Two disabled researchers draw from their experiences conducting an interview study with a population of self-identified disabled faculty members to question some long-held commonplaces about qualitative interviewing. They use the phrase centering disability to emphasize disability as a critical lens and form of embodied experience that has theoretical and methodological implications for qualitative interviewing research design, implementation, and analysis.

How does one balance dedication to two communities that are never served equally well? I consider a theoretically based response through Gramsci’s hegemony, the Brazilian sociologist José Maurício Domingues’s collective subjectivity, and Laclau and Mouffe’s particular brand of post-Marxism. Together, they provide a way to think about leading, holding onto the traditions of the academy while trying to change those traditions so that those who are perforce Othered can be afforded greater than mere recognition or accommodation. I argue that one must adopt a necessary mindset that places the emphasis on the collectivities to which one belongs, relegating the individual to the backdrop, to the extent that is possible.

This article theorizes teaching as accommodation and argues for a centering of disability in writing pedagogy. It examines how universal design can improve composition classrooms, applying inclusive principles to the syllabus in particular.

The book Rhetorical Touch by Shannon Walters opens with a reference to 18th-century philosopher Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac’s Treatise of the Sensations in which he argues that all other sens...

The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

By examining the literate practices of persons with aphasia, or language disability after stroke or other brain injury, this essay develops the concept of literate misfitting—the conflicts readers and writers encounter when their bodies and minds do not fit with the materials and expectations of literacy. I analyze how literate misfitting reveals both how persons with disabilities are often excluded from normative conceptions of literacy and how their experiences adapting and innovating in the face of literate misfits offer vital insights into the social and material aspects of literacy.

Book Review| June 01 2016 Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. By Shannon Walters. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014; pp. 257. $49.95 cloth. Amy Vidali Amy Vidali University of Colorado Denver Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (2): 350–353. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0350 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Amy Vidali; Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2016; 19 (2): 350–353. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.2.0350 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| December 01 2015 Disability Rhetoric Disability Rhetoric. By Jay Timothy Dolmage. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014; pp. 304. $39.95 cloth. R. Kyle Kellam R. Kyle Kellam Marian University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 766–769. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0766 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation R. Kyle Kellam; Disability Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 766–769. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0766 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article discusses how the experience of caring for my severely autistic son, Charlie, and my academic research in disability studies have given me insights into teaching the ancient Greek and Latin languages to university students. My efforts to teach Charlie, who is almost nonverbal, to talk and communicate have inspired me to create strategies that help students review grammatical material for exams in a highly effective way. Teaching, I have learned, can happen in the absence of speech. My research about the history of the treatment of individuals with intellectual disabilities has shown me how to make mundane vocabulary-building exercises come alive. For example, explaining what certain ancient Greek words mean with reference to contemporary medical and ethical questions about the care of children with disabilities, born and unborn, has been of great benefit to students learning medical terminology for their science classes and preparing for careers in the health professions.

This article offers readers a case study of a course-based tutoring partnership that frames and enhances the focus on the stories of three participants—two with learning disabilities. The first part engages arguments involving connections between learning-disabled and typical basic writing students to ask the important question: should learning-disabled students receive more institutionally sanctioned time, attention, and pedagogical care than mainstream students, especially if they are also in basic writing courses? I offer course-based tutoring and peer review and response groups as loci for exploring that query. In the article’s second part, I narrate the sorts of ethical choices that emerged as I began to focus on the participants in this study. I describe the interactions of the participants as they worked together, and with other students, in two peer review and response sessions. The article’s third part provides a more intimate gaze into the backgrounds and experiences of all three participants, offering readers a sense of just how compelling and unexpected the participant stories proved to be, behind the scenes and beyond the classroom. The article concludes with some thoughts on how this poignant experience with two students with learning disabilities taught us all the value of what it means to struggle, to persevere, and to make the most of what “others” of all backgrounds and abilities have to offer.

This article describes the unique journey both of a blind student in our Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Program and of the faculty who taught him as they all navigated through uncharted territories. We were unable to identify any programs that had enrolled students with this particular impairment; thus, there were no previous parameters set by other PTA programs, nor were we able to seek advice from any other physical therapy educators. For instance, we knew that we needed to make certain accommodations but were very aware, as was the student, of the necessity of not overaccommodating. Despite the fact that the physical therapy profession trains practitioners to help clients with disabilities to maximize their physical function and teaches them how to adapt to the challenges of daily activity, we initially assumed that a blind student would not be able to complete the program or be able to become a self-sufficient practitioner. We were very wrong. This article describes our learning process over the course of an eighteen-month program and details a valuable pedagogical experience pertinent to anyone in the teaching profession. We particularly stress the importance of being flexible and open in modifying one's teaching style to accommodate the needs of the individual student and offer tips on doing so without bias or overcompensation.

