Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

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

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

Abstract Research has shown that student silence poses one of greatest challenges in the teaching of race. This article reports on a small one-year study that examined the value of using anonymous student feedback to teach race in the context of Indigenous literatures. The author's experience suggests that the collection of anonymous student feedback opens up a back channel of unconditional love between students and instructors, where students’ authentic beliefs and ideas are neither judged nor evaluated, thus empowering them to discover a sense of agency in the ongoing conversation around race.

In the past decades, the notion of voice in the theorizing and teaching of academic writing has been the subject of much debate and conceptual change, especially concerning its relation to writer identity. Many newer accounts of voice and identity in academic writing draw on the dialogical concept of voice by Bakhtin. However, some theoretical and methodological inconsistencies have surfaced in the adaptions of the concept. Working from a refinement of the dialogical notion of voice based on the concepts of polyphony and interiorization, this article presents a methodological approach for analyzing voice(s) in writing. The article presents material around the evolution of an early-career researcher’s dissertation synopsis. The material is multilayered, including the writer’s text, transcripts from an interdisciplinary peer-feedback conversation with two colleagues, and a video-stimulated interview with the writer. Excerpts of the material were analyzed to trace the polyphony of interiorized voices that influenced the writing. This focus revealed the multivoicedness of academic texts as an effect of their history of coming into being. This article contributes to the question of voice and identity in academic writing from a dialogical psycholinguistic perspective by presenting a de-reifying notion of voice grounded in an understanding of writing as a polyphonic activity, which also feeds into the formation of a writer’s self.

ABSTRACT This article builds on the scholarship on violence at the nexus of rhetoric, philosophy, decoloniality, and human rights discourse to theorize what it calls a rhetoric of everyday violence. Moving beyond the focus on the politics of representation in slow violence, it brings a transnational feminist rhetorical analytic and a focus on the politics of recognition to illegible temporal violence, arguing that a rhetoric of everyday violence can help recalibrate human rights discourse to recognize temporal and gendered violence as human rights violations.

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between rhetoric and violence by running this pairing through a corresponding couplet: rhetoric and race. Arguing for a common substrate between these two pairs of terms—coloniality—this article proposes that rhetorics of “nonviolence” are better understood as rhetorics of anti-violence.

PDF version Abstract This article focuses on the lived experiences of multilingual writing teachers and presents what we, the authors, call “A Rhetoric of Accent Fear,” which introduces accent fear as a form of linguistic racism. Through this framework, we reflect on our stories of accent fear as multilingual writing teachers; we practice forming relational… Continue reading A Rhetoric of Accent Fear and the Experiences of Multilingual Teachers of Writing

This article critiques the whole-college reform project dubbed Guided Pathways. The article describes how Guided Pathways research has failed to provide data that support the reform project’s claims, disputes the extent to which Guided Pathways can claim to be equity-oriented work, and ultimately identifies Guided Pathways as a reform project that diverges from the interests of the two-year college.

Abstract This article forwards the concept of affective inertia to understand how caucasity, or emboldened whiteness, motivates rhetorical (in)action. Specifically looking at the viral case of “BBQ Becky,” I argue the historic momentum of both settler colonialism and anti-Blackness propel contemporary performances of emboldened white femininity. The videoed interactions between Jennifer Schulte (Becky) and Michelle Dione Snider (videographer) illustrate how scenarios of property afford white cisgender women particular roles of constrained privilege when in public spaces. Turning to the dynamics of white feminine caucasity, I position Snider's performance of “race traitor” as one equal and opposite to Schulte's “damsel in distress,” thus interrupting Schulte's inertia. Of importance is how the women perform to divergent ends while being capacitated by the same affective inertia.

