“Using Michael Warner and Christian Lundberg as a frame, I argue the best Kickstarters mobilize their publics’ affect via meaningful tropes baked into their project’s pitch while using synecdoche to offer that same public the chance to help create the text that binds them together.”

This article sheds light on moments when educators affirm and when writers assert their epistemic rights— the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. Affirmations and assertions of epistemic rights can work to counter epistemic injustice, or harm done to people in their capacities as knowers. Though an understanding of rhetoric as "epistemic" or "epistemological" is not new (e.g., Berlin; Dowst; Scott; Villanueva), I argue that we need to bring attention to the related terms and conceptual frameworks of epistemic rights and epistemic injustice. Together, these terms help to explain the wrongs (micro-inequities leading to macro-injustices) that manifest when writers are stripped of language, experience, or expertise and their attendant agency, confidence, and even personhood. This study highlights both the social stakes involved and the interactional work needed for putting one's words into the world. Hence, this project contributes empirical research in addition to an understanding of epistemic rights that can counter epistemic injustice.

ABSTRACTThe spread of mobile technologies and social media have contributed to making snapshot photography an ordinary part of everyday life. As snapshots become more omnipresent, asking why we take so many photos becomes less exigent than asking what might stop us from doing so. Drawing on insights from affect theory, new materialism, and studies of visual rhetoric, this article argues that deterrents to snapping pictures arise not only from the range of human rhetorics or “laws” that influence our actions or inactions, but also from a dynamic tangle of extrahuman factors, ineffable though this influence may be. Speculating about the implications of these extrahuman deterrents for how we understand rhetoric, I suggest that the ineffable enchantment of certain encounters exhibits a worldly rhetoricity in itself, one that conditions the possibility of—and sometimes prevents—the anthropogenic symbolic actions we are more accustomed to recognizing as rhetorical.

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 essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

We examined longhand note taking strategies when reading and summarizing a source text that was formatted with bullets or that was presented in a single paragraph. We analyzed cognitive effort when reading the source text, when jotting notes, when reading the notes, and when composing the summary, as well as time spent in these activities and the content of the notes and the summaries. With a formatted text, students’ perceived comprehension difficulty was lower and they expended less cognitive effort, spent less time reading the text, and noted more ideas. While composing the summary, only those students who read the formatted source text continued selecting ideas in their notes. Finally, the summaries were unaffected by the formatting of the source text. The study shows that formatting a source text with bullets facilitates note taking by helping students to grasp its structure and by reducing the cognitive effort of reading.

This article explores the benefits of bringing museum education into the composition classroom to help students develop confidence and skill in oral presentation. Drawing on current scholarship in object-based learning and engaging museum audiences, it outlines a project in which students closely observed objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and critiqued a museum tour before presenting on their objects on-site at the museum. As well as teaching students new skills, the project also encouraged them to use their own experiences as audience members in the classroom and the museum to create more engaging and coherent presentations for their peers. The article explains the logistics of the project and students' reactions, concluding with students' own reflections on the benefits of presenting in a museum setting.

Decisions about writing assessment are rooted in racial and linguistic identity; the consequences for many writing assessment decisions are often reflective of the judgments made about who does and does not deserve opportunities for success, opportunities historically denied to students of color and linguistically diverse writers. Put simply, assessment creates or denies opportunity structures. Because writing assessment is also racially and linguistically affected by the identities of those performing assessment, the role of writing program administrator (WPA) becomes a social justice role that challenges racial and linguistic biases and interrogates institutional structures, so that all students have the same opportunities for success.

“This issue features a range of topics, but despite their diversity, the articles share a common thread of embodiment and affect, two areas toward which much current rhetorical scholarship is directed. While theories of embodiment and affect frame just a few of these essays, all of them reflect the centrality of bodies and emotion in discourse.”

Examining the rhetorical responses of Hongkongers toward the influx of mainland Chinese maternal tourists, this article investigates citizenship claims made by a citizenry that is locally and culturally powerful but is transnationally and sociopolitically marginalized. By analyzing how alienizing discourse circulates and gains political valence through social media and popular cultural discourse, this article demonstrates that citizenship—particularly at a moment of national crisis—is intimately tied to and regulated by collective affects that could foreclose alternative and more inclusive articulations of membership.

