As digital technologies rapidly evolve, updating and enhancing models of digital literacy pedagogy in technical and professional communication (TPC) becomes more urgent. In this article, we use "digital life" to conceptualize the ever-changing ways of knowing and being in postinternet society. Using collaborative autoethnography, we investigate features of threshold concepts in TPC pedagogy that may support models of digital literacy that are resistant to tools-based definitions, foster student agency, and facilitate accessibility, equity, and justice.

Abstract This article proposes the value hip-hop based education can add to the first-year composition classroom. It provides a framework for using hip-hop based education to scaffold traditional writing assignments, including rhetorical analysis assignments and argumentative essays using concepts like zines, cyphers, and song analysis. Drawing from culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistic justice, and Black feminist pedagogy, this article offers the genre of hip-hop to define and solidify its usefulness in composition studies and its relevance to the Black community, asserting that centering pedagogy relevant to Black students is beneficial for all students. Based on culturally relevant pedagogy's tenets, this article highlights ways culturally relevant materials can be implemented to recognize and value students’ diverse cultures and lived experiences to increase student engagement, agency, and academic success. The concepts presented here promote antiracism and multimodal learning in the classroom contributing to pedagogical research and praxis looking to disrupt hegemonic teaching and learning.

Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.

Abstract This article proposes a revision to the traditional research essay taught in many first-year writing courses to include a methods section. By explaining their research methods, students have the opportunity to think robustly and systematically about their research questions, their research practices, and their study outcomes. Such a practice holds students and instructors accountable for a rigorous research process. As they write their methods, students learn to articulate the process of field research while they increase their knowledge of both conventions and rhetoric. Importantly, this practice pursues social justice outcomes as students reflect on their identities as researchers and consider how positionality intersects with research questions, research practices, data interpretation, and analysis.

Abstract Arts and humanities fields, specifically the field of writing, are well-positioned to help educate people about the lack of diversity in nature and the consequences (both good and bad) of visiting and documenting wilderness locations with writing technologies. Writing faculty can also find creative ways to provide outdoor opportunities to their students and to give them hands-on writing experiences. This field teaches the rhetorical and critical thinking skills necessary for students to understand who and how we write about such places. Writing also teaches students to be successful in analyzing problems and generating solutions for them, which can enable students to make significant and meaningful changes that better protect our environments. Many of the initiatives, programs, and policies that, for instance, conservation agencies and organizations create, are done so through the act of writing. This article, therefore, discusses a course, Writing in the Wilderness, that is designed to show students the impacts that writing can have on their local wilderness spaces. It provides students a range of on-location assignments and activities as well as introduces them to the people that work in and for wilderness spaces.

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 presents a critical account of one teen’s sense of audience as she enacted literacies on social media platforms and provides strategies that can inform the teaching of audience and purpose in ways responsive to teens’ digital literacies. Informed by case-study research and insights gained from interviewing, observing, and collecting digital artifacts, I discuss how Samirah X, a self-described teen actress and social justice advocate, engaged in writing practices on social media for three different main perceived audiences: cultural and racial community audience, socially conscious audience, and parental audience. Other sub-audiences from Samirah X’s case narrative are presented: audience as Black people, culture, and identity; audience as Black women and girls; and audience as Blacks who experience injustice and acts of violence. At the conclusion of this article, I provide implications for teaching English Language Arts focused on how social media work can fulfill state standards.

This essay investigates the contemporary association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and delinquent behavior. Long before its diagnostic appearance as ADD in the DSM III (1980), youth behavior associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity was rhetorically situated within an ecology of delinquency science which yoked these behaviors to criminality. Because rhetorics of criminality are profoundly racialized in the U.S., a close study of ADHD and delinquency must contend with the ways racial discourses have determined conceptualizations of juvenile behavior, particularly in educational contexts.  Through an analysis of two rhetorical case studies, I demonstrate how hyperactivity and restlessness were initially associated with delinquency by proponents of the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s. The same behaviors were later imbued with sinister and antisocial meanings by a white public responding to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary rhetoric of ADHD can be understood as a type of delinquency rhetoric from its inception.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> This article provides a critical interface analysis of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website to reveal how systemic oppressions embedded in governmental websites create injustice among minoritized communities. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> We situate this research within the existing scholarship about the multilingual user interface, usability studies, and the issues of linguistic social justice as it intersects with technical and professional communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How does the USCIS website's content cater to diverse immigrant populations in terms of usability, specifically considering Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for accessible websites? 2. From a user-experience perspective, are the USCIS website navigation tools obtrusive in presenting information? Are there issues of power and privilege through the inclusion/exclusion of certain voices? 3. What ideological and cultural assumptions does its interface design impart to diverse website users through its tools, content organization logic, and visual style? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research method:</b> Working under the critical interface analysis framework and adopting a walkthrough approach, we analyze the official website of the USCIS. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> The USCIS website prioritizes English or Spanish proficiency, potentially excluding users with other diverse language backgrounds. First-time users lack immediate access to essential features, and the site overlooks the needs of its diverse immigrant population, with limited language options, multimedia resources, and occasional discrepancies in content. Using terms like “alien” contradicts the inclusive image the US aims for. The Multilingual Resource Center faces document translation shortages, contributing to a potential digital divide. Inclusive design choices are crucial for creating a welcoming environment and addressing these concerns. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> These findings have implications for understanding the rhetorics of immigration policy, power, identity, and government perceptions.

• Hispanic women engage more in check-in assignments than men. • Hispanic enrollment (37.71 %) exceeds community college average. • Main themes: course perceptions, personal challenges, faculty-student relations. • Check-in assignments enhance engagement and faculty-student bonds for Hispanic women. • Advanced course students report more personal challenges, greater faculty reliance. While online community college students’ engagement with coursework, class retention, and motivation to participate are critical for academic success, these needs often go unmet for diverse and underrepresented populations, especially in the absence of culturally responsive and inclusive teaching practices. This study contributes to the limited research on culturally responsive pedagogy in online community college settings by exploring the implementation and impact of high-context communication practices in that setting, with a focus on improving engagement and academic outcomes for diverse student populations. Drawing on frameworks of culturally responsive teaching and high-context communication, the research examines the effectiveness of “check-in assignments” as a low-stakes, personalized intervention designed to foster stronger faculty-student relationships, enhance student belonging, and bridge cultural communication gaps in online learning environments. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes quantitative data on assignment engagement and qualitative themes from student responses. Findings indicate that high-context communication practices promote deeper engagement, especially among Hispanic and non-Hispanic females, while highlighting disparities in engagement among male students. Key themes—course perceptions, personal challenges, and faculty-student relationships—underscore the role of culturally informed interventions in addressing the needs of underrepresented groups and enhancing engagement and academic success. Future research could expand on these findings by exploring longitudinal outcomes and adaptive strategies for diverse learning environments.

