AbstractAccording to a dialectical approach to argumentation, a single argument can be seen as a dialogical "Why? Because!" sequence. Does this also apply to multimodal arguments? This paper focuses on multimodal arguments with a predominantly visual character and shows that dialogues are helpful for identifying and reconstructing arguments in multimodal communication. To include nonverbal arguments in dialectical argumentation theory, it is proposed to regard dialogue as mode-fluid. The account of multimodal argument as dialogue will be compared with Champagne and Pietarinen’s account of visual argument as movement.

AbstractIn this paper, I examine argumentative strategies that social movements can follow to counter hate speech. I begin by reconstructing the disagreement space of the abortion debate in Argentina as a polylogue, identifying the protests of the social movement Pañuelos verdes as argumentative contributions. I then describe two different forms of hate speech used in response to the movement’s protests. I argue that hate speech discredits the position of Pañuelos verdes in the abortion debate and depicts their protests as social threats. Subsequently, I discuss three argumentative strategies that social movements can implement to address hate speech: arguing with hate speakers; advocating for a dialogue with restrictions; and opting for argumentative disobedience. Arguing with hate speakers aims to make hate speakers retract hate speech by exposing the undesirability of using hateful messages in argumentative exchanges. Advocating for a dialogue with restrictions aims to impose limited bans on public speech in order to ensure equal participation of arguers in argumentation. Finally, I propose the notion of argumentative disobedience to describe communicative responses to hate speech that aim to bring bystanders in line with the position of social movements in public debates.

AbstractThe article undertakes the problem of a Wittgensteinian background of Toulmin’s model of argument. While appreciating the original character of the investigations set out by Toulmin in The Uses of Argument, Wittgenstein’s ideas taken to be forerunners of both Toulmin’s philosophical method and the particular elements of the model of substantial argument are traced backward, to Toulmin’s earlier books: The Philosophy of Science (Toulmin, The philosophy of science. An introduction, Hutchinson University Library, London, 1953) and An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Toulmin, An examination of the place of reason in ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950). The technique of pinpointing the constituents of that model in the books preceding The Uses of Argument is superposing the layout of Toulmin’s model on the crucial arguments concerning the earlier books: the scientific one based on Newtonian optics and the moral one concerning keeping promises. Such a procedure allows identifying backing for warrants and argument fields with the methods of representation in The Philosophy of Science and with modes of reasoning in An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics. The former is traced to passages 6.3 ff of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, while the latter—to the concept of word-games (the later Wittgenstein’s language games). The claim regarding Wittgenstein’s background is that in Toulmin’s view of Wittgenstein, some parts of Tractatus concerning representing are in line with Wittgenstein’s later reflections on language games; as well as that the overall method of The Uses of Argument goes along with Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach to philosophical problems that have to be placed in the context of their ordinary use.

Critical thinking and problem-solving are essential skills in management education. ChatGPT and other AI-assisted writing tools might disrupt conventional tools like essay writing and case-study analysis. The project incorporates bibliotherapy-inspired usage of ChatGPT and critical thinking and problem-solving frameworks to make students identify and solve real-life problems like social media addiction or time-management skills. ChatGPT is used as an assistant, coach, and/or motivator in the project. Students’ experiences are shared as blog posts. The impact of the project on developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills is measured by a post-and-then-pre survey questionnaire.