This is an excellent, well-constructed set of essays focused on the intersection of decoloniality, the posthuman, and new materialist rhetoric. While each essay focuses on different topics, the central themes are consistently covered throughout, making this a more unified set of contributions than one might otherwise find in an edited volume. The text includes a Foreword, an introductory essay by the co-editors, and eight individual essays. The authors are primarily from English rhetoric and writing programs; several have backgrounds as Indigenous scholars and/or a focus on including Indigenous voices in their work. The importance of this text—especially for those of us fully ensconced within interconnected colonial worlds from our campus to the community and on to the nation and beyond—cannot be underestimated. The continued dismissal of Indigenous voices remains a critical issue and one this text addresses in a provocative and compelling manner. The co-editors recognize that two limitations of the volume are a focus on North America as the primary geography from which issues are taken and that Black scholars are not represented.The Foreword, by Joyce Rain Anderson, a founding member of the CCCC American Indian Caucus, sets the stage for an argument that resonates throughout the text: the need to move from a dominant “settler colonialism” mind-set that ignores Indigenous voices, to an embracement of “Indigenous ways of knowing” (xi) that allows for a de-colonizing perspective to take hold.1 A key move is to “delink” from colonial practices and engage with a perspective that promotes universal relationality between the human and the non-human. The co-editors’ introductory essay further elaborates this argument. A Eurocentric view devalues or dismisses any role for the non-human and posits a view in which animals, plants, and nature in general have no role in the construction of knowledge. To re-engage a more diverse set of voices, including what the non-human might tell us if we were to listen, is a challenge that requires a willingness to move out of our comfort zone and recognize that white, heteronormative voices represent only one vision of reality and our place within it.The first essay, “The Politics of Recognition in Building Pluriversal Possibilities,” by Robert Lestón, begins by denoting what ‘decoloniality’ represents—neither a research area nor a discipline. It is the “struggle” those who have lived under colonization endure (22). Lestón presents two primary issues—that as educators we have the possibility of bringing excluded knowledges to the surface so their influence can be felt, and that the content of our own classes be transformed by the inclusion of “ancestral, border and non-Western cultural knowledges” (23). He presents a trenchant critique of “posthumanism”: it “still works within a tradition that is founded on a humanism that is part and parcel of modernity, and a humanity that is anything but humane” (29–30). He notes it yet may have a positive role, but it needs to question its own grounding in a worldview that excludes significant others. His first extended example is the Zapatista movement—it succeeded in establishing a different reality for people long oppressed by the State by reversing the leader/people position: “it is the people who lead and the leaders who obey” (35). The second extended example considers revisions to the Ecuadorian constitution by a coalition of Indigenous people who re-establish a sense of “living well” that incorporates a commitment to basic social rights [Buen Vivir] such as housing, education, etcetera, as well as a recognition that nature has rights that must be appreciated and maintained (38–39).The second essay, “Performing Complex Recognitions,” by Kelly Medina López and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, brings “Western theories of complexity . . . into conversation with . . . Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial projects” (57). The authors focus attention on “recognition” and “misrecognition” in mentoring relationships—who gets mentoring in order to further their ability to be recognized via a demonstration of their “fitness” to be a recognized part of an academic setting (59). From an Indigenous perspective, what is missing in colonial recognition is a sense of relationality, not just between humans, but with respect to the non-human as well. Their story revolving around “misrecognition” concerns an “Indigenous Maya Guatemalan” student who was taking Chicanx courses but did not see herself in those classes, yet was recognized as Chicanx. Her “research interests were (mis)recognized” as she was seen in “institutional terms,” where Chicanx was a “catchall for relations among the Americas” (49).Essay number three, “Listening Otherwise,” by Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder & Shannon Kelly, proposes that we expand our listening practices beyond normal communication expectations and engage in an “arboreal rhetoric,” listening for what trees might tell us. Their review of current research that argues against the dismissal of “plant rhetorics” is well done. Accepting non-human rhetorical influences is a move that may be difficult for some to embrace as it challenges conventional thinking on human communication. The argument in this essay, to “listen otherwise,” is one well worth the time.Christina Cedillo's essay (#4), “Smoke and Mirrors,” argues convincingly that reminding “whitestream activists that the dominant culture ignores Indigenous ecological wisdom to its own detriment” (92) is a critically important task. The essay focuses on a mythic story (Tezcatlipoca) that frames the discussion of a petrochemical explosion in Houston, Texas, and the resulting failure to meet the needs of both human and non-human in response to the crisis. A. I. Ramirez's essay (#5), “Perpetual (In)Securities,” examines the “global border industrial complex” (GBIC) (115) as it is exemplified in the border murals on the U.S./Mexico border. She applies conceptual framing drawn from Gloria Anzaldúa's “theory of la facultad” plus a pluri-versal theory of ‘facultades serpentinas’ in discussing the impact of the murals. Her application of a ‘serpentine’ method of analysis works well as does her ‘sensing the skin’ of the wall. As she notes, “Embodied knowledge, learning through the skin, through the body, is an ancient or traditional knowledge that has long been ignored” (125). Seeing the murals “as sensual and sensational rhetorics” (127) challenges the dominant approach taken by the “GBIC.”“Corn, Oil, and Cultivating Dissent through ‘Seeds of Resistance’” (#6) by Matthew Whitaker focuses attention on social movement rhetoric and protest assemblage in resistance to the projected XI pipeline. The only reservation a reader might have about this essay is that the pipeline project was abandoned in early June 2021. That, however, does not diminish the reasons for objecting to its potential existence. To begin, the essay focuses on the Cowboy Indian Alliance and its members’ act of resistance in planting corn where the pipeline was projected to be built. Since 2014, the Alliance has convened in a “Seeds of Resistance” ceremony that “is a deeply rhetorical event that brings together plants, people, soil and sky” (148) to remind people of what the pipeline could represent.In “Top Down, Bottom Up” (#7), Judy Holiday & Elizabeth Lowry focus attention on the possibility of granting legal “personhood” to non-human objects. The Deep Green Resistance environmental group filed a suit that sought to “confer personhood on the Colorado River ecosystem” (181). While the suit was dismissed, it raised awareness of the issue. As the authors note, New Zealand conferred personhood on the Whanganui River. They examine the human/nonhuman interaction and present, from a feminist perspective, the possibilities for embracing an Indigenous understanding of the co-relationship between living and ‘non-living’ entities.The final chapter is, in my view, one of the best in the text. Andrea Riley Mukavetz and Malea Powell's “Becoming Relations” uses a narrative approach in “Building an Indigenous Manifesto.” The authors utilize the role of ‘braiding sweetgrass’ as integral to their story of how Indigenous knowledge is created as “constellated, relational, and nonhierarchical” (195). The authors move away from Western/Eurocentric perspective of knowledge that is to be found someplace else toward a sense of knowledge as built on relations between human and non-human, including the role of plants. A key phrase encompasses a consistent theme throughout the text: “all our relations.”While much more could be said about each contribution, Decolonial Conversations reminds us that we are, all of us, interconnected via our relations, and that means giving respect and space to both Indigenous and Western/Eurocentric voices at one and the same time. As such, the edited collection is vitally important in bringing awareness to the presence and significance of Indigenous voices. It would be an excellent addition to any course that serves to review material rhetorics.