This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences, writerly voices, and perspectives on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

In Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, political theorist Heather Pool offers a theory of “political mourning” in which publics respond to a highly visible death (or deaths) in ways that challenge the existing meaning of citizenship and the nation's responsibilities towards disenfranchised groups. In the introduction, Pool states, “I define political mourning as an affective communal response to a loss that threatens (or is perceived to threaten) the historical narrative, present expression, or future possibility of the political community and/or the ideals that sustain that political community” (17). While political mourning could be associated with any identity group in the United States, Pool specifically examines the role of racial identity formation. In addition to centering racial identity in the political mourning concept, Pool narrows the focus of her work to the deaths of “everyday people” rather than public figures such as politicians or martyred activists.This book contributes to political theory by building upon past scholarship on mourning and trauma studies. In the introduction, Pool argues, “It is the central claim of this book that the deaths of everyday citizens, at particular moments and in the wake of a contingent process by which these deaths are made political, can move the living to political action” (10). Pool then delineates between three forms of “mourning” in chapter one, including “private mourning,” “public mourning,” and “political mourning” (14–21). The conception of “political mourning” draws from John Dewey's publics and the “barriers to creative democracy.” These barriers—“apathy”, “indirect effects”, “the problem of presentation,” and “development of judgment” (19)—provide the framework in the analysis chapters of Political Mourning. Pool states, “Considering Dewey's focus on mobilizing citizens out of apathy, widely visible losses that prompt discussions of responsibility can be seen as moments when publics are formed. In response to visible losses, citizens and political leaders often propose specific institutional reforms” (20). Additionally, Pool extends theories regarding death and politics, including works by Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler's “mortalist humanism” concept, and Simon Stow's book, American Mourning (21–22). The author traces the political process of “how mourning becomes political by examining several instances where death served as the justification for political calls for change” (33, original emphasis). In Pool's “processual theory of political mourning,” scholars should consider five aspects of a highly publicized death, including: “context”; “visibility”; “agents”; “responsibility”; and “political change” (7–8).The analysis chapters include the following four examples of political mourning in the United States: The Triangle Fire of 1911; the murder of Emmett Till; the September 11 attacks; and the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter two examines the political mourning surrounding the Triangle Fire, which involved the deaths of 146 young women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This chapter critiques the ways in which white racial identity transformed, in part, due to the mourning process and memorials in honor of deceased workers who were mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Prior to the Triangle Fire, “white identity” was reserved almost exclusively for Anglo-Saxons (47). When workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory held a labor strike less than two years before the fire, although “non-white” workers received a lot of press coverage, their efforts to unionize failed. According to Pool, the political mourning following the fire motivated the public to support increased worker protections. Pool states, “Before the fire, the immigrant, not-quite-white striking workers were perceived by political elites as attacking American values and cherished ideals of self-sufficiency at the heart of American identity. . . . However, the power and the outpouring of public sympathy after the fire recast the now-dead workers as victims of politically enabled negligence and racialized exclusion” (49). Additionally, she claims that the dead workers’ “youth, femaleness, and ambiguous racial status” transformed them into sympathetic figures in the public's imagination (49). Although factory fires were common during this period, Pool argues that the earlier news coverage of the Triangle Factory workers’ strike created a “visibility” that made the public “predisposed to care about the workers in this factory” after the fire (56–57, original emphasis). Pool claims that the widespread mourning in New York City following the Triangle Fire, including a “March of Mourning” with nearly 400,000 marchers and onlookers, mobilized the public to care for “non-white” laborers (59) and adjusted the public's understanding of non-Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” Pool claims, “Triangle was a moment when intra-white racial differences were muted, and one of many moments in the long process of reconceptualizing the threat to Americanness as originating not from hordes of immigrants but from blackness” (66). The public began to view the mostly Italian and Jewish victims of the Triangle Fire in New York as “innocent victims,” and their victimhood and status as working-class immigrants “laid the groundwork for a shift from hostile race relations toward friendly ethnic rivalries that helped pave the way to full citizenship for white workers within a racialized democracy” (67).Chapter three explores the political mourning surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. Pool provides a detailed overview of the scene of the murder in Mississippi, the funeral procession in Chicago, and the deep South location for the trial of Till's killers. In this chapter, Pool discusses the primary agent of this political mourning, Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Bradley (more commonly known as Mamie Till-Mobley). Pool argues that Till-Bradley's claim “I know the whole United States is mourning with me” was, in Pool's words, “a powerful rhetorical construction,” that extended a mother's private mourning of her son to a collective mourning for Americans of all races (80–81). Additionally, the author connects the death of Emmett Till and the subsequent failure of the Mississippi court to convict his two murders to sociopolitical contexts, including the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Pool claims that the unjust verdict of “not guilty” for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who later confessed to Till's murder) helped propel political change by getting Northern liberal whites to recognize the extreme harms of white supremacy. She states, “A politics of mourning over Till's death gave white American liberals—who had apparently come to accept the Jim Crow status quo—a clear instance to reflect on the calls of the nascent civil rights movement for racial justice and to see how the reality of Jim Crow violated aspirations to actual American democracy” (72–73). Similar to the author's finding in the chapter on the Triangle Fire, some white Americans became motivated to see a racialized community differently once a tragic death received widespread media coverage. This chapter of Political Mourning provides one of the most insightful applications of the political mourning concept that rhetorical critics could use with other civil rights case studies. As Pool states, “Without understanding the politics of mourning, it is difficult to make sense of why some deaths lead to political change while others do not” (90).In chapter four, Pool argues that the United States adopted a skewed version of political mourning following the September 11 terrorist attacks, what she terms “sovereign mourning.” In contrast to the other cases, the author claims that, following 9/11, the American government did not take any responsibility for the events that could have motivated the terrorists, including US military interventions and political intrusions in the Middle East. Furthermore, the news coverage of 9/11 focused on images of planes flying into the Twin Towers and burning images of the Pentagon rather than bodies of the deceased. In the analysis chapters on the Triangle Fire, Emmett Till, and Black Lives Matter, there are detailed descriptions of how images of the dead served pivotal roles in rallying the public toward political change. And finally, the majority of the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were white Americans, primarily upper-class white men in the financial industry. These victims were honored along with the New York City firefighters and police officers who responded to the attack on the Twin Towers. Meanwhile, the racialized groups of Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Arabs were constructed as an “Arab Muslim enemy” that could fill the country's need for an external target following the end of the Cold War (97–99). Pool, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers first-hand, provided a compelling description of the context preceding 9/11. This chapter departs in some ways from Pool's theorization of political mourning. It may have been beneficial for readers to learn more about how the patriotism following 9/11 helped draw white racial groups together, compared to other racial groups.Finally, chapter five centers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the impact of Trayvon Martin's and Mike Brown's deaths. Pool states that while many social media users adopted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to push for political change regarding police brutality, the alternative #AllLivesMatter became a backlash against centering blackness. As the author argues, “If, as the data seem to indicate, those using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter are generally white and pro-law-enforcement, #AllLivesMatter seeks to equalize the risk of being a police officer with being a black citizen. . . . It also disregards the long history of law enforcement's purpose: to protect both property and whiteness” (139). It is important to note that both Martin and Brown were killed by individuals who were white-appearing and serving in roles to protect the state. Since Political Mourning was published in 2021 and completed in the spring of 2020, there are only brief mentions of George Floyd's death by strangulation. However, in the case of George Zimmerman (who killed Martin) and Officer Darren Wilson (who shot Brown during a traffic stop), neither of the killers were convicted of a crime. Chapter five instructively synthesizes past studies on the forms of dialogue that social media users engaged in with either hashtag. As the BLM movement is ongoing, Heather Pool's connection of the political mourning concept to this activism could help scholars studying other deaths that have been commemorated by BLM. Pool claims, “The public whose interests the state reflects and whose interactions become predictably ‘canalized’ is a white public, who has rejected both logical and emotive calls to recognize the humanity of blacks and other people of color in the United States. And yet blacks (and other excluded groups) regularly challenge the undemocratic institutional arrangements that define our white democracy” (143, original emphasis).Pool concludes by considering the outcomes of political mourning, whether it will “serve as a powerful resource to demand Deweyan democracy” or “lead the polity down dark roads of xenophobia and the denial of our own role in shaping the world” (153). These two possibilities are reflected in the four case studies. While “political mourning” could help scholars studying public memory, affect, rhetorical history, media theory, and publicity surrounding deaths and tragedies, the concept may be too broad, or stretched to its limits, aligning the aftermath of murders with the aftermath of terrorism and deadly fires.