American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion by Richard Benjamin Crosby speaks to multiple areas within rhetorical studies, particularly for researchers interested in U.S. religion and politics, spatial rhetorics, presidential rhetoric, and kairos as a multilayered concept.Crosby is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has published extensively on race, politics, and religion. American Kairos fits well within his previous work analyzing Mormon, presidential, priestly, prophetic, and civil religious discourse. As he mentions in the preface, some of the archival research for this book took place during his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.Rather than a straightforward rhetorical history or close reading of the cathedral, American Kairos analyzes several rhetorical dimensions of the building's relationship to civil religion in the United States. The book's attention is thus split between two theses. As Crosby states early on, “The main argument of this book is that American Civil Religion, the implicit system of values, ideals, rituals, traditions, and symbols that lend shape and meaning to our citizenship, has never been properly imagined, and that, as a consequence, the nation's past is haunted by ghosts that presently grow louder and more violent” (xii). This set of claims sits alongside what this reader takes to be the overarching rhetorical claim of the book, which appears in the introductory chapter: “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—also variously named the Cathedral at Washington, Washington Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, or the National Cathedral—is one the of the great, unknown rhetorical triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship” (6). The two lines of argument surface in each chapter in some form, although they do not fully overlap.American Kairos is structured in an unorthodox manner. It is comprised of eight chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion, and split into two main sections. The first section explores the history and idea of the cathedral as it was conceptualized by prominent figures in its development, including Pierre L'Enfant, Henry Yates Satterlee, Francis B. Syre, and Mariann Edgar Budde. The second section examines the cathedral's “public space,” that is, its most well-known speeches and symbolic artifacts. This section begins with a close reading analysis of the cathedral's symbolism and spatial rhetorics by drawing on the theologically driven architectural vision of Philip Hubert Frohman, who served as the cathedral's principal architect from 1921 to 1972. It then moves into three chapters dedicated to major speeches delivered at the cathedral. The first analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” given five days before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next contrasts the speeches of George H. W. Bush, who dedicated the cathedral in 1990, and George W. Bush, who offered pulpit remarks for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Closing the trilogy is a chapter dedicated to the 2014 address of Cameron Partridge, an openly transgender Episcopal chaplain, and the 2018 interring of Matthew Shepard's remains within the cathedral, each highlighting the institution's role in promoting LGBTQ+ causes.Drawing liberally from the chapter on Dr. King, Crosby links various elements of the National Cathedral's rhetorical life to the concept of kairos. Building on James L. Kinneavy's theological work, Crosby defines kairos as “not just a moment; it is . . . an opening into what is truly real” (23). For Crosby, American kairos comprises “a sacred space wherein citizens could be moved by their experience of the country's heroes, deeds, and ideals, a space wherein citizenship becomes a holy practice” (23). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not offer precise definitions for these constituent terms—holy, religion, sacred, etc.—and thus does not fully articulate what separates “civil religion” from “religion” proper. By drawing on a wider and more critical literature on the intersection of faith, politics, religion, and society via the work of thinkers like Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Kyle Harper, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Neuhaus, Charles Taylor, or Joseph Massad, the book's claims regarding kairos and the cathedral might have delineated those concepts more sharply. Regardless, Crosby robustly identifies fractures and inconsistencies within American civil religion and shows how those divisions manifested within the cathedral's rhetorical career, concluding the book with a call for the United States “to imagine itself at the helm of something unique . . . by throwing out all notions that we are a nation with a distinct religious or ethnic past. From there, we will find that we remain as rich as ever in the raw materials of civil-religious potential” (233).Along the way, the book makes several notable academic contributions. First, it provides a first-rate close reading of the National Cathedral itself. Chapter Five, which synthesizes scholarship on spatial rhetorics with Frohman's “fourth dimension” approach to ecclesial architecture that prioritizes “an experience in which the worshipper loses all sense of time and space and becomes co-present with God,” is a major contribution of the book (144). It offers a useful guide for scholars who seek to understand the sacred as it intersects the rhetoric of space and place. Second, the first section of the book offers a fascinating history of the National Cathedral as a rhetorical site, perhaps providing a roadmap for future scholarship that seeks to perform a similar diachronic rhetorical analysis of a specific monument, building, or public space. Third, Crosby's meditations on kairos, particularly in the preface and introduction, offer an insightful and interdisciplinary take on an oft invoked and potentially ambiguous rhetorical concept. Additionally, the book does a good job of situating its criticism of the chosen rhetorical artifacts within their articulatory and civil religious contexts by referencing the cathedral archives and other primary sources. American Kairos is, if nothing else, a work of patient and extensive research that models the best practices of public address scholarship.That said, the book has several areas where it could be stronger. First, the overall structure confused this reader. Perhaps because of its patient composition, the chapter sequencing can jump across historical eras and arguments, making important throughlines between chapters difficult to identify beyond general themes. While beginning with L'Enfant's dream of a national church makes sense chronologically, the result is that the book begins with a detailed, contested history of a rhetorical institution across multiple chapters without fully establishing from the start the rhetorical dimensions of that institution. One of the casualties of this organizational design is that a sustained rhetorical analysis of the National Cathedral's relationship to other spaces in the District of Columbia as they exist today is not provided. This absence seems all the more striking given Chapter Three's focus on anti-Catholic attitudes among nineteenth century Protestants. This chapter could have been expanded by discussing the proximity of the National Cathedral to a major center of Catholic life in the United States—Maryland and northeast Washington D.C.—epitomized by the Catholic University of America (established 1887), which boasts its own cathedral on a rival hill a mere five miles away (The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, consecrated in 1920). That this information is left out seems like a missed opportunity.Second, the wide-ranging organizational structure leads to an attenuated sense of context at times across the book. For example, Chapter Four's discussion of Mariann Edgar Budde, the cathedral bishop since 2011, references several controversies related to President Donald Trump along with McCarthyism, xenophobia, immigration, and standards of civic dignity over the span of three pages. Chapter Three does not reference any anti-Catholic invective from Protestant pulpits prior to the nineteenth century or any of the significant criticisms of liberalism, democracy, and the United States offered by the Vatican during this era. Chapter One describes L'Enfant's vision of a “Great Church for National Purposes” that would be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination, but equally open to all” (48–49). Crosby returns to this description in later chapters, even asking, “Was L'Enfant's church supposed to be Christian?” (122). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough explanation of what a non-Christian church would look like and what would differentiate it from another kind of religious gathering. As these brief examples illustrate, while the book ably analyzes the rhetorical figures it selects, it sometimes struggles to capture key elements and the full complexity of the broader context, which may in part reflect the book's ambitious scope.Finally, a main contention of American Kairos is the polemic assertion that “we have never had a coherent civil religion” (230). Likening the National Cathedral's attempt to embody American civil religion to “a charioteer holding the reigns of wrangling horses” (143), Crosby laments the cathedral's serpentine history and mishmash of iconography as “brilliant but unsettling and perhaps nonsensical” (163). Crosby proposes a view of the National Cathedral as an embodiment of a new civil religion: I imagine his [L'Enfant's] church as a place of ritual and memorial, yes, but also a great center of civic education where students and citizens come to study, debate, and celebrate the rights, responsibilities, and implications of their citizenship, including the responsibility to atone for past sins. To this end, such a church might also host schools and libraries, symposia and debates, artists and scholars in residence, and of course great speeches and civil-religious sermons (229).To this reader, this description sounds a lot like a university—an educational institution with many departments that is focused much more on here than the hereafter—and less like a church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. An alternative reading of the “incoherence” of American civil religion as embodied within the life of the Washington National Cathedral might find that its contradictions reflect democracy, in all its messiness, itself. In that sense, it would be difficult to find a building that more perfectly encapsulates the full range of the American experiment than the National Cathedral in northwest Washington D.C.In conclusion, American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion is an insightful book that deserves to be on the shelf of any serious scholar of political rhetoric, civil religion, and religious discourse in the United States. It merits a readership that, like the cathedral itself, seeks to chart a path forward in divisive times.