Abstract This essay examines Ta-Nehisi Coates's article “The Case for Reparations” to illuminate how he uses inventive temporal strategies to transform the grounds of the reparations debate. I argue, Coates engages in a process of temporal tampering that involves meddling with dominant temporal structures (conceptions of time that serve white supremacy) to accommodate the excessiveness of anti-Black violence. Through tactics of timeline jumping and a rhetoric of repair, Coates draws on articulations of time as a resource to sabotage anti-reparations temporalities. Instead of approaching the reparations debate through stale discursive entry points, such as financial logistics, I reveal how Coates draws upon conceptions of time to reposition reparations as a mode of worldbuilding and social transformation.

This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

We take up disruption in this article to consider what sustained attention to disruption and its relationship to agency can bring to scholars and educators. We do so by revealing the ideological commitments, relationships, and labor that make disruption possible and valuable. We also look to Indigenous studies and new materialism to explore matter and ethical responsibilities at the interstices of rhetorical practice and work. From this, we propose a theory of disruptive agency that seeks to understand how disruptions emerge and how they can be rhetorically engaged for progressive change.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.

Time and temporality are variously conceptualized and employed ubiquitously in both theoretical and empirical studies of education and literacy. Since education and learning are inherently defined as change over time, any theory of learning or education makes implicit or explicit claims about the nature of time. In this exploratory conceptual review / theoretical essay, temporal discourse analysis is used to identify the temporal claims operating in six studies drawing on six different theoretical framings: (1) predictive theorizing (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); (2) developmental theorizing (Sulzby, 1985); (3) sociocultural theorizing (Gonzalez et al., 1995); (4) critical literacy theorizing (Jones & Enriquez, 2009); (5) critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); and (6) queer theorizing (Schey, 2023). Each theorization brings theoretical, methodological, and practical implications related to how research might be conducted, what changes across time, how time operates, and what might be tracked across time. Theorizations of time have substantive implications for what happens in classrooms and how what happens is interpreted by teachers, students, and researchers.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.