According to professional correspondence from Harvard, the spring 2024 anti-war and Palestine solidarity protests on campus were “disruptive.”1 UCLA similarly claimed that their students’ encampment was “a focal point for serious violence.”2 Despite these assertions, independent non-profit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project analyzed 533 US campus demonstrations from that spring and found that 97 percent were uneventful.3 Journalist Steven W. Thrasher spent time at four camps and describes these as “beautiful” encounters.4 CNN examined “the role professors have played in the demonstrations,” a facet of the protests that “received comparatively little attention.”5 At my own institution's protest—Virginia Commonwealth University—I watched students set up food and medical stations, deliberate, and intermittently chant at a volume slightly higher than the towering, middle-aged white man who, almost every week, projects a monologue about hell outside the library.When it comes to student-driven political activity on college campuses, charged and widespread commentary often clashes with far more banal and contradictory perspectives. One of John McWhorter's New York Times op-eds, for instance, calls the 2024 student protests “a form of abuse.”6 Online comments on this piece display a range of assumptions about US higher education: someone writes that people with humanities and social science degrees graduate “with zero knowledge.” Another person maintains that the protests “are purely performative.” What I hear in these comments and in the broader narrativizing around college students are resonances of truisms that Bradford Vivian's vital book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education would categorize as, indeed, misinformation7. To Vivian, such truisms coalesce into an farfetched worldview where college students “crave confirmation” to the extent that they “frequently shut down campus events and even assume power over entire universities,” rendering an alternative reality where college is a breeding ground for extremism.8 As Vivian argues, this implausible perspective grows out of “fixations on the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces,”9 the circulation of which produces reactionary doctrines like “viewpoint diversity.” These doctrines perform propagandistic moves such as proliferating data to mimic scientific or theological argumentation and appealing to feelings like cynicism as expertise. Vivian emphasizes that casting doubt on the legitimacy of universities “is common in periods of rising authoritarian sentiment.”10 A year after the publication of Campus Misinformation, Donald J. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate—the same man who in 2021 delivered a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” for the National Conservatism Conference.11Kendall Gerdes's compelling Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism is a smart analysis of how such misinformation forms. Gerdes's book unpacks public critiques of (over)sensitivity to show how those critiques fuel misinformation about college students and higher ed more generally. Gerdes argues that critiques of sensitivity mark an “ideological discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action” (4). Even though misinformation does not persuade on a purely intellectual level, language is still reduced to mere correspondence. If words are just words, then college students are too sensitive about what texts they're asked to read, what visitors are paid to speak on campus, how violations are managed, and so on. But if words are more than just words—if language is perlocutionary—then language initiates a sensitivity that resonates in far more collective ways than previously realized. As Gerdes articulates, “the sensitivity of rhetorical subjects is a generalized condition of possibility for rhetorical affection” (51). Universities and colleges pose a threat because they reveal how vulnerable or exposed we really are, together, within language.Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity is revelatory: with each site of inquiry—trigger warnings, sexual misconduct policy, Black student activism, and campus carry policies in Texas—rhetoricity itself is resignified. The book articulates that it is one thing to think of sensitivity as a weakness—it is an entirely different thing to think of sensitivity as “an irremissible exposedness.” “Before symbolic persuasion,” Gerdes writes, “before thinking and knowing, even before the experience of being, a rhetorical sensitivity obtains, opening us to existence as rhetorical subjects” (91). This conception transforms many of rhetoric's givens. If sensitivity is a mutual condition “of one's constitution in language” (38), then “vulnerability and exposedness” are not “simply matters of individual agentive choice” (51). Rather, vulnerability is a radical openness to being addressed. At all times, to be rhetorical existents is to sit in the potential for language to affect.Readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs will be interested in how Gerdes demonstrates that public critiques of sensitivity enlist the topos of academic freedom, often misunderstood as adjacent to free speech. Academic freedom is supposed “to provide insulation for those with less rhetorical power,” since the production of knowledge should be free from hegemonic pressures (9). Still, academic freedom is a baggy topos. In 2025, I think we are more aware than ever that appeals to academic freedom do not always protect against “harassment campaigns” and remain contingent on the governor's board of visitors (9). Infrastructurally, academic freedom is often a tool or gauge of rhetorical power. As Gerdes points out, arguments about curricular changes and practices even put academic freedom in opposition to students. When “trigger warnings” were constructed as a talking point—cherry-picked from isolated contexts—academic freedom was simultaneously turned into an exigence. Gerdes refers to a 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education article that used trigger warnings as evidence of an existential threat to the university (25). Many such opinion pieces not only amplify suspicion of students but also “pit the rights of instructors against the rights of students” (26). I think most rhetoricians would be wary of that dynamic. All told, Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity provides a nuanced reading of trigger warnings as advocacy for accessibility given that trauma modulates bodily response.Gerdes's third chapter argues that college campuses do not feel safe for historically disenfranchised students. Most campuses, Gerdes argues, are defined by what Louis M. Maraj references as “white institutional defensiveness, policies, and practices that posture tentatively (often in racially colorblind ways) so as to avoid causing racial stress for white individuals.”12 Black student activism that demands “safe spaces,” such as the productive 2015 occupation of the Carnahan Quad on the University of Missouri's campus, is always resistant to Diane Lynn Gusa's conception of “white institutional presence,” which is another example where Gerdes shows how rhetorical sensitivity can be a transformative tactic for invention (63).Sensitive Rhetorics not only takes student activism seriously as institutional critique, but it also implies that college students are uniquely attuned to our shared openness. The issues that college students raise make explicit the “power of language to injure, wound, or harm” (4), implying that the practice of learning sensitizes you, making the address of others more salient and available while you yourself grow more responsive. In this way, Gerdes communicates what many lifelong learners feel: the simultaneous heaviness of beginning to notice differently—notice more—while beginning to feel slightly more responsible. College students are not fragile or self-absorbed. In their quest for trigger warnings and safe spaces, students are practicing ethical sociality. Activism mobilized by sensitivity is not whimsy nor idiosyncrasy—it's an active negotiation with what it feels like to become more responsible for yourself with others.In the book's composition, it is inspiring to witness Gerdes pulling from sensitivity as a resource. If vulnerability is distributed, as Sensitive Rhetorics argues, then even experts on sensitivity are themselves drained, prickled, and agitated, with or without personal permission. While Gerdes shows remarkable restraint referencing egregious arguments as well as questionable decisions to platform speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos outside of “peer review and shared governance” (31), every so often Gerdes delivers a biting critique. In the book's rundown of how students pursuing the Title IX process to address abuses are demeaned, Gerdes writes: “It's worth noting when scholars complain about students acting like consumers but appeal to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a justification for academic freedom, as if the metaphor of an intellectual marketplace should only extend to those it figures as merchants, as if the responsibility for rhetorical engagement amounts to something like ‘buyer beware”’ (49). In response to misinformation about trigger warnings, Gerdes sneaks in some fair snark: “This claim implies that the potential for trauma is so regularly inflicted on students that to advise them about it in advance would halt the day-to-day activities of teaching” (35).This book sensitized me. The first chapter on trigger warnings is a tour-de-force and the arrangement of the book is incredibly smart. I'm now wondering what “ambient norms” my pedagogical and professional choices perpetuate (29). I'm struck by what it means to be unendingly affected by others. I'm spinning stories of rhetoric where sensitivity is “a rhetorical term of art” (3). I'm listening for fallacies of false dilemmas or those moments when higher ed values serve misinformation. My antenna is up, I'm reminded of precious commitments, and it's all due to the “uncloseable openness” of Sensitive Rhetorics (4).