This article presents a conceptual framework for integrating experiential learning into higher education, focusing on guest speaker engagements, company field trips, and project-based learning. Grounded in Kolb’s experiential learning theory and Bandura’s social learning theory, the framework aims to bridge the gap between academic theory and professional practice by fostering critical thinking, teamwork, and communication skills. The article also explores the potential of technologies like virtual reality and AI in enhancing experiential learning, while emphasizing future research on long-term impacts, cultural adaptation, and faculty development.

The article analyses the lyrics of selected songs by Lila Downs, paying special attention to the rhetorical appeals of logos, ethos and pathos they contain. The results of the analysis reveal all three types of rhetorical appeals, as well as passages combining two or all three of them. Pathos appeals to emotion, often using specific linguistic means (hyperbole, irony), ethos evokes both historical figures and indigenous people as examples, and logos involves predominantly social criticism.

The aim of the article is to revise views on the parodic nature of Plato’s funeral speech (epitaphios logos) entitled “Menexenus.” By demonstrating Plato’s literary virtuosity in the funeral speech and conveying his opinions regarding the social policies of democratic Athens, the author of the article seeks to challenge previous interpretations of the parodic nature of epitaphios logos in the “Menexenus.” Since Plato was writing during a period of establishing and asserting the authority of literary prose in opposition to the hitherto educative role played by poetry, the article also addresses the question of Plato himself establishing his authority through a symbiosis of philosophy and rhetoric. The author of the article draws attention to Plato’s significant contribution to revising views on the art of rhetoric by discussing it exhaustively and extensively in his dialogues, including the “Menexenus.”

Aaron Bruenger (he/they) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester where he teaches writing and communication courses. He is interested in rhetorical criticism and theory, multimodal literacy and composition, and relational pedagogy.Ellen C. Carillo (she/her) is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014), Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018), and The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021). Ellen is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks, handbooks, and collections.Esther M. Gabay (she/her) is a PhD student at The Ohio State University, focusing on writing, literacy, disability studies, and writing assessment. She has over a decade of experience teaching first-year writing in the two-year college, and was a collaborative member of the Faculty Initiative of Teaching Reading at Kingsborough Community College. Esther has published articles in TETYC and has chapters in the forthcoming edited collections What Is College-Level Writing (vol. 3) and College Teachers Teaching Reading: Practical Strategies for Supporting Postsecondary Readers.Catherine Gabor (she/her) is professor of rhetoric and acting associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Francisco. Her professional interests are digital authorship, the scholarship of administration, and ungrading. Her work appears in the Journal of Writing Program Administration, Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy, the Journal of Basic Writing, and several edited collections.Kara K. Larson (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Hillsborough Community College–SouthShore, Florida. She was a Conference on College Composition and Communication Scholars for the Dream Award recipient in 2021. A former middle school English language arts and reading teacher for ESL students, Kara has enjoyed taking learner-centered engagement and collaborative learning strategies into the college classroom.Bronson Lemer (he/him) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester. He is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq (2011). He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul.Jessica Nastal (she/they) is assistant professor of English at College of DuPage. With Mya Poe and Christie Toth, her edited collection Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education won the CWPA Best Book Award for 2022. Jessica serves on the editorial boards of Assessing Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Composition Studies.Katherine Daily O'Meara (she/her) is assistant professor of English and director of Writing across the Curriculum at St. Norbert College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Response to Writing, The WAC Journal, and multiple edited collections. Kat's current research focuses on accessible assessment and contract grading, student self-placement, equitable/antiracist pedagogies, WAC/WID, and writing program administration.Cheryl Hogue Smith (she/her) is a professor of English, WRAC coordinator, and liberal arts coordinator at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. She is a past chair of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) and a Fellow of the National Writing Project. Her work appears in TETYC, JBW, JAAL, English Journal, JTW, and in several edited collections.Jesse Stommel (he/him) is a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver. He is also cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy and Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop (2023) and coauthor of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (2018).Molly E. Ubbesen (she/they) is assistant professor and director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester. She applies critical disability studies to writing studies to support accessible and effective teaching and learning. Her work has been published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and Composition Forum. Additionally, she is an editor for the forthcoming collection Disability, Access, and the Teaching of Writing.Megan K. Von Bergen (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University, where she teaches first-year and upper-division composition courses. She is interested in inclusive, student-centered assessment practices and the programmatic structures needed to support them. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies and enculturation. In her spare time, she likes running (really) long distances.Griffin Xander Zimmerman (they/he) recently graduated with a PhD in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English from University of Arizona. Griffin's work appears in the Journal of Writing Assessment and the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. An interdisciplinary disability scholar, Griffin focuses his work on pedagogical approaches to neurodiversity, teacher training, disability rhetorics, and relationality through communities of care.