Abstract This essay argues that The Palm-Wine Drinkard ([1952] 2014), a tale of a quest through the African bush by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, does important decolonial work and is therefore an excellent candidate for inclusion on a literature syllabus that aims to introduce students to decolonial thinking. After introducing Tutuola's work and considering some of the issues at stake for a decolonial pedagogy, it argues that Drinkard provides an active reading experience that creates powerful opportunities in the classroom to challenge students’ assumptions about how colonialism was experienced by colonized populations, the valences of the human, and uses of the English language. In so doing, the essay highlights potential teachable moments in the text that may be useful to instructors who wish to adopt a decolonial approach in their literature courses.

Writing studies must conduct replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research to understand the relationship between creativity and writing, including how writers use creative thinking to generate texts and how environmental factors mediate writers’ engagement with creative thinking. This article traces research on creativity from selected writing studies journals since the 2011 release of The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Through a systematic literature review, the findings show how RAD research supports domain-specific knowledge-building about writers’ creativity, which can help teachers, scholars, and practitioners to understand what counts as originality in writing, how writers produce creative texts, and how educational institutions can teach advanced writing skills that develop students’ creative thinking.

Abstract National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman stunned the United States with her captivating performance of “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” during the 2021 inaugural ceremony for President Biden and Vice President Harris. Analyzing this political poem, we contribute to the rhetorical scholarship of inaugural ceremonies and demonstrate how Gorman's performance renews a tradition of Black jeremiads. Specifically, we argue that Gorman's performance creates a “double play” on white expectations, thereby crafting a rival version of democratic unity as she poetically envisions a “we the people” that does not center on the U.S. system of white supremacy and is not sponsored by white aesthetic and rhetorical traditions. Ultimately, we demonstrate how Gorman's Black poetic jeremiad calls Americans into a democracy that rejects white supremacist assumptions of the good life.

Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research, this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing, pedagogy, professional interaction, and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates, inclusion is not inherently equitable, nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately, I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.

In “Our Story Begins Here” (2014) the CR Theory Lab offers key concepts related to cultural rhetorics such as constellating and relationality. Drawing from decolonial theory and practice, these concepts allow cultural rhetoricians to develop a scholarly practice that is reflective of the cultural community they are a part of and write for and to address the long histories and cultural practices of the land they dwell on. Where the CR Theory Lab is committed to a decolonial practice invested in the theories and lived experiences of the tribal nations people of Turtle Island, they also offer that it isn’t the only approach to cultural rhetorics. I argue that both scenarios reflect a larger political and cultural issue regarding how the occupied territories of Turtle Island (also known as the United States) don’t know what to do with tribal nations people, our fight for sovereignty, or our ongoing effort for cultural continuance. In other words, I will make an argument that maps how our discipline’s approach to decolonial theory, cultural rhetorics, and Indigenous rhetorics reflects the ongoing efforts of survivance and resurgence of Indigenous people.

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide. In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

This essay argues for attention in cultural rhetorics scholarship to stories as effective civic pedagogical tools informed by participatory knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a multiyear “mobile cinema democracy project” based on the physical circulation across Africa, Europe, and North America of a successful African democratic story told in the multi-award-winning documentaryAn African Election, I attend to both the documentary and its larger contextual project, “A Political Safari: An African Adventure in Democracy Building.” I demonstrate the ways that the African storytelling traditions of collaboration upon which this project rests offer us cultural rhetoricians key opportunities to reimagine inclusive knowledgemaking practices in using stories as civic pedagogies. My analysis reveals how such knowledge-making practices might orient our work against the grain of hierarchical, exclusionary, colonial practices and toward decolonial approaches that are truly participatory and inclusive.

In this article, we share and reflect on our experience working together (as a Native youth and settler scholar) to develop a cultural camp for tribal youth. Through reflection and storytelling, we came to realize the complexities of attempting to support what Scott Lyons terms “rhetorical sovereignty” (particularly of youth) in real institutional contexts, of appealing to different audiences without compromising our vision, and of determining where the line really is between “I” and “we” in our writing and our visions for this work. In short, we have come to realize how complicated justice-driven work really is and how the process has actually changed us both along the way. We use our own stories of collaboration and the program we designed to explore both the possibilities and complexities of allyship and collaboration across difference in our cultural rhetorics practice.