“The affective rhetoric of China’s Internet culture provides an instructive illustration of a kind of rhetorical activity that preserves but exceeds overt and explicit symbolic or referential meanings: a rhetoric that binds and separates people especially by the circulation of affective energy.”

This article explores rhetorical implications of extending the audience of written physician notes in hospital settings to include patients and/or family members (the OpenNotes program). Interviews of participating hospital patients and family members (n = 16) underscored the need for more complex understandings of audience beyond “universal” and “particular” explanations. Interviews were organized around the aspects of comprehension, affect/emotion, and likes/dislikes about receiving notes. Results from these interviews indicated that participants understood the notes overall but had questions about abbreviations and technical terms. Many participants felt reassured about the care they were receiving, and many liked having the notes as a reference and springboard for further discussion with health care staff. A more detailed content analysis of the interview data yielded themes of document use, readability, involvement, and physician care. Findings from this study reveal an expansion of audience in this case to include both universal and particular audiences. Also, findings point to the possibility of audience involvement among patients and family members through activities such as asking questions about the physician notes. This study has implications for other forms of written communication that may extend readership in novel ways.

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts.

AbstractThis paper explores the role of examples (paradeigmata) as propaedeutic to philosophical inquiry, in light of a methodological digression in Plato's Statesman. Consistent with scholarship on Aristotle's view of example, scholars of Plato's work have privileged the logic of examples over their rhetorical appeal. Following a small but significant trend in recent rhetorical scholarship that emphasizes the affective nature of examples, this article assesses the psychagogic potential of paradeigmata, following the discussion of example in Plato's Statesman. I argue that by creating an expectation in the learner that he or she will find similarities, the use of examples in philosophical pedagogy engages his or her desire to discern the intelligible principles that ground experiential knowledge. Thus, examples not only serve as practice at the dialectician's method of abstraction but also cultivate a dialectical ēthos, characterized by the desire to know the logoi of all things.

Situated learning theory postulates that the environment in which learning occurs is foundational to understanding the outcomes of that learning. Taking classes in a nontraditional classroom, therefore, might have a noticeable effect on learning outcomes. This study examines three structures of the same general education course to understand the potential impact of mediated learning on students’ public speaking and writing apprehension and self-efficacy. Although situated learning theory suggests that the three structures (face-to-face, partially face-to-face, and fully online) should demonstrate differences, the results of this study are mixed, suggesting a complicated picture for situated learning’s ability to speak to differences based on technology use while highlighting the differences in how such technology might affect oral skills versus written skills. The application of situated learning principles to technologically mediated courses demonstrates the need to consider the interplay between environment and content.

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback interventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback intervention—screencast response to written work—through students’ perceptions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating transparency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a conversational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and distinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional process enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, especially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

This article examines the role of reflective practice in rhetoric and composition scholarship and argues for reconsidering practice through posthumanism. It (re)introduces posthumanism as a productive frame for considering rhetorical training in a networked age. In place of reflective practice, the article develops the concept of "posthuman practice" as a serial and material activity for rhetorical training. The article concludes by reconsidering metacognition and how reframing rhetoric as a posthuman practice could affect rhetorical pedagogy and ethics.

Abstract The U.S. news media’s heavy circulation of images of dead soldiers returning home from Vietnam in “body bags” is frequently offered as an explanation for the state of popular political disaffection with war commonly called “Vietnam Syndrome.” We argue that the rhetoric of Vietnam Syndrome misdiagnoses dissent against war as a photo-pathogenic affective disorder, a visually transmitted disease of the popular political mind. In their respective attempts to stave off the syndrome, Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush enacted visual quarantines of deceased U.S. soldiers—first in 1991 and again in 2003. Our analysis suggests that President Obama’s lifting of the ban in 2009 represented not only a more precise grasp of U.S. war history but also a cynical recognition of the limited need for popular assent in executing the war on terror.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

