Austin through performative illocutions, which are summed up by the formula “in saying x I do y.” One of Austin’s simple examples is “I bet you sixpence”: in the act of saying this phrase I’ve done (performed) what I’ve said and said what I’ve done, namely, with my illocution I’ve engaged you in a wager. But, according to Austin, perlocutions are performative in a different manner. Perlocutionary speech, true to its prefix per-, is summed up as “by saying x I do y.” Austin writes, “Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the or of the or of other and it may be done with the or of the perlocution we are in the of possible and effects. And the rhetorical on the power of by may produce effects that are not necessarily or The force of the perlocution from and it is a It is the to say something that or the and that speech and its effects. the examples of and as two of perlocutionary Austin’s with of Austin, Lorenzini that the perlocution the power to transform the disrupt power and the ethical and he characterizes the parrhesiastic as a critical perlocutionary speech act that and to be clear, we should not to a rhetorical Lorenzini, Austin and some of Foucault’s to rhetoric as the to And if we the of liberal perlocutionary effects and will refer us to the rather than to the rhetorical For rhetorical scholars, of course, speech or or necessarily in But even for a we a reading of Foucault in which is to the to to understand parrhesia we must be defined as an the of (2010, Indeed, Foucault that is no form of rhetoric specific to In parrhesia is necessarily a of These are carefully that parrhesiastic are closed they are not or or to be to particular in the rhetorical For many of this to a philosophical It a rhetoric without a discourse without Moreover, it would the of language like the can be in its would that rhetorical is concerned with the and dimensions of It is not always with truth, as is or on the and it is to and in that often and or the And I take is the kind of rhetorical and that Lorenzini seeks in the critical of counter-conduct that he A rhetorical would to advance his indeed, I would add that for Foucault philosophy is not the to is also a “game of and rhetoric, Foucault are or two of . . . two of of discourse which to the truth and which to the truth in the form of in the of (2010, Indeed, Foucault that “a discourse which claims to the truth should not be by it a history of which would us to or not it the truth” is for a genealogy of philosophical or rhetorical is an or of the discourse of truth” offers a of Foucault’s understanding of rhetoric and philosophy in relation to parrhesia. He notes that Foucault all of the perlocutionary to Foucault’s of where Foucault that does not any between the and what is rather rhetoric is as a relation of power and And by a and between the and what he that the at for it that their their And, if I have understood Lorenzini this may also a between and through the It is a relation of and of but not the may be by the not only by what is but also by of the where the is in with what is where speech and are of some form is for the of the that is to the principal Lorenzini advances in and the power relation between may be in a through the “force of truth” that their and and and As Lorenzini argues, “the between the and is not only a of parrhesiastic utterance, more a of is, a perlocutionary and an ethics of the relation to is we might say, and the is joined in a when that and that are is not always but parrhesia Lorenzini’s final chapter, “Critique and Possibilizing when he that Foucauldian genealogy normative it does not us what we should genealogy a for ethico-political us to certain of the and regimes of truth it us to of This is the most and yet the most It is where Lorenzini the three broad of his and the of a parrhesia and this are as genealogy is so, for it “possibilizes” the “critical that an ethico-political the who and and regimes in the Foucault’s genealogy, Lorenzini argues, in his a of ethico-political commitment toward the or the of the commitment to on their in the present, in a different This is the must be it is also as a of or and It is, moreover, “the of a of and that and contemporary with of different historical and to practices of but this is because Lorenzini Foucault would quite their Lorenzini normative force from its to a for (a genealogy itself to answer the by a of ethico-political commitment in its his here with the and the in Lorenzini’s does critical for a in the of the whose to words, to or at to the of As Lorenzini writes, between the and is not only a of parrhesiastic utterance, more a of . . . and to the in a speak of any however, I we must also take the of which the and the perlocutionary effects may produce in Lorenzini that this does not a rhetorical “the of parrhesia is not or but the violent of the truth” But parrhesia all of And rhetoric, at Lorenzini to Foucault’s often understanding of rhetoric as an of that on the and institutions of speech acts, rather than perlocutionary that may well and Indeed, some rhetoricians will that an rhetoric is possible e.g., if the is not to may perlocutionary of speech can always be to or to and As Lorenzini does to the and of but to do by a of power between speech and the to it is emphasis of such or Lorenzini here to the that the or moreover, by of a power that is always in a of power which is a in the first is always a between Indeed, it to that it is this power that is mobilized in and by the truth, and yet is not quite to is not quite free to do And it is the power that is in the of truth. The act of is itself a critique in this no the content of that it the of that would As Foucault in “What critique is “the of that of must not that the is also a a of In order for to be a we must be to the we must the critical we must the will to truth and in some way to it and to and speak in such a is itself an of the in and by which the This that parrhesia is, at in a of rhetoric and an the am I who to this to this of at this in time, at this of which is to the power of truth in and truths in In Foucault that parrhesia is “a way of which akin to a phrase he had in when he the critical is something in critique that is akin to Critique is “the of not quite emphasis I am of Foucault’s lectures from the 1980s the of the self as the relation to which is a relation of and or the I of of my of my words, my and my or even of my In The of the Foucault that in order to have to the truth, to it and to one must first transform through ascetic This with the practice of from to (from true discourse to what will be the of of course with The self is never or with critique is always a certain of And, if we for the of a the must true for the who to and the is, as who and who and the between the and The have to of Foucault “by the truth” In other words, the will and will a certain if he is to the and its force of be by to and to it as we are always free to the “force of truth,” and because our regime of truth is of the will to and one for the of Lorenzini’s but no less is not should I but should I Lorenzini’s book is as we from the to a mindful of our contemporary regime of truth, which its own I am also speak truth” as to be in and by this but no more and and by feelings that a that claims them and claims the of true facts no “force of truth,” we must not that the the repeat they carry the force of truth. who Lorenzini’s us to on in the many of this In as in language, a force is and only by its effects. The force, for was and in as in language, in order for to be a force we something like a with all its and with all its In other words, in order for to be force to be and for it to have and in must have As Foucault only in relation to something other than But the of any critical is for Lorenzini, “a or is it “in to a For Lorenzini, if I have understood at for although we out an on a force and are not in an the force of and of and Lorenzini his on a force that the of if only to our as something other than it

Children, as a result of age, social status, and developmental stage, depend upon caregivers and medical professionals to interpret health discourse. However, children have largely gone unexamined in research on visual health communication. Because children are a vulnerable audience, rhetoricians should more closely attend to texts addressing them. This article analyzes 147 children’s picture books about COVID-19. These texts draw on the rhetorical concept of identification to encourage readers to take up particular health behaviors. These texts illuminate three specific risks of using identification to instantiate health behaviors in children: failing to acknowledge material limitations on children’s agency, glossing over the risks of infection, and distorting scientific discourse. Ultimately, while the majority of the texts in our corpus articulate the need for a community-centered approach, only a handful acknowledge directly that children’s agency and power are limited. These texts, therefore, also highlight a larger issue beyond the coronavirus: the difficulty of relying on an individual health imperative in communicating public health—an inherently communal enterprise.