Recently, a private space race has emerged, helmed by some of the world’s wealthiest figures. These space entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk most prominently, have framed the new space race as preparation for the permanent emancipation of humans from Earth. Brad Tabas terms this project the “post-planetary.” In this essay, I analyze postplanetary rhetoric through Todd McGowan’s theorization of fantasy, arguing that the discourse gains assent through operationalizing fantasies of abundance and relegating Earth to a lost cause. In charting the structure of this discourse, I seek to promote further disciplinary attention to fantasy for its capacity to illuminate how contemporary discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation perpetuate capitalism’s hegemony by cultivating consumers’ desires for plenty. I also seek to showcase how a rhetorical approach to fantasy both attends to capitalism’s abortive repression of its contradictions and reveals how the repressed Real of capitalist violence haunts the entrepreneurial scene.

The field of children’s literature has been adversely affected by the current alarming resurgence of book banning across the United States. Book banning has become the grandstanding stage for individuals on different political platforms to institute their desire to silence issues and people; most of these banned books share experiences that differ from mainstream white society. In their zest to muzzle others and create a dogmatic uniformity to a majority white mainstream, some parents and their political allies have targeted books they deem inappropriate, books that celebrate the kaleidoscope of races, cultures, and mores that make up the US. This essay examines the current wave of banning children’s books and the reasoning behind this trend. I argue that this trend of reader suppression seeks to silence minoritized voices and prevent critical conversations. Finally, I make a call to action for educators to share diverse stories so young readers, especially Black and Brown children, can see representations of themselves in books and other media.

ABSTRACT Post-truth, understood as a turn from collective sense and judgment to nonpublic forms of epistemic justification, is a distinctly rhetorical problem. This article offers, in response, a theorization of knowledge making as the means by which affective and material impingements upon bodies become publicly legible and rhetorically available. For this, the author turns, perhaps unexpectedly, to John Locke. Locke’s works offer the foundations of an empirical theory of rhetoric that embraces the sensible realm not as a conduit to reality but as a space where social connection becomes possible. Locke engages this realm through natural historical inquiry. Tracing this inquiry to his commonplacing practices, the author presents the rhetorical-dialectical topics as a basis for the shared sense and judgment that he pursued and that post-truth demands. The topics, this article argues, guide and enlarge the senses, forming objects of knowledge with which to sustain public life—objects about which plural truths are possible.

ABSTRACT Africana scholars often address their texts to a reader who is implicitly white. This tendency, which this article characterizes as the “discursive orientation toward whiteness,” has the pernicious effect of limiting the range and rigor of scholars’ research questions and proposal. This analysis examines the other discursive “face,” following J. Saunders Redding’s observation from almost eighty years ago, which remains unnervingly insightful: “Negro [sic] writers have been obliged to have two faces . . . to satisfy two different (and opposed when not entirely opposite) audiences, the [B]lack and the white.” Scholars have described this second face in the text in a number of ways—variously as a temperament, a rhythm, or an “aesthetic.” Through an analysis of a few exemplary texts, the current study will describe a few of the most salient characteristics, ultimately in the service of equipping the “Black” scholar with a few effective, liberatory rhetorical strategies.

Knowledge about the use of the term “Indigenous science” (IS) is valuable to technical and scientific communication in the larger goal of exposing colonial, appropriative legacies. Using rhetorical content analysis, we analyze 61 instances of IS in US-based news articles and find that IS is often represented as an ongoing activity, connected to food production, and related to higher education activities. However, IS is rarely defined and Indigenous people are not always cited/quoted.

This article examines the role that reformed hiring practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the global industry of ecotourism may (or may not) play in bringing multiply marginalized or underrepresented (MMU) voices to the forefront of environmental risk communication and sustainability efforts worldwide. Ultimately, the article argues that ecotourism companies should promote grace-based hiring practices to include marginalized knowledges of threatened ecosystems (places) in a company’s decisions regarding sustainability.