In 1970, black autoworker James Johnson, Jr., fatally shot three people at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel Plant in Detroit. The shooting occurred three years after a devastating urban uprising and in the context of black militant labor organizing in local automotive plants. After a legal defense arguing racism and labor exploitation provoked his actions, Johnson was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. In this essay, I attend to the defense strategy that attempted to retain the political critique implicit in Johnson’s “black rage” while working within the constraints of jurisprudential and clinical notions of “insanity.” The Johnson case suggests that the mobilization of black affect is an always-ambivalent endeavor that can enable radical critique and political practice, while also subordinating black rhetorical agency.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary efforts to advocate for job security for teaching-track faculty in English studies, especially in composition, can be enhanced by identifying and reconfiguring two types of negative affects: those circulating around the “affective labor” required to teach writing and those circulating around the educational spaces in which such labor typically occurs. After defining my terms, I begin analyzing the impact of these two types of negative affect on calls for teaching-track job security. I then use Grego and Thompson’s “studio” model of basic writing as an example of teaching work that can be used to generate and circulate positive affects regarding the “affective-labor-in-space” performed by writing teachers. Finally, I articulate three premises designed to help articulate and emplace positive affects regarding teaching-track composition work such that possibilities for job security are enhanced.

Drawing from cultural studies and social justice education, this essay argues for the productive potential of racial inquiry in composition scholarship and pedagogy. Ethical imperatives facing rhetoric and composition are also pedagogical opportunities:to rethink multiculturalism, politicize student affect, and develop student-centered writing processes predicated upon deliberative critical inquiry.

The concept of metanoia illuminates the spaces that exist around and beyond opportune moments. As such, metanoia offers ways to reframe the affective elements of teaching and learning, writing and revising. This essay examines emotion, agency, and transformation in the concept of metanoia as a way to expand “opportunity” in writing processes. View a short video by Myers and some of her students on the CCC Videos page.

Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

In this review, the author discusses two books that attend to the variety of ways in which the geography of a writing program affects how writing is managed and taught.

ABSTRACTFirst I discuss the limitations of recognition for grounding both politics and ethics, the main problem being that recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. Next, I take up more recent attempts to link recognition to vulnerability rather than to self-consciousness. I challenge the concept of vulnerability on the grounds that it is not exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize it for ignoring differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. I propose witnessing, grounded in response ethics, as a supplement to recognition models of political and ethical subjectivity. Witnessing takes us beyond recognition to the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience, which must be added to the politics of recognition. It requires a commitment to what Jacques Derrida calls “hyperbolic ethics,” an ethics of impossible responsibilities for what we do not and cannot recognize.

In this essay, I build on current work in rhetorical genre theory to read a historical genre for the affective uptake(s) it generates. Medically authored child-rearing advice literature developed as a genre in Britain between 1825 and 1850; this new genre instantiated anxiety as the central affect of middle-class maternal subjectivity. This rhetorical genre analysis both extends our understanding of this period and the history of motherhood; it also contributes to the developing affective turn in rhetorical genre studies by offering a way to begin reading for affective uptakes.

Abstract This article explores how the children of immigrants queried and enacted the immigrant bargain narrative in their orientations to literacy and schooling at an afterschool program in New York City. The Mexican American elementary school students in this study expressed a common “immigrant bargain” narrative, a working-class immigrant family story of parents’ past and present sacrifices redeemed and validated through their children’s future academic merits (Louie 23; Smith 123). Language differences, transnational movements, and family histories affect how the children of immigrants imagine their parents’ migrations and their own transnational identities and literacies. Their identities as students, for example, compelled them to perceive their academic work ethic as repayment for their parents’ sacrifices, doubled with sometimes unreasonably high academic expectations for literacy achievement measured by merit. Literacy mentors and educators unfamiliar with the immigrant bargain should be attuned to its power for autobiographical writing, expressing both what motivates and constrains family migrations and second-generation students in their own academic goals. Afterschool program organizers, youth mentors, and school counselors especially should consider how the narrative builds confianza, or trust, and offers space for encouraging a transnational orientation to literacy in dialogue with immigrant families’ academic motives, goals, and preferences.

In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

This study examines how a supervisor’s delivery of negative feedback affects employees’ tendency to respond by either voicing their ideas or remaining silent. The results show that approbation, or the use of praise to soften face threat, was the most effective facework message for the supervisor to use when providing negative feedback. When employees felt more threatened, they reported that they would be less likely to use voice to help others and more likely to use silence defensively as a response, but as their perceptions of threat decreased, they generally reported that they were more likely to use voice to help others. The article discusses implications of these results, limitations of the study, and future directions of this research.