This article addresses how nondisabled people identify with and become disability advocates and how this identification can also fail to occur. The advocacy work of a group of fraternity brothers in the late 1960s highlights both the local successes that personal connections to disability offer and the shortcomings of large-scale advocacy efforts that lack meaningful engagement with disabled groups. Situated histories of advocacy offer models for how we can build and sustain solidarity across difference, craft more inclusive understandings of accessibility and disability, and engage more thoughtfully in our advocacy work.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

Jay Dolmage in Disability Rhetoric relentlessly asserts disability as a powerful and dynamic rhetorical force. As I read, I found that message sinking its way into my body as I moved through Dolmag...

Visual sign systems have become an essential means of communication in places where large numbers of people of different nationalities gather, such as at international airports and the Olympic Games. That they can effectively increase accessibility among users not necessarily sharing a common language speaks to their potential usefulness in other situations. A homeless shelter in a western North Carolina community received funding to build a new facility. With the clientele's widely diverse communication abilities, including those who are illiterate or have limited reading skills, those who are non-native speakers knowing little to no English, and those who are coming from different cultural contexts, a visual sign system was designed to facilitate navigation for all visitors. Using Peirce's theory of signs, Neurath's ISOTYPE, and the least action principle borrowed from physics as a framework, this case study shows how the signs were designed and usability tested to ensure increased accessibility.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

In Disability Rhetoric, Jay Dolmage draws together disability studies and rhetorical history and theory to make a compelling case for both the “central role of the body in rhetoric” (3) and disabil...

This prototypical disability studies course raises unusual issues of ethics and engagement because of its focus on sensitive, sometimes taboo matters of bodies and minds by autobiographers, physicians, theorists, and artists. These works enhance awareness of disability and human rights and help inculcate an ethic of care, concern, and social activism. The University of Connecticut has made human rights a university priority, enrolling eighty to one hundred students annually in its human rights minor, one of the largest in the country; a human rights major was inaugurated in 2012-13.

Although Graham Pullin, an instructor of design, probably doesn't refer to himself as a technical communicator, he takes on the role of one in his book, Design Meets Disability. In this book, Pulli...

Abstract Disability disclosures in academic scholarship raise questions about possibilities of rhetorical agency. This article engages performances of disability disclosure and recent theories of rhetorical agency to show such disclosures as the culmination of recurring processes in which past experiences are brought to bear on a present moment as people recognize opportune moments for action. Notes 1 Thanks to Scot Barnett, Brenda Brueggemann, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Margaret Price, and Amy Vidali for helping me develop this project. Especial thanks to Theresa Enos for her editorial guidance and to RR reviewers Jay Dolmage and Debra Hawhee for their thoughtful and valuable reviewers' reports. 2 I mean this in two ways: both literally in a different place—at different institutions and locations in different parts of the country—but also in terms of my place in scholarly experience, ranging from graduate school to being in my fifth year as an assistant professor. 3 Importantly, Price has recently revised her discussion of "kairotic space" to include what she calls "tele/presence" in order to acknowledge exchanges that occur even when participants are not physically present with one another (Yergeau et al., "Multimodality"). 4 This essay also appears in a slightly revised form as chapter 5 in Mad at School.

Book Review| September 01 2013 Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic. By Emily Russell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011; pp. vii + 243. $44.95 cloth; $28.95 paper. Rachel D. Davidson Rachel D. Davidson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (3): 610–613. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0610 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rachel D. Davidson; Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2013; 16 (3): 610–613. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0610 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Novice Web developers and other technical communicators need to learn not only accessibility standards but also factors that make designs usable to audiences with disabilities. One challenge of teaching accessibility to novices is creating exigency; another is emulating experiences of users with disabilities. This article tackles teaching novices to create Web sites for visually impaired audiences using a five-stage, recursive approach. Teaching best coding practices is only one stage: Instructors should create exigency by introducing real users and their experiences. They should also check for accessibility and emulate screen-reader output using tools such as WAVE and FANGS, respectively. Furthermore, novice developers should examine how different tools can be used in combination to provide a variety of feedback.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

“I use epideictic rhetoric to examine how the intellectually disabled person was over time constructed and deconstructed via praise and blame.”