The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of “symbolic action.” However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene’s “Another Materialist Rhetoric” and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley’s edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham’s recent book, Where’s the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “right branch”) as well as the more traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as “symbolic action” (what Graham calls modern rhetoric’s “left branch”). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as “other” to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham’s angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about “symbolic action” as “situated action” that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson’s relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric’s left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not “need to re-engineer rhetoric” to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham’s perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham’s book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke’s thinking, Graham focuses on Burke’s early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke’s later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action), which have been crucial to interpreting him as a theorist of symbolic action, Graham argues that Permanence and Change is directly indebted to a Bergsonian process philosophy that emphasizes the rhetoricity of situations. For the Burke of Permanence and Change (which Graham calls Original Bergsonian Burke [OBB]), there is no ontological or epistemological gap between symbolic action and material situations. Instead, symbolic practices and the situations that underpin such practices (e.g., environmental ecologies, social ecologies, digital ecologies, etc.) can all be conceived immanently, as nested complex dynamic systems that reveal motives toward reality. Hence, according to Graham, available in the writings of OBB is a Bergsonian ontology that emphasizes relational processes all the way down and rejects any Cartesian dualism (or Kantian correlationism) between nature and culture and things and words. For OBB, which is also the Burke Debra Hawhee focuses on most extensively in her book Moving Bodies, symbolic action is the effect rather than the cause of material processes of becoming, and rhetoric is the act of responding to these material processes in a satisfying way that is always itself creative and inventive.After offering a novel way to think about Burke and his materialist contributions to rhetoric, chapter 3 of Graham’s text turns to Carolyn Miller’s highly influential essay “Genre as Social Action” (originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984). As her piece is deeply influenced by Permanence and Change, as well as the writings of Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz, Graham believes that rhetoricians can also read Miller’s formulation of genre as presupposing a Bergsonian ontology. While Miller does not mention Bergson in her essay, Graham argues that by appreciating the influence of Bergson on Burke and Schutz, it is possible to see that Bergson has indirectly influenced Miller’s account of genre. Graham argues that rhetoricians can also appreciate the link to Bergson in terms of how Miller’s project explicitly rejects “modernist materialism and the postmodern fetishization of discourse” (90). For Miller, the situations that produce genres—as repeated patterns of discourse—are not mechanistic and mechanical but active and dynamic processes that sediment through time (what Bergson calls duration). For Graham, then, the resources for interpreting Miller as “in some ways, the [discipline’s] original rhetorical new materialist” are already at play within her text (90). If we simply expand Miller’s understanding of situation so that, like OBB, it accounts for patterning and structuration not only at the social level but also at the flattened ontological level of movement and becoming, then Miller’s Genre as Social Action (GASA) framework can be reconceptualized in terms of a new materialist method that Graham calls Genre as Process (GAP). Whereas GASA conceives of genres as abstract nouns that emerge out of stable social patterns, GAP emphasizes genre-ing, “[t]he processes of structuring activity that occurs in situational hierarchies and guides situated action” (73). A GAP approach also helps realize Miller’s recent call for deeper engagement with new media technologies. As dynamic structures that are always entangled with their larger contexts and environments, new media technologies, such as Twitter, are best approached through a GAP framework that can appreciate the way these technologies repattern the norms of genre (e.g., letter to the editor genre on Twitter vs. traditional letter to the editor genre). Approaching GASA as GAP, then, allows rhetoricians to conceptualize genre in terms of dynamic patterns of circulation that are continually predisposed toward change and entropy. While effective genre deployment, like Burke’s rhetoric, requires kairotic responsiveness (or what Graham, borrowing from Whitehead, calls satisfaction), this situated responsiveness (especially in digital contexts) is itself inventive and, thus, continuous with the patterns of circulation that makes genre itself possible.Chapter 4 of Graham’s book concludes the conceptual portion of his project. In this chapter, Graham argues that a GAP framework can enrich not only traditional rhetorical (left branch) perspectives but also RNM. While Graham identifies as a new materialist rhetorician who favors the ontological turn in rhetorical studies, he believes that part of what makes the GAP framework valuable is its tendency to move RNM back toward a study of “the recurring experiences of practicing rhetors” (122). Too often, Graham argues, advocates of RNM adopt a “zoom-out” (distributed agency) perspective that makes it challenging to locate rhetorical agents’ strategic, situated practices. A GAP approach, by contrast, returns to the situated rhetor without rendering their agency discrete, atomistic, or self-contained. By conceptualizing rhetorical agency as the accomplishment of “structuring structures” that produce performatively enacted boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, GAP enables both a “zoom-out” and “zoom-in” approach that can account for the rhetorical strategies that satisfy particular human situations and exigencies. Graham’s framework, thus, not only improves traditional rhetorical perspectives by making them more process-oriented but also enriches RNM approaches by making them more suited to analyze rhetorical practices and discourses.The remainder of Graham’s book is a sampling of case studies that apply the GAP framework to cultural artifacts. In chapter 5, Graham discusses the qualitative research he produced studying the work of Brandon, a graphic designer who consults with various companies to create novel digital products. Graham argues that the novel digital products that Brandon produces for these companies can be understood through a GAP framework. Across his consulting work, Brandon must demonstrate an ongoing sensitivity to the genre constraints of various situations (that are ecological, social, and digital) to effectively satisfy his clients and consumers—a practice Graham calls “fit foraging.” Graham argues that a clear example of this approach to “fit foraging” is the holiday e-card video game that Brandon produced for the Ryzex Corporation (a UPC scanner manufacturer). After being asked by Ryzex to create a novel holiday e-card that could satisfy the company’s various clients, “Brandon designed a shooting-gallery Flash game that used Ryzex UPC scanners as ranged weapons and barcode-marked boxes as appropriate targets” (126). According to Graham, this shooting gallery game was an excellent example of fit foraging because it combined the genres of the holiday e-card, shooting gallery games, and Ryzex’s unique brand identity to produce a novel outcome.In chapter 6, Graham turns his attention to scholarship on computational rhetoric. Focusing largely on his own work deploying content-analytic methods, Graham argues that these approaches work through an ongoing dialectic between intuition, which he defines as “an experiential approach to metaphysical inquiry” (139), and abstraction. This Bergsonian framing is valuable, Graham argues, because it locates practices of quantification in a GAP framework that understands data as “aggregations of intuitions rendered symbolically so that the patterns, abstracted for the local sites of situated action, become more clearly visible” (149). Hence, for Graham, computational rhetoric should be approached not as “other” to more traditional rhetorical perspectives but as a distinct genre of rhetorical inquiry that is compatible with his larger GAP framework. Graham’s insights in this chapter also have important implications for scholarship centered on the rhetoric of science. Like content analytic methods, scientific inquiry can be understood generally as a process of abstracting the intuitive and forging a fit with material reality through embodied experimentation. Graham’s Bergsonian approach to the rhetoric of science is, thus, compatible with scholars, such as Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, without needing to draw extensively on their distinct science and technology studies vocabulary. If we simply start with a Bergsonian relational ontology, Graham argues, all rhetorical practices emerge out of the nexus between intuition, the patterns of stabilization (or duration) that result from intuition, and the processes of symbolic abstraction that attempt to provisionally capture intuition and duration in a satisfying way.In chapter 7, Graham returns to a more specific case study that deals with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Arguing that the Trump moment poses a crisis to traditional studies of presidential genre, Graham claims that a GASA framework can help make sense of Trump’s success as a rhetor. Graham’s method for analyzing Trump’s rhetoric works at two registers. First, Graham shares the results of a quantitative study he conducted to test the widely held conviction that “the 2016 presidential primary [featuring Donald Trump was] . . . more negative . . . [than] prior campaign cycles” (165). Contrary to popular perception, Graham shows that his study reveals that a similar level of negativity characterized previous primary debates and that there is no stark difference. Graham then zooms in on the specific rhetorical strategies enacted by Trump during the primary debates, focusing in particular on his infamous exchange with Marco Rubio about hand (penis) size. Graham’s main argument here is that Trump’s communication during this exchange (and others) can be appreciated in terms of a Laconic rhetoric genre that “leverages the powerful organizing structures of reality TV and Twitter flame wars to supplant the traditional genre-ing processes of political oratory” (176). Graham argues, furthermore, that this same Laconic genre did not work when Rubio deployed it because his situated responsiveness did not align with “the media apparatuses that supported . . . [Trump’s] rhetoric” (176). Graham’s case study in this chapter, thus, shows how a GAP approach to presidential genre, especially when paired with computational rhetoric, can reveal illuminating insights about rhetors. While a historical perspective on negativity in presidential primary debates cannot capture, on its own, the qualities that made the Trump presidency unique, Graham’s GAP framework is able to locate the specific “structuring structures” that made Trump such a powerful contemporary rhetor.Chapter 8 concludes Graham’s text by recapping key theses and offering a glossary that defines key terms. My summary sense of the key takeaway is that Graham offers scholars a new materialist perspective on genre (GAP) that can account for the diverse material structures that pattern symbolic meaning in historically specific contexts. Effective responsiveness to this new materialist conception of genre works in terms of Whiteheadian satisfaction, or fit foraging, which I would describe as an ontologically situated enactment of kairos (similar to the account offered by Debra Hawhee in Bodily Arts). In addition to providing a recap of his project and clearly defining key terms in the book, the concluding chapter of Graham’s text notes some of the book’s limitations. Some of the critical limitations raised here include a need for more careful engagement with cultural rhetorics (i.e., rhetorics that study the performance of identity and embodied subjectivity), applying GAP to old media in addition to new media, and considering GAP more directly in relation to sound studies.While Graham does a good job acknowledging the limits of his project, I’d like to conclude this review by discussing what I perceive as a few more limitations. First, in addition to engaging more directly with cultural rhetorics, Graham’s text could benefit from a more robust theorization of power and its effect on the patterning of genre. For example, while I agree that new materialism should explore the processes that produce the situated boundary of the human, I believe, following the interventions of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Armond Towns, that what constitutes a “fitting” response within this domain is overdetermined by structures of racialization (as well as patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.). Graham’s work does not discuss the boundary of the human in this way, and his case studies seem to overlook the problem of positionality in relation to genre. It would be interesting, as part of Graham’s ontological account of genre formation, if he considered how genres emerge out of historically specific patterns of exclusion and bordering.Second, while I find Graham’s advocacy of “zoom-in” approaches to RNM compelling, I feel that his book could engage more with the nonhuman. Most of Graham’s case studies foreground the materiality of new media, but they say little about concrete extrahuman processes of mattering. I’d like to hear more from Graham about the role of physical ecosystems and nonhuman entities (like plants, animals, and even inorganic matter) in the dynamic materialization of genres. It seems that from an RNM perspective, something as banal as the energy used to power new media technologies would play a constitutive role in genre formation.Finally, there is the question of whether turning to Bergson can resolve rhetoric’s crisis of disciplinary identity. Bergson, after all, is first and foremost a philosopher, and Graham’s project could have benefitted from more argumentative scaffolding to support the case that Bergson was doing philosophy from a rhetorical vantage. Perhaps if Graham returned to some of the earlier disciplinary debates over rhetoric and philosophy that occurred between the late 1960s and early 1980s, he could locate more commonplaces for exploring these tensions and justifying why Bergson’s relational metaphysics should be conceived as an ontological approach to rhetoric.Limitations notwithstanding, Graham should be praised for this important contribution to the discipline. Graham demonstrates a masterful understanding of RNM, computational rhetoric, and thinkers associated with the left branch of rhetoric. And his ability to synthesize all this work into a unified theory is very impressive.I look forward to reading new scholarship in genre studies that builds on this text, and I look forward to following the theoretical debates it prompts with respect to the compatibility between RNM and traditional rhetorical perspectives. I also look forward to future scholarship that situates Graham’s process-oriented account of rhetoric in relation to a larger historical context and disciplinary genealogy. As scholars such as Debra Hawhee, Thomas Rickert, Scot Barnet, and Mari Lee Mifsud have all shown (at least indirectly), perspectives that resonate with the process philosophy of Bergson can be found in Greek antiquity as well as the Homeric period that predates Greek antiquity. More work should be done to connect these historical threads so that rhetoric’s ontological relationship to process, change, movement, and indeterminacy can be fully appreciated.