ABSTRACTUnder the influence of a reading style that Avital Ronell has called “narcoanalysis,” this article performs a reading of addiction and humility through David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Exploring both addiction and humility through the vector of habit, I argue that both habits indicate the non-self-sufficiency of a subject exposed to affection from outside. But while I position addiction alongside humility, both as habits, I also argue that humility parasitizes the totalizing logic of addictive habit. Neither identical to nor simply the opposite of addiction, humility exploits addiction's structure of uncontrollable relationality. Even addiction depends on the affectability or rhetoricity of a subject always already exposed in language. Humility holds this rhetoricity open.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

In this set of essays, the authors argue for the importance of affect and emotion in literacy education, teacher education, and classroom life. In the introduction, Boldt describes the authors’ shared belief in learning as happening within a landscape of relationships and emergent life in classrooms and beyond. The introduction makes clear that while the authors are writing from different intellectual traditions, they share a sense of anger about the fetishization of standardization, testing, and methods at the expense of ambiguity, improvisation, and unexpected, disruptive, and enlivening classroom relationships. In the first essay, Lewis demonstrates how emotion is regulated in a secondary English classroom and yet can never be fully regulated, giving rise to discomfort and to unexpected transformations of signs. In the second essay, Leander argues for a more emergent vision of lesson planning that begins with the body and its expression of energies and potentials in the present. In the final essay, Boldt urges that teachers be provided with opportunities to openly examine their negative emotional responses—including anxiety and, at times, aggression—to mismatches between children and what is required in a high-stakes environment. Throughout the essays, the authors enact rather than describe a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, laying their differences and their shared commitments side-by-side in the hope of creating for themselves and their readers new sets of relations and possibilities and, with those, the condition of potential for imagination and desire.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

Many studies have examined organizations’ use of specific types of online media, but few studies have examined how organizations generate dialogues and develop relationships by using multiple online communication platforms. This study takes an integrated approach by examining how top global organizations incorporate brand Web sites, Facebook, and Twitter to cultivate relationships with stakeholders. Its findings suggest that those particular online media are used similarly, that is, more for information dissemination than user engagement and more for one-way than two-way communication. The findings also suggest that the types of products promoted can affect the way that organizations use different online media to develop relationships.

From the early to mid 2000s, economists, pundits, and other commentators engaged in heated debate about the possibility of a bubble in the U.S. housing market. Prognosticating in a variety of public forums, debaters divided along largely ideological lines, with adherents of mainstream neoclassical economics producing a forceful narrative accord that a bubble was unlikely or impossible. Approaching this debate as a case of the powerful discourses that strive to keep markets intervention-free, this essay explores market bubbles as sites of discursive tension and professional stigma, seeking to understand how the allegation of a bubble imbricates expectations of decorum and provokes a constraining rhetorical response. With particular attention to the phenomenon of “bubble denial,” I highlight how rhetorical strategies of definition, insult, and risk dismissal functioned to sustain market confidence, discredit bubble predictors, and habituate decision makers to evolving market risk.

Review Article| March 01 2015 Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion Depression: A Public Feeling. By Ann Cvetkovich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012; pp. xi + 278. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist. By Barbara Tomlinson. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010; pp. viii + 279. $79.50 cloth; $30.95 paper.The Promise of Happiness. By Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; pp. x + 315. $89.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Erin J. Rand Erin J. Rand Erin J. Rand is Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University in New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (1): 161–176. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erin J. Rand; Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2015; 18 (1): 161–176. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.1.0161 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.

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

AbstractRecent scholarship on Kant and rhetoric suggests an inclusive relation between affectivity and cognitive judgment, but that position runs counter to a traditional philosophical opposition between sensibility and rationality. A way to overcome this opposition comes into view in the overlap in three significant areas between Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric. First, each allows that communicative capacities operate within the way a perceptual object or scene appears in the first place. Secondly, each significantly broadens such communicative capacities so as to include the entire conceptual form of one's disposition or orientation to the world as a whole. Thirdly, each links those broad mental dispositions to specifically affective states of mind. Taken together, the areas of overlap between Kantian judgment and Aristotelian rhetoric adumbrate an integrated picture of the affective sensibilities and cognitive capacities largely missing from the contemporary landscape.