In The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, Jenna N. Hanchey delves into the intricate and often contradictory world of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), focusing on their operations in Tanzania. Blending decolonial and psychoanalytic theory, Hanchey explores the political and social forces that govern the operations of NGOs in Africa. Hanchey's central theoretical contributions are, first, the concept of “liquid agency,” which refers to the fluid ability of individuals to act in varying contexts (17). Such an ability project serves as an interconnection between personal agency, external influences, and environmental circumstances that could cause human agency to shift. Second, the concept of “liquid organizing” refers to the flexible and adaptive approach NGOs take to prioritize relationships with Indigenous people beyond rigid engagement structures (21). This focuses on the collaboration and spontaneity of Western donors to respond to the needs of stakeholders. Hanchey, in weaving the threads of these theoretical ideologies and proving their practicalities, draws on rhetorical fieldwork, ethnography, and rhetorical criticism to examine how Tanzanian NGO workers and communities navigate and resist colonial systems, frequently creating their own “fluid” response to the inflexibility they encounter.The book is made up of two sections. In Part I, comprising the first three chapters, Hanchey explores the theoretical foundations of Western subjectivities, mainly how leaders and volunteers participate in “haunted reflexivity,” as defined by Hanchey (31, 56). This idea draws attention to the struggle between the volunteers’ attempts to distance themselves from neocolonialism and their awareness of their involvement. These silent conflicts demand the volunteers’ acknowledgment of “hauntings” or lingering issues, especially those that unsettle the sense of self or familiar systems of control. Part II, also divided into three chapters, turns to the NGO itself, discussing the conflict between Western organizational theories and the more flexible, relational organizing styles of the Tanzanian people. The chapters examine leadership and land ownership tensions and conclude that when the NGO “falls apart,” the collapse creates new opportunities. The book's primary metaphor—the “center cannot hold”—indicates how neocolonial and decolonial ideas are incommensurate. However, the transformational and adaptive potential that arises from the NGOs’ disintegration, what Hanchey calls “fluidity,” becomes the unifying theme of the conversations across the book.Hanchey's critical examination of how a Tanzanian community was made to embrace modernization principles prompts NGOs to recognize and be mindful of presenting programs that reflect a Westernized gaze. She argues that Western donors provide incentives that eventually lead aid workers to adhere to ideas of altruism and use irony or detachment to avoid responsibility and a confrontation with structural problems. Hanchey states that international aid “offers the opportunity to resecure masculinity through neocolonial relationship” (34). Thus, the core of the first chapter exposes readers to how international aid not only assists but also functions as a means of maintaining power, reinforcing gender hierarchies, and perpetuating unequal relationships between the Global North and South. The rhetoric of help also affirms the provider's sense of masculinity, tied to dominance and control. According to Hanchey, Western subjects—men in particular—reproduce hierarchies under the impression of beneficence. Through the second chapter, Hanchey calls readers to think of how the “subjectivity of Western volunteers is constructed through foreclosure of the neocolonial self” (60) and “how white supremacist and neocolonial attitudes underlie the fantasy of white saviorism counterintuitively providing grounds for volunteers to avoid recognizing themselves as partakers of fantasy” (73). Thus, Hanchey examines how white volunteers perpetuate colonial power dynamics while avoiding self-awareness or accountability. To avoid culpability, these volunteers use denial, which is discussed in subsequent chapters as a means of maintaining subjective coherence.Chapter three concentrates on the haunted reflexivity that leads to the internal change of Western subjects, and focuses on how Tanzanian NGO staff members implement flexible organizing techniques within the inflexible frameworks. Hanchey poses critical questions that challenge “what being reflexive means” (89). By doing this, she compares the effect of colonialism on both the colonized and colonizer: “Haunted reflexivity requires choosing not to turn away, choosing subjective dismemberment over a reprisal of fantasy, choosing to give up the fiction of control” (101). This means that there is a necessary “haunted reflexivity” to be faced due to the abhorrent legacy of colonialism for both the colonized and the colonizer. Hanchey argues that the erasure and pain imposed on their identities must be faced by the colonized, and they must resist the need to romanticize their victimization or pre-colonial pasts. Conversely, the colonizer has to give up moral and political superiority and acknowledge their past and present involvement in oppressive regimes. To do this, Hanchey states that both must relinquish illusions of control or innocence, embrace the discomfort of unresolved histories, and take on the challenge of reevaluating authority, identity, and responsibility.The Center Cannot Hold makes evident that Tanzanian employees are already managing significant inconsistencies through liquid organization, while Western volunteers are “haunted” by their conflicts. The fractures in organizational structures are similar to the breakdown of cohesive Westernization in Tanzania. Hanchey underscores