“Each of these essays explores the overlaps and tensions of disability and mothering in the context of subject positions and liminal spaces, the complex and often confusing space where the personal and social collide.”

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson's research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson's medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

In this article I examine The Lancet Iraq casualty reports for their demonstration of prefigured accommodation, a rhetorical strategy in which the authors anticipate and attempt to influence their work's wider popularization. My reading of the reports and accompanying commentaries attends to the introduction of journalistic features and calls to political action. As part of my analysis, I interview a lead author of the reports about his rhetorical concerns in composing the work of a politically engaged science.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 86% of Internet users living with a disability or chronic illness have looked for health information online (Fox, 2007). And while so-called e-patients often start this search for information, many find themselves led to communities that provide this and more, such as Tu Diabetes, an online social network site. This pause in what can seem like an endless search for answers may be one that health professionals can gain insight from. Such extended pauses may give insight into the values of this particular community. This article provides the results and analysis of a study using ethnographic methods and rhetorical analysis to examine the texts posted by members of the social networking site Tu Diabetes in order to discern the values held by this community.

Recent rhetorical accounts of mental illness tend to suggest that psychiatric disability limits rhetorical participation. This article extends that research by examining how one group of the psychiatrically disabled—those diagnosed with mood disorders—is using a particular narrative genre to engender participation, what I call the mood memoir. I argue here that mood memoirs can be read as narrative-based responses to the rhetorical exclusion suffered by the psychiatrically disabled. This study employs narrative and genre theory to reveal mood memoirists’ tactics for generating ethos in the face of the stigma of mental illness.

In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton revealed to the American public that he had been hospitalized for depression on three occasions. The revelation seriously damaged the campaign of his running mate, George McGovern, and eventually led to Eagleton's dismissal from the ticket. This article seeks to understand the Eagleton Affair by showing how the stigma of mental illness functions as a form of rhetorical disability. Using a reading of stigma in ancient Greece and the work of Erving Goffman, this article argues that stigma can be viewed as a constitutive rhetorical act that also produces a disabling rhetorical effect: kakoethos, or bad character.

Physicians write child abuse forensic reports for nonphysicians. We examined 73 forensic reports from a Canadian children's hospital for recurrent strategies geared toward making medical information accessible to nonmedical users; we also interviewed four report writers and five readers. These reports featured unique forensic inserts in addition to headings, lists, and parentheses, which are typical of physician letters for patients. We discuss implications of these strategies that must bridge the communities of medical, social, and legal practice.

Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants' actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women's attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women's use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women's birth plans to argue that women's silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.

This article positions letters of recommendation as important and troubling indicators of faculty beliefs about diversity and access in higher education. I focus on the disclosure of disability, both by examining the history of disclosing stigmatized difference and by analyzing five letters of recommendation for an aspiring graduate student with a traumatic brain injury. I suggest that faculty must revise their letter-writing practices and engage in a type of rhetorical forecasting that questions well-intentioned disclosures of difference and imagines how various letters form a composite sketch of a candidate.

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Even with careful, thoughtful planning and attention to the scholarship in disability studies, any course that centers on literature featuring illness and disability inevitably interrogates the philosophical positions and social values of the disabled community, as well as those of the able-bodied, necessitating a classroom that is sensitive to discomfort encountered when participants’ deeply held beliefs come into conflict with their own desires to be seen as politically correct.

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Drawing on activity theory, the author describes and analyzes how he uses software to determine whether websites administered by his university are accessible to disabled people. He argues that, ultimately, accessibility is a rhetorical construct, in the sense that it is defined by communities rather than by sheer technical measurements.

This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers’ responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies’ tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more recent constructivist theories.

This article critically analyzes how technical communication practices both construct and are constructed by normalizing discourses, which can marginalize the experiences, knowledges, and material needs of people with disabilities. In particular, the article explores how disability studies theories can offer critical insights into research in two areas: safety communication and usability. In conclusion, the article offers ways that disability studies can intervene in the pedagogy of usability, communication technology, linguistic bias, narrative, and discourse communities.

The author recalls her struggles and adaptations—to school, to anti-Semitism, to her family’s history, to her feelings for other women, to her learning disability—before there were terms to make what she experienced a familiar part of our discourse. She suggests that,because the words that might have exempted her from effort or locked her into one category or another were never spoken, she found ways to do what was required and methods of coping that have served her well in life.