The ability to carefully craft writing for an intended audience is crucial in creating persuasive rhetorical arguments. Learning to do so requires knowledge beyond IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). Many graduate students learn by mimicking this structure, yet lack audience awareness and overuse jargon, producing low-readability texts. What is more, they increasingly rely on AI-based writing tools that mimic the same structures that are already often poorly written. The results are too often uncommunicative articles that fail to persuade the intended audience. Therefore, we suggest writing pedagogy includes a deeper understanding of effective written science communication using the rhetorical triangle. As graduate students most readily understand the importance of logos, i.e., the scientific content, our job as writing instructors should be to emphasize the role a carefully aimed pathos and ethos plays in producing highly readable, persuasive, publishable articles. To this end, this paper first presents a brief background on the IMRaD structure before outlining the much-overlooked role of the rhetorical triangle in scientific writing. Specifically, we offer a detailed table for graduate students to use in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Background: The bulk of international trade has led to increasing demand for specialized professional communication texts in multilingual contexts. Persuasive language is required in promotional discourse to sell products. When transactions are carried out with foreign countries, translation becomes essential for successful commercial exchange. Literature review: Persuasion requires the use of positive evaluation to describe products. This article addresses the need to contrast the expression of positive evaluation in English and Spanish online promotional cheese descriptions. Research questions: 1. What are the linguistic resources used to express positive evaluation in English and Spanish in online promotional texts of the cheese industry? 2. What is the distribution across parts of speech and semantic categories and subcategories between these two languages? 3. How can semantic tags in bilingual comparable corpora provide useful information for translation practice? Methodology: Empirical data have been extracted from Online Cheese Descriptions (OCD), a semantically tagged English-Spanish corpus, and classified using the Appraisal Framework into the subcategories of appreciation, judgment, affect, and graduation. Results and discussion: Tests of statistical significance have revealed cross-linguistic differences, mainly in appreciation, thus leading to a qualitative analysis. The findings also include a large inventory of all evaluative items that express appreciation for cheeses in both languages and general guidelines for translators. Conclusions: This multilayer corpus-based analysis has yielded relevant data that can be used to enhance the second-language writing and translation processes required for marketing cheese in English and Spanish, thus supporting international professionals in their communication in multilingual contexts.