the necessity of these fractures for decolonial transformation in chapters three and four, whether in organizational structures or subjectivity. She alludes to the lack of understanding among the Western organization and Tanzanians, noting that, “without understanding, donors would continually be unable to apprehend how their ideas for the project and control of funds lead to atrophied” relations and disaster (139). Thus, the cracks created by misunderstanding cause foreign organizations to realize the weaknesses of their top-down approach to communication with Indigenous people.Hanchey narrates how the NGO's collapse brings colonialism's fluidity to a logical end. Here, she uses the term “fluidity of colonialism” to describe how the effects of colonialism endure and evolve into other forms, such as neocolonialism, in which outside forces—typically Western governments or organizations—continue to impact former colonies. It might be noteworthy, however, that in grasping liquid agency, Africans have to realize that colonialism's “epistemic injustice is much deeper” than what academics or methods of inquiry have proven (143–5). On this note, Hanchey invites readers to reflect on how colonization has not only disoriented African political, economic, and social structures but also affected Indigenous ways of knowing, appreciating Indigenous practices, and epistemic autonomy. The reflexivity of the NGO presented in chapters four and five serves as a means of negotiating colonial structures that propel the NGO's demise in chapter six. To Hanchey, for “marginalized subjects,” “solidity cannot be trusted” (169). Instead, “organizational ruination figures the possibility for decolonial transformation” (177). In this possibility lies the impetus to create entirely new forms of organization independent of colonial and imperial power dynamics. Hanchey's approach asks readers to view organizational collapse as an opportunity rather than a failure. The collapse of NGOs allows local Tanzanian workers to redefine their positions, reject extra-organizational control, and set a new course in line with their needs, priorities, and values.The Center Cannot Hold's last section explores how “decolonial dreamwork” becomes possible when Western subjectivities and organizational structures finally collapse. As part of this dreamwork, Hanchey argues that “Youth Leaders Tanzania is the product of decolonial dreamwork, and it desires a future where the spark of decolonial dreamwork lights innumerable fires—fires that catch, spread, and change the face of the future” (193). In this, Hanchey highlights the potential of Youth Leaders Tanzania as part of a larger movement towards decolonization, one that envisions a radically different, more inclusive, and more just world. She urges readers to envision and construct previously unthinkable futures due to colonial structures. Thus, Tanzanians need to imagine and actively create alternative realities and systems of existence that colonialism made impossible or suppressed. This is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refers to as “decolonizing the mind,” which emphasizes the necessity of dismantling colonial ideologies (52).1These ideologies include gender binaries, racial hierarchies, and patriarchal governance structures that limit how people imagine their lives, relationships, and identities. Ultimately, Hanchey calls for non-Western societies to uphold their Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices to reshape social norms.Regarding the power tension between Western actors and Tanzanian peoples in particular, The Center Cannot Hold offers an extensive and original perspective on the operational difficulties faced by NGOs in postcolonial contexts. Hanchey's work is stimulating, provocative, and timely, as it challenges the underlying assumptions of the role of NGOs in post-colonial societies. It critically explores the dynamics and weak connections between non-governmental organizations and Indigenous societies. Hanchey contributes to growing scholarship on decolonization and empowerment within various sectors, including development and humanitarian aid, especially in Africa. She draws attention to the fact that, although not all NGOs contribute meaningfully to postcolonial societies, they must undergo a decolonial transformation. This involves moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach and fostering genuine partnerships that elevate Indigenous voices, cultures, and knowledge systems.Readers unfamiliar with the decolonial and psychoanalytic theories used by Hanchey may appreciate the book's theoretical richness, which is easy to understand, especially considering how Hanchey infused these frameworks in her analysis to critique the operation of Western NGOs in Tanzania. Hanchey navigates complex territory as a scholar doing valuable work in an understudied African country. Her reflexivity is an advantage as it enables her to expose the hypocrisy of Western benevolence. This self-reflection allows her to critically engage the power dynamics that she encounters in the operations of the NGOs. While she spotlights local and Indigenous perspectives, Hanchey's positionality enables her to critique the Westernized exploitation of African development narratives without obscuring African people's ingenuity and ability to build and sustain the continent. In this way, Hanchey opens a space for vital conversation about the potential for decolonial transformation within the development sector, encouraging readers to reimagine the possibilities of a future untethered from colonial systems of power. The book encourages practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to reconsider traditional paradigms and explore innovative models prioritizing Indigenous agency, sustainable partnerships, and community-driven outcomes.