This article explores the mobile and material dimensions of a writing practice we call pocket writing. Emergent in our 6-year ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school, this practice involved adolescents composing and carrying their self-sponsored writing close to their bodies. We consider the pocket both a physical artifact—the place from which writing emerged at the right moment—and a metaphor describing how youth created small, portable boundaries around their writing to facilitate its invisibility and mobility. Using a transliteracies lens, we worked alongside youth to trace the circulatory pathways such writing took relative to the official institution of school. These high school students made agentive rhetorical choices, sometimes deliberately disconnecting their writing from school as an everyday resistance practice—an effort to keep school in its place. In theorizing pocket writing as a mobile and embodied extension of writing (for) the self, we argue its “pocketed” nature is key to its transformative power.

PDF Version Abstract We offer an in-depth look at how a Black-led nonprofit, Life Pieces To Masterpieces (Washington, DC), stepped up to the challenges of 2020 – the devastation of the pandemic and of yet another wave of anti- Black violence. We place this story alongside scholarship about democratic education and the value of generative… Continue reading Black Leadership and Shared Humanity: A Profile of Generative Reciprocity for Racial Equity

This article traces the complexities of two-year college (TYC) writing program administration and offers suggestions for more research about TYC writing program administration and in collaboration with TYC writing program administrators.

Abstract This essay discusses the usefulness of empathetic, relational pedagogy while teaching at CUNY in the time of COVID-19 and reflects on experiences with three students early in the author's career that led her to this pedagogical approach. A terminally ill student, a student who had been shot in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, and a student who became paralyzed in a motorbike accident led the author to reconsider the idea of the classroom as apart from the outside world. Embracing the sometimes frightening events happening beyond the classroom walls can lead to a deeper engagement with course texts as well as to a more meaningful student-teacher relationship and a sense of the course as personally significant. By constructing classrooms as places for listening and by striving to practice antiracist pedagogy, linguistically and culturally diverse students find themselves supported, even when the world outside becomes unstable and difficult to navigate.

AbstractThis article describes an antiracist first-year writing curriculum, formulated in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Classroom participants examined the racialized and class-based nature of “Standard English,” then each student informed their instructor of how they wished to be graded. Student coauthors reflect on their educational experience.

Abstract This essay details the evolution of an interdisciplinary course at a university with proximity to Baltimore, Maryland. The original course relied entirely on experiential learning via field trips. During these trips, students conducted analyses of museums as rhetorical and political spaces. As a result of the pandemic, the course evolved into one that relied entirely on students making virtual field trips for cultural organizations and for those at home. In both courses, students focused on issues of social justice as they pertain to museums: issues of access (who is able/encouraged to visit the museum?), issues of diversity (which artists/works of art are featured and who is offered positions of power within the organization?), and issues of engagement (does the museum offer exhibits/programming that is relevant to the public they serve?). In the revised class, students (1) virtually met with museum representatives to discuss their needs; (2) researched the types of resources, events, and objects that can be found in the different locations; (3) learned how to use technology such as Nearpod as multimodal composing platforms; and (4) created a virtual field trip to be used by that organization for educational and promotional purposes. By creating material for specific audiences, students not only learned the rhetorical skills of composing for diverse groups but also grappled with issues of equity, access, and engagement. While the revisions were made out of necessity, this essay details the transferable methodology that can continue to be employed in online classes and integrated into in-person learning.

AbstractWork as a university teacher post(?)-pandemic must be rethought entirely. Creating better futures—or a future at all—does not mean getting back to some happy place, but it does mean faculty must engage institutions and communities courageously, ethically, and collectively. This essay links conversations about teaching in the pandemic to those about gender, race, class, and disability, and to academic labor and faculty fights for better pay and working conditions, shared governance, and academic freedom.

AbstractThis article proposes that the methods and philosophies informing corequisite teaching could be generalized throughout English studies to support students at all levels who are undergoing and recovering from pandemic-related traumas. Corequisite courses, which promote equity among first-year students, are designed with attention to trauma-informed approaches and a focus on process-driven writing. Instructors address noncognitive skills with students, such as time management and note-taking, and consider the cultural relevance of their reading and writing assignments. By describing specific activities and methods used at Hostos Community College, the article considers how strategies that are central to corequisite pedagogy might be widely adopted or adapted in this moment of reorientation for English studies. Additionally, the article suggests that mission-driven practices of community colleges serve as a model for higher education more broadly.

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.