AbstractA convincing argument can change a discussant’s commitment regarding the acceptability of a claim, but the same effect can be achieved by examining evidence. Observing objects or events that count as evidence for or against the acceptability of a statement can change one’s commitment regarding that statement. If we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through argumentation, can we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through evidence? In this paper, we defend an affirmative answer. We introduce and discuss the conceptual implications of evidentiary fallacies as fallacies committed when evidence is fabricated or suppressed during an attempt to resolve disagreement using proof. We then apply the notion of evidentiary fallacy to two real-life examples of mis-executed evidentiary procedures. We conclude that the notion of evidentiary fallacy can contribute to a more comprehensive fallacy theory and can foster new and broadly applicable critical skills.

AbstractThis paper introduces moral argument analytics, a technology that provides insights into the use of moral arguments in discourse. We analyse five socio-political corpora of argument annotated data from offline and online discussions, totalling 240k words with 9k arguments, with an average annotation accuracy of 78%. Using a lexicon-based method, we automatically annotate these arguments with moral foundations, achieving an estimated accuracy of 83%. Quantitative analysis allows us to observe statistical patterns and trends in the use of moral arguments, whereas qualitative analysis enables us to understand and explain the communication strategies in the use of moral arguments in different settings. For instance, supporting arguments often rely on Loyalty and Authority, while attacking arguments use Care. We find that online discussions exhibit a greater diversity of moral foundations and a higher negative valence of moral arguments. Online arguers often rely more on Harm rather than Care, Degradation rather than Sanctity. These insights have significant implications for AI applications, particularly in understanding and predicting human and machine moral behaviours. This work contributes to the construction of more convincing messages and the detection of harmful or biased AI-generated synthetic content.

AbstractIn this paper, we present a model of pathos, delineate its operationalisation, and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of natural language argumentation. We understand pathos as an interactional persuasive process in which speakers are performing pathos appeals and the audience experiences emotional reactions. We analyse two strategies of such appeals in pre-election debates: pathotic Argument Schemes based on the taxonomy proposed by Walton et al. (Argumentation schemes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), and emotion-eliciting language based on psychological lexicons of emotive words (Wierzba in Behav Res Methods 54:2146–2161, 2021). In order to match the appeals with possible reactions, we collect real-time social media reactions to the debates and apply sentiment analysis (Alswaidan and Menai in Knowl Inf Syst 62:2937–2987, 2020) method to observe emotion expressed in language. The results point to the importance of pathos analysis in modern discourse: speakers in political debates refer to emotions in most of their arguments, and the audience in social media reacts to those appeals using emotion-expressing language. Our results show that pathos is a common strategy in natural language argumentation which can be analysed with the support of computational methods.