Academic integrity continues to concern educators worldwide. Furthermore, general guidelines for ensuring academic integrity do not seem to encompass all the angles that are required to be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to multicultural students’ decision to adhere to the norms and values of academic integrity.  This literature review focuses on how academic values can be unified through academic integrity, and specifically explores factors and perspectives of utilising academic integrity to unify academic values when teaching academic writing. The dimensions of academic values explored in this paper are: a) beliefs and attitudes of multicultural undergraduate students and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), b) the value of academic performance in academic writing classes, c) exploring the development of multicultural students’ authorial voice while maintaining academic integrity, and d) using technology to encourage academic integrity in academic writing classes. Over 56 identified sources were chosen carefully to ensure unbiased approaches to the issues of academic integrity and development of academic writing skills. The authors explored the issues from a variety of perspectives. The gap noticed in the review of literature is the disconnection between academic values and academic integrity. The authors make recommendations for future research.

Addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic writing is vital in higher education, especially when considering the lived experiences and education of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds. This paper acknowledges the challenges faced by students unfamiliar with Western academic integrity standards, emphasising the disparities experienced by socioeconomically disadvantaged, racialised, and international students. The paper describes an innovative learner-agentic empowerment approach at a Canadian university designed to enable students from diverse backgrounds to gain the academic, cultural, disciplinary and linguistic capital required to practise academic integrity. Through a mixed-method analysis of 182 undergraduates in a writing support program, we found that students who responded to a reflective prompt on academic integrity at the start of the program wrote substantially more (mean 7050 words) than those who did not respond to the prompt (mean 1692 words) during the month-long program. Qualitative analyses revealed students' unfamiliarity with cultural differences, academic integrity practices, linguistic challenges, and penalty severity. This model suggests the importance of a proactive, learner-agentic approach to facilitate education about academic integrity and to address equity and inclusivity. The study underscores the importance of systemic pedagogical changes, furthering the dialogue on equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.

This low-stakes assignment invites students in an online corequisite first-year writing course to explore the archives of a local historic African American newspaper as an alternative to more conventional research-based writing tasks. This course is taught at a large public community college with a predominantly white student population in Louisville, Kentucky. For this activity, students first are introduced to the concept of archives through a reading and a video. Next, they are invited to freely explore the digitized newspaper archive, choose one article that captures their interest to read in full and sharing a short summary of it along with a reflection on their experience of navigating the digital archive on a discussion board. Finally, each student is asked to respond to at least two classmates, looking for harmonies and tensions between their and their classmates’ summarized articles and experiences in the archive. The local focus of this assignment encourages students to see research as personal and quite literally close to home, while the focus on reflection and response encourages students to work collaboratively to overcome challenges when navigating difficult digital sources. In an online writing classroom, which can often be an isolating and unfamiliar space, particularly for the historically underserved populations most likely to be in a developmental writing course, this assignment encourages students to embrace their roles as researchers in community with other researchers.

Please note that some discussions of domestic, sexual, and racial violence are included in this article. This article explores how teachers and students in a teacher training program constructed precarious moments by engaging with sexual assault literature and pedagogy that centers rape culture and sexual trauma. In this qualitative feminist study, 23 participants took up readings of a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with adolescent students in the Canadian K-12 public school system. A focal aim of this project is to think ahead to how teachers in training might cultivate radical communities prepared to address the pervasiveness of sexual assault and the insidiousness of rape culture in the secondary English classroom. As such, the ways in which teacher candidates’ experiences of and witnessing precarious personal safety, as well as how precarious moments impacted their attitudes toward considering this pedagogy in particular, are analyzed.

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.

Deflective Whiteness weaves together an anti-essentialist analytic across mediated rhetorics; its transmedia methodology is a novel and notable approach to thinking through the intertextual nature of racial formation in the era of “new racism” by studying the ideological functions of decontextualization, the superficial representation of Black and Latinx identity politics used to secure White dominance.

Although the field of illustration is a major topic in technical and professional communication (TPC), social justice regarding medical illustrations is yet to be investigated. Drawing from an analysis of TPC journals, program websites, textbooks, and syllabi, this study explores how TPC could advance a social justice view on medical illustration, especially in the textbooks that we use in teaching medical and science writing courses. Not only did we find that very few medical and science writing textbooks included illustrations, but a significant number of illustrations were white. We suggest intentionality in the choice of pedagogical materials, overt discussion of social justice in the curriculum, and critical borrowing of pedagogical materials.

A good command of academic vocabulary is important for academic success in higher education. However, research has primarily focused on the receptive academic vocabulary knowledge of L2 learners while devoting relatively limited attention to their productive use of such vocabulary and its impact on writing quality. To address this gap, we analysed the problem-solution essays written by 168 first-year undergraduates in Hong Kong, focusing on the relationship between their use of academic words in the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) and the overall quality of their writing. We also explored the relationship between the size of students’ receptive academic vocabulary and the frequency of its use in writing. Findings revealed that essays with high scores contained a greater density and diversity of academic vocabulary than low-scored essays, with greater frequency of words in the 1–500 and 501–1000 tiers of the AVL significantly predicting better writing quality. The essays also showed a significant relationship between the participants’ receptive academic vocabulary size and the diversity of academic words used in writing. However, no significant relationship was observed between receptive academic vocabulary size and the density of academic words used. We highlight the implications of these findings for EAP teaching and research. • Problem-solution essays written by undergraduates in Hong Kong were analysed. • Density and diversity of academic vocabulary (AV) predict L2 writing quality. • Learners’ receptive AV size significantly relates to AV diversity in their writing. • Only words from two tiers of the AVL significantly predicted writing scores. • A holistic and tiered approach to assessing AV use is important.

At a time in history when we are faced with an authoritarian, misogynist, racist, imperial regime that has actively dismantled higher education in the USA, what does it mean to stand as an academic witness against the consolidation of white supremacy, of imperial regimes, of the normalization of gender, race, caste and class violence, of religious fundamentalisms and climate disasters, economic dispossession and the carceral state within and beyond the walls of the academy?In this special issue devoted to Transnational Feminist Rhetorical Studies, contributors mobilize critical race theory and transnational feminism to bear witness to the deeply violent, neoliberal, eurocentric narratives of the US academy that objectify, erase, and colonize minoritized international communities from the Global South.Using feminist autoethnography and counter-storytelling, these courageous authors develop complex, theoretically provocative analyses of a variety of rhetorical landscapes in the academy mapping the academic journey of a queer South Asian educator (Saurabh Anand); speculative linking and corporeal rhetorics--the body as the site, producer and consumer of labor in transnational feminist rhetorics (Florianne Jimenez); transnational counterstories and autoethnographies of Bangladeshi women (Abantika Dhar and Ridita Mizan); challenging female fragility and objectification of hegemonic narratives of refugees using counter-storytelling by Syrian Muslim women refugees to develop genealogies of agency and resistance (Nabila Hijazi); and finally, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik and Bernadita Yunis Varas' compelling autoethnographic, theoretically and historically grounded analysis of Palestinian feminist survivance rhetorics bearing witness to the profound impact of the occupation, colonization and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.In speaking back to racist, colonial, objectified hegemonic knowledges normalized by the US academy these young scholars illustrate the profound significance of bearing witness to injustice, just as James Baldwin and many others stood witness to racism and white supremacy.