Technology is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives in and out of schools, yet it escapes the sustained scrutiny of education researchers who contribute to the wider “orthodoxy of optimism” (Selwyn, 2014) accompanying all things technological. Challenging such orthodoxy begins with greater precision in language, replacing the broadness of technology with the more accurate specificity of software (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). This essay conceptually frames how software space—a term I use to refer to complex computational assemblages—affects the teaching of literature, arguing that software-powered technologies can be conducive to rigorous forms of literary study and research if they are used with an understanding of both the nature of software and the contexts in which software is produced and promoted. I draw on English education and related fields to propose the establishment of what I call new literatures.

The editorial team introduces the February issue, which focuses on the affects, ideologies, and textual objects that influence the teaching and learning of English.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

Abstract In philosophy and rhetorical studies, self-knowledge inscribes the absolutely indivisible line that separates “the human” from “the animal.” Autodeixis, the self-reflexive power of the I, is the condition both for language acquisition and for reason; it names an exceptional sort of auto–affection in which a being demonstrates the capacity to step back from itself enough to recognize itself and so to refer to itself as itself. What I propose in this article, however, is that autodeixis involves not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological as such (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical as if. The presumption of self-knowledge is not an innate quality of “the human” but the already relational condition for any living being that must repeat itself to be itself. A kind of preoriginary rhetoricity, I argue, is the very condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.

This article considers how technical communication practitioners and teachers can approach Donald Schön’s notion of problem setting as rhetorical and reflective work that offers us a richer, more precise language for articulating the technologies, narratives, and values from which problems appear as problems in the first place. The author posits that problem setting, when foregrounded in our work, adds value to the knowledge we make in practice rather than the knowledge we gain from stepping back and abstracting. After briefly describing problem setting as a significant yet invisible practice already underlying technical communication, he then describes a vignette from a digital marketing and design firm to foreground problem setting as creative, on-the-spot reflective work that we often use to invent, rather than discern, problems in unstable situations. The larger goal of this article is to further investigate Schön’s past construction in order to examine how the practice of problem setting affects our ability to act within the instability of digital, divergent, and knowledge-intensive settings—the kinds of settings we regularly face in the workplace and the classroom.

While grand claims have been made for the power of literature, there is a dearth of experimental research in English education examining the effects of reading literature—and specifically young adult literature—on students’ attitudes and moral development. Little work of any kind has been done on the efficacy of literary interventions in reducing adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. In response, this study examined the capacity of a dialogically organized, reader response–based literary unit focused on the young adult novel Speak to reduce adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. An experimental design was used with eighth-grade English language arts students in seven classes that were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Rape myth acceptance was measured using the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (Burt, 1980) and a researcher-created scale, the Adolescent Rape Myth Scale (ARMS). Results revealed that girls had significantly lower levels of pretest rape myth acceptance than boys, that intervention significantly lowered participants’ rape myth acceptance, and that there was no backlash to treatment. Factor analysis revealed a two-component solution for the ARMS representing common rape myths; further analysis found that treatment was more effective in reducing the component She Wanted It than the component She Lied. The results demonstrate the instructional value of young adult literature, support the use of reader response–based dialogic instruction, and show it is possible to effectively address topics such as rape at the middle school level. I argue that future research should examine whether similar literary units can affect attitudinal constructs such as homophobia, tolerance of bullying, and attitudes toward disabilities. The potential marginalization of this type of literary instruction due to current educational reforms is also discussed.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

This article argues for the use of experiential learning to teach eighteenth-century travel literature to undergraduates. Exploring the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, students wrote their own travelogues and reflected on the ways in which the experience affected how they analyzed travelogues for the rest of the semester.

Hospitals have encountered significant changes since implementing the hospitalist model. The changes have been most prevalent in the communication between patients, primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitalists. This comparative case study examines hospitalists’ and patients’ perceptions of communication challenges. During interviews, hospitalists reported that most of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. But during group sessions, hospitalists reported that less than one third of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. A comparison of patients’ and hospitalists’ perceptions demonstrates that there are critical gaps in patient education that affect patients’ care and their trust in their caregivers.