AbstractIn this paper I apply the epidemiological model of the spread of beliefs and how they become cultural representations to the field of fallacies. The model suggests that beliefs tend to replicate as a virus does in a potential epidemic, and those strains that are dominant in a given socio-cultural sphere become cultural representations. My ultimate aim is to denounce the fact that some presumptive argumentation schemes are widely applied as definitive arguments, but turn out to be instances of common and traditional fallacies. Moreover, some such fallacies have managed to colonise the human mind and become cultural representations in society today. Adopting the approach I advocate here, we could say that the fallacy has become a belief, which has then managed to replicate like a virus, and finally the fallacy has become a cultural representation. One of the great harms that results from this process is that it is very difficult to open up effective lines of argument that expose the fallacious nature of these new and perverse cultural representations.

Abstract: This article provides a systematic analysis from an emic (culture-specific) perspective of the role of implicitness in classical Chinese rhetoric. Although implicitness is among the defining characteristics of East Asian rhetorical traditions and contributes to misunderstanding of ancient Chinese texts, there has been limited discussion of the role played by implicitness in classical Chinese rhetoric and argumentation. This article explicates the nature of implicitness rooted in the high context Chinese language, literary, and philosophy traditions, and explores the function of implicitness as a strategic means of persuasion in influential texts in the Chinese rhetorical tradition. The essay contributes to a multicultural knowledge of Chinese classical rhetoric beyond the Eurocentric traditions for understanding rhetoric, language, and communication in non-European cultures.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