Abstract If writing studies today is engaged in a project to remake composition pedagogy apart from modern language ideologies, then medieval writing reminds us that such ideologies were not always dominant. This essay asks how medieval texts, written before monolingualism became normative, might help student writers to imagine possibilities for composing beyond monolingualism. What happens when students are invited to read Dante Alighieri's defense of his Italian vernacular in book 1 of the Convivio alongside contemporary defenses of linguistic diversity more commonly taught in the first-year writing classroom? As this experiment suggests, assigning medieval texts in composition courses offers at least two advantages to student writers in support of linguistic justice and critical language awareness learning goals. For one, contradicting a modern view of translingualism as deviation from a monolingual norm, students learn that writers have had to assume language difference, rather than homogeneity, as a condition of composition for most of history. Second, the juxtaposition of medieval and contemporary, far from flattening historical difference, prompts students to think even more specifically and critically about the conditions for and consequences of translingual practices in particular times and places.

Megan Behrend is a lecturer at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where she teaches writing and literature in the Sweetland Center for Writing and the Department of English Language and Literature. Her writing on the multilingual literary culture of medieval England has appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Her scholarship and teaching thematize linguistic politics and diversity, translation, and adaptation across historical locations.Thomas Blake is associate professor of English and director of gender studies at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he teaches courses on medieval literature, gender studies, and fantasy. He is currently a principal investigator on the college's Pathways to a Just Society Mellon grant. He coteaches faculty learning groups on issues like gender identity and sexuality, and on strategies for teaching controversial topics and systemic thinking.Gina Brandolino is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She teaches and writes about medieval and early English literature, working class literature, comics, and horror.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her teaching and scholarship engage with medieval literature, disability studies, comics studies, and the history of the English language.Natalie Grinnell is Reeves Family Professor in the Humanities at Wofford College. Her areas of research include Middle English and Old French romance. Dr. Grinnell is currently president of the Southeastern Medieval Association, a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages, and a member of the editorial board of the New Queer Medievalisms series by Medieval Institute Publications.Sonja Mayrhofer is an associate professor of instruction at the University of Iowa, where she has taught English, rhetoric, and business communication.Laura Morreale is a medievalist and independent scholar who lives in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian historiography, medieval French-language writing outside of France, and digital medieval studies. She is the cofounder and coeditor of Middle Ages for Educators, based at Princeton University.Courtney E. Rydel received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. She is now an associate professor of English at Washington College, a small liberal arts college in Chestertown, Maryland, where she has the delight of learning alongside her students every day.Rachel Linn Shields is a PhD candidate in English literature at Saint Louis University. Her dissertation project explores transhistorical medieval eco-poetics through juxtapositions of Middle English poetry and modern fiction. She is also working on a book-length collection of translations of medieval poems and has published sections of this project, including “False Fiends: Middle English Lyric Poems in Translation” (Subtropics) and “John's Knot” (Poetry).Kisha G. Tracy is professor of English studies and chair of the General Education Program at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. She specializes in teaching early British and world literatures and in researching medieval disability, especially mental health. Tracy's recent publications are Why Study the Middle Ages? (2022) and two open access textbooks for the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens project.

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.

A digital text adventure, a topographical survey, a chorus of violence: perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor] is a creative-critical parser game that enacts Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled repairing composition, extending Trammell's (2023) "repairing play": a Black phenomenology of play that begins with the idea that torture is play for people of color who share collective histories and ongoing experiences of racial and ethnic violence. Mapped using kolam geometry, perimortem is a parser game designed to simulate the pleasurable and painful affects of composition and challenge the Euro-Western moral and aesthetic aversion to tortured embodiment in scholarly writing by explicitly, interactively illustrating the presence of torture-and/as-play in academia.

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.

Writing center scholars have long been interested in the configuration of administrative leadership, often focusing on the roles and designations of writing center administrators (WCAs), whether faculty or staff. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining the affordances—capabilities and limitations—of a mixed-designation administrative team composed of both faculty and staff. Using our writing center as a case study, we highlight the benefits and limitations of a leadership team composed of both faculty and staff. We outline our center’s transition to a mixed-designation leadership model and use affordance theory to delineate the potentials and constraints of such teams, exploring how this configuration impacts functionality, effectiveness, and reach. Capabilities of this model include institutional visibility and legitimacy, access to information and resources, institutional reach, tutor education and training, and mentorship. Limitations include time constraints and a split focus, communication challenges, role ambiguity, and potential reinforcement of hierarchical structures. We conclude with practical recommendations for WCAs seeking to enhance their team structure or add faculty or staff administrative roles. By exploring the unique potentials and limitations of mixed-designation teams, we aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about equity, inclusion, and effective leadership structures in writing center administration.

In the last decade, writing center studies has shifted to proposing more radical approaches to tutoring praxes in the hopes of more aggressively challenging the normativity and institutional hegemony of Standard American English (SAE). While well-intentioned and ostensibly conceptualized as “student-centered,” these approaches often fail to acknowledge how radical approaches to writing center (WC) praxes often contend with students’ reliance on directive and assimilationist tutoring, a dependence fostered by the pervasive, institutional hegemony of SAE. As such, drawing on personal experience and contemporary writing center theory, I argue that we should look back to scholarship from beyond the last 5-10 years to guide us as we move forward in the fight to challenge the linguistic hegemony of SAE and institutional linguistic oppression. To that end, this article also offers some suggestions for how we might proceed in a more nuanced pursuit of some of the field’s loftier social justice aims, based on concepts offered by authors like Esters, Geller et al., Diab et al., and others.

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.

Trauma is ubiquitous, including in post-secondary settings, meaning that trauma-affected individuals are present in every classroom or service setting. While research has investigated the engagement of post-secondary instructors with student trauma disclosures, this work has not extended to cover the unique role of post-secondary writing center staff. Writing tutors may encounter trauma narratives through written assignments or verbal disclosures and often labour under a degree of precarity and lack control over curricular and assignment design, giving them little preparation before encountering emotionally challenging material. As a “helping profession,” writing tutors may be at risk of secondary trauma, re-traumatization based on personal trauma histories, or unsustainable levels of emotional labour. Employing a critical disability lens and an equity-centered trauma-informed framework, this project engaged eight university-based writing center staff in Ontario, Canada in semi-structured interviews to explore how they perceive and narrate their engagement with student trauma and how this may relate to trauma-informed pedagogical practices. Based on a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, several themes are explored, including the relationship between writing center structure/labour conditions and trauma-informed practices, types of emotionally challenging interactions, strategies tutors employ to engage with students during trauma-adjacent sessions, and gaps in ability to provide trauma-informed service. These themes provide insight into tutors’ experience with student trauma and imply recommendations to improve staff and student well-being through engaging with trauma-informed practices in the writing center.

Research has increasingly addressed first-generation (FG) students both in and outside the center (Baelemian & Feng, 2013; Bond, 2019; Denny et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2012), but there remains a need to address this unique student population from the perspective of critical theory. In a replication study of Bond’s 2019 “‘I Need Help on Many Things, Please’: A Case Study Analysis of First-Generation College Students’ Use of the Writing Center,” we examined the needs and perceptions of self-reported FG students in a writing center at a large, regional, public R2 university in the Midwest. We gathered preexisting digital data from WCOnline, consultants’ postsession notes, and our office of institutional research. Using thematic analysis, we coded, categorized, and compared FG college student and non-first- generation student data to better understand their unique needs. Thereafter, we corroborated our qualitative findings using quantitative analyses, specifically the Pearson chi-square test. Situated within the framework of cultural community wealth, our findings illustrate that FG students bring their own forms of cultural capital to the academy, challenging prior deficit-oriented narratives (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Yosso, 2005). Our study can be used to better address the academic needs of FG college students and to extend replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) writing center research (Driscoll & Wynn Perdue, 2012; Haswell, 2005) into conversations of justice, equity, and inclusion.

Reflecting on experiences with two Afghan students writing in response to events following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, this essay challenges traditional writing center practices in response to the evolving and urgent writing needs of diverse (international) student populations. Focusing on the intersectional identities of student writers and the geopolitical realities they face, we develop further the call to transform writing centers into “brave spaces.” Deploying this framework of bravery, we call for a reevaluation of the concept of “better writers,” of empathy constructed primarily through peerness, and of the current conceptualization of nationality in writing center scholarship. Writing centers as a discipline must reconceptualize these constructs of our theory and practice if they are to become brave(r) spaces that support students as they fight for social justice and survival.

Although traditional asynchronous tutoring is associated with text-based communication, writing centers are beginning to experiment with asynchronous multimodal tutoring with the assistance of accessible and interactive multimedia technologies and instructional platforms like VoiceThread. Using a mixed-methods approach of surveys and interviews of undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), this study explores the potential benefits of asynchronous multimodal tutoring beyond access and convenience: We examine why students choose to submit their papers for asynchronous multimodal feedback, and whether they perceive that the multimodal aspect of the feedback improves their understanding and enhances their connection with tutors.

This mixed-methods study sought to better understand how confidence in writing and race interact as factors within writing centers. Students utilizing our writing center were asked to provide data about racial identity and writing confidence both when registering with the writing center and when completing postsession surveys. From this data, we interviewed a racially representative pool of respondents to better understand their definitions of confidence and the identity factors that have shaped their confidence in writing. Our survey data showed that students’ confidence increased significantly as a result of a writing center session, replicating previous writing center research. Furthermore, we found that improvements in confidence were consistent across racial identities, with students from different racial backgrounds reporting comparable gains. Our qualitative interview results revealed how students struggle with both identity-and non-identity- based factors that lower their confidence in academic writing. Results offer a more nuanced picture of how student identity impacts writing confidence both within and outside the writing center.

In this essay, I suggest that we should embrace generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools, particularly chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude), because they can enable linguistic equity by leveling the academic playing field for English as an additional language students. As writing experts, we can find ways to use this technology to enhance learning, and, since we know both student and faculty positions, we can help develop policies so such tools can be used effectively and ethically. Alternatively, we can ignore them and risk becoming irrelevant.

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—and argues that this anxiety persists even at advanced proficiency levels due to internalized linguistic deficit ideologies. By reframing L2 anxiety as a structural equity issue, the article calls for a more justice-oriented tutoring ecology and offers concrete pedagogical strategies and recommendations to help writing tutors recognize and respond to the often-invisible emotional labor multilingual students carry.

Writing center scholars have adopted Pratt’s (1991) “contact zone” metaphor to describe the diversity of consultants and students in writing centers, but this literature has largely overlooked the perspectives of multilingual students. Through surveys, interviews, and session data, we found that while multilingual students described rich linguistic identities, they also experienced tension and instability as language users. Students often framed their considerable language assets as deficiencies in academic writing contexts. They faced additional tension between instructor expectations and their own understanding of assignment goals. Students frequently sought native-like language competency from consultants and expected them to serve as informants about academic writing conventions—goals that often conflicted with writing center values and practices. This research suggests writing centers need to move from “clashing” to “collaboration” to understand and support multilingual students’ writing processes and goals within the context of U.S. higher education.

Drawing on the dual perspectives of a writing center administrator and a tutor, this paper explores how political symbolism—such as the Department of Education’s 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter—technological homogenization, and institutional consolidation are contributing to a resurgence of standard language ideology and attempting to erode linguistic diversity. We argue that writing center administrators and tutors must confront their own biases, reflect on their positionality, and adopt pedagogies that prioritize inclusion and agency over assimilation; and must refuse these pressures that seek to judge diversity as deficit and flatten difference into sameness.

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

VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

The origin of self-efficacy and academic self-efficacy are essential for self-identity and must be pioneered within the public education comprehensive curriculum to enhance academic success for Black male students. If our systems remain stagnant without the promotion of self-efficacy, the Cave Experience for African American males will continue to impact their social-emotional well-being from kindergarten unto adulthood. Black males must gain a deeper understanding of their cultural and historical contributions to promote, preserve, and gain a perspective of what perseverance and progress looks like while embracing high academic self-efficacy standards.

Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate the importance of resistance in my first- year writing courses as well as the role that exploring social justice continues to play in my pedagogy.

One of the root causes of health disparities in Louisville, Kentucky, is air pollution, a disparity rooted in the city’s history of environmental racism. Residents who engage in local environmental justice efforts face other systemic barriers, all of which intersect in the jargon-filled public notices about air pollution that circulate throughout the city. This article discusses a feminist environmental health literacy coalition formed to promote health literacy and create translations of public notices in plain language. Our preliminary theory of Air Justice maintains that health literacy is a social practice and that intersectional coalitions provide rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholars with a local approach to scholarship that mirrors the diverse and multiple situatedness of the communities in which they work.