The emergence of populist politicians internationally in the past twenty years is remarkable. This phenomenon has prompted voluminous academic analyses: scholars from political science, political theory, and media studies have analyzed populism in books, articles, and edited collections. Rhetoric as a discipline has been relatively quiet. Populist Rhetorics: Case Studies and a Minimalist Definition proposes to address the dearth of work in disciplinary rhetoric not by inviting scholars identified with rhetorical studies exclusively (though some are) to analyze populism but by asking all the contributors to take a “rhetorical approach” in analyzing the discourse of a populist politician. The editors associate a rhetorical approach with, especially, close readings, and each contributor analyzes at least one text of a populist politician to see how the text works to persuade the audience the text invokes. This disciplined (in both senses of the word) approach marks this volume as important for readers of Rhetoric and Public Affairs and gives the volume a unity that many collections lack, further advanced by the apparent agreement among the contributors to raise fundamental questions concerning how to understand populism; to wit, should populism be thought of as an ideology or as a style? Since the chapters include populists from both the left and from the right, and since the contributors are committed to a rhetorical approach, it is not surprising that the authors individually and collectively conclude that populism is performative, not ideological. Finally, this volume gives witness to what is truly remarkable (some might say scary) about our particular moment: that populism is international. The case studies examine the rhetoric of populists from Britain, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Venezuela, and the United States.The object of Paul Elliot Johnson's analysis in “Populist Melancholy” is the Republican Platform of 2016, adopted by the party without change in 2020. That the party decided to reproduce the same platform in 2020 following the Trump presidency suggests to Johnson that the grievances that the platform identifies could not be addressed by political action; otherwise, why weren't at least some of the grievances ameliorated while Trump was in office? On Johnson's reading, the “people” of the Republican imaginary see themselves as weak and powerless—victims. He argues that Freud's analysis of melancholia captures well both the feeling of loss that the Trump base experiences and its inability to articulate a positive path to addressing this loss—thus, on his analysis, the pathology of the current American right. In defining Republican populism in psychological terms, Johnson's thesis recalls Richard Hofstadter's argument that populism is fueled by status grievance and resentment, rather than material conditions.In “Voltagabbana Rhetorics: Turncoating as a Populist Strategy in Pandemic Times,” Pamela Pietrucci notes a propensity of populists to practice a voltagabbana, a turncoat or flip-flopping rhetoric. She notes that Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and Matteo Salvini—all identified as right-wing populists—changed both their positions and their practice with regard to masking during the Covid pandemic; none attempted to reconcile the contradictions in their advice or practice. Pietrucci examines in detail the voltagabbana rhetoric of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League and the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy in 2019. As is typical of populists, Salvini lacks an historical connection to a consistent ideology; he began his career as a Communist while at present his politics are right-wing. According to Pietrucci, the positions Salvini advances are based on the analysis produced by “The Beast,” a search engine that identifies the terms, themes, and memes most prevalent in Internet computer searches. If “hydroxychloroquine” is trending well, then presumably Salvini would endorse it as an effective Covid cure that “bureaucrats” are keeping from the public. On Pietrucci's analysis, Salvini has no ideology. He might be labeled a populist of “algorithmic” opportunism (73). Ultimately, the politics that Salvini practices, she concludes, is one of disavowal, whose inconsistency is in the service of deniability (75–76).In “Brexit, YouTube and the Populist Rhetorical Ethos,” Alan Finlayson maintains that populism should be understood more as a political style or performance than an ideology, drawing extensively on work in rhetorical studies to make his case. Finlayson argues that ethos is central to populist rhetoric, not merely its premise but also its conclusion (86). The populist appeals to voters to become “the people” that they already are, he maintains. The object of his analysis is the YouTube video, “The Truth About Brexit,” created by the popular conspiracy-theorist Paul Joseph Watson, which had nearly a million views during the Brexit debate. Finlayson's analysis is attentive to the effective use that Watson makes of the affordances of YouTube as a medium as well as the discursive contradictions in Watson's narrative.In “Populism and the Rise of the AFD in Germany,” Anne Ulrich, Olaf Kramer, and Dietmar Till report the rise of populist movements from the right, especially the AFD (Alternative for Germany), that have gained prominence via the use of a rhetoric of provocation suited to online broadcast. The authors maintain that new media create spaces for provocateurs to perform an identity and identification with “the people.” The authors offer close readings of speeches by Björn Höcke, a prominent member of the New Right, and by Alice Weidel, co-chair of AFD. The Höcke speech, broadcast live on YouTube, employs rhetorical devices typical of demagoguery: breaking taboos, stoking indignation, and inspiring negative emotions (122), all with an intention to provoke. To this end, Höcke identified the “‘true victims’” of World War II as the inhabitants of Dresden killed in the allied bombing in February 1945 (125). Weidel is similarly provocative in her characterization of immigration as a “Great Replacement” strategy that installs fertile “‘headscarf girls’” and “‘knife men’” as the basis for a new majority (130). The racists metonymies are made for circulation as memes, the authors argue.Sophia Hatzisavvidou analyzes the populist rhetoric of socialist Alexis Tsipras who became prime minister of Greece in 2015. As a result of the 2007–08 world-wide recession, Greece's debt was staggering. The European Union, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank conditioned a bailout on Greece's enacting of severe austerity measures. But round after round of tax increases, while producing much general suffering, seemed to make economic matters worse; thus, “the crisis” of 2015. Hatzisavvidou analyzes Tsipras's campaign of resistance to the austerity measures, characterizing Tsipras's rhetoric as a moralizing discourse that contrasted “the people” as morally superior—more genuine than the technocratic elites. The technocrats’ austerity program failed on its own economic terms, Tsipras maintains, but succeeded in creating a resistant people with a “‘purity’” (156), who want “to take their lives into their own hands,” and who stand up to “‘blind conservative forces’” (157). Drawing on Aristotle's three types of rhetoric, Hatzisavvidou characterizes Tsipras's speeches, surprisingly, as epideictic rather than deliberative, surprising because, like deliberative rhetoric for Aristotle, Tsipras's speeches advocate a future-oriented solution to a political problem. Still, the speeches are indeed epideictic because the audience addressed lacks the power to solve the problem: the bureaucrats held the purse strings, and Greece had no choice but to accede to the bankers’ demands.Viktor Orbán can credibly claim to be the model for the contemporary populist-right nationalist leader. His rhetoric is the subject of Miklós Sükösd's “Victorious Victimization: Orbán the Orator—Deep Securitization and State Populism in Hungary's Propaganda State.” Sükösd finds the template for Orban's subsequent rhetoric in his speech at Heroes Square, attacking Soviet occupation in 1989; at the time, Orban was the leader of the leftist Fidesz party. The speech set the pattern for speeches that Orban gave annually since his election as prime minister in 2010. On Sükösd's analysis, in Orban's case a populist rhetoric served first a liberal and then an illiberal politics. Drawing on a content analysis of forty-one of these speeches, Sükösd's argues that Orban's rhetoric is especially notable for fear-mongering: Orban exaggerates threats to Hungary's sovereignty and national character from EU bureaucrats and immigrants. If the Hungarian voter is especially vulnerable to such threats, the history of Hungary can explain why: Hungary was dominated by the Hapsburgs in the eighteenth century, followed by the Russians, then, in the twentieth century first by the Nazis and then the Soviets. Sükösd's essay is notable for giving a relatively rich account of how populist appeals are rooted in national character. He writes, “Themes of fear, suffering and gloom occupy central places in Hungarian national identity and culture” (179). Hungary sees itself as “ever the guiltless victim of contempt, assault and injury perpetrated by others” (179).” Sükösd's analysis shows in a compelling way how perceived victimhood and its attendant resentments are fertile ground for the populist.Pierre Ostiguy identifies his analysis specifically as rhetorical in his chapter, “The Voice and Message of Hugo Chávez: A Rhetorical Analysis.” By a rhetorical approach, he appears to mean not only an analysis that features close readings but also an analysis of “relational-performative” elements, more traditionally the fourth canon, actio. Ostiguy identifies a number of features of Hugo Chávez's rhetoric that mark his brand of populism as unusual and extreme. The speeches are uniquely characterized by expressions of passionate love: for fatherland (la patria), for the flag, and for Christ, reflecting values that are more typically associated with right-wing politics. Famously aligning himself and his movement with Símon Bolívar, Chávez claims to be less an heir to that original revolution than its re-incarnation and extension, as if he and his movement were pre-ordained to bring about its messianic completion. Furthermore, Chávez would not merely represent the Venezuelan people but embody them. Chávez, Ostiguy writes, “is the people.”Like other populists Chávez also shares a penchant for “the low,” an important idea that Ostiguy advanced in earlier work. “The low” manifests as a general vulgarity that is intended to shock, especially in coarse, personal insults. Ostiguy notes as exemplary a Chávez speech in March 2006, in which he “unloaded” on George Bush (following the invasion of Iraq) with personal insults, including calling Bush a donkey, a genocider, a drunk, a sicko, a coward and worse. Equally important is Chávez's actio. Speaking without a manuscript or teleprompter, Chávez exhibits an apparent spontaneity but delivers with cadence and rhythm, in a deep baritone, punctuated by an expressive arm waving.This is an excellent, well-conceived collection. Each of the chapters reviews the literature on populism and offers a taxonomy for classifying and understanding it. Each also critically analyzes at least one work that bears the populist label. The chapters demonstrate the value of a rhetorical take on populist rhetoric. It invites rhetoric scholars to take a seat at the table. We should heed that invitation.

When we think of the civil rights movement, imagery of the mass meeting almost immediately comes to mind. We imagine the immense crowds at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, where more than a quarter million people assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Reflecting on the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., we might also think of the religious and liturgical quality that marked these mass meetings. Yet, despite their influence and importance, the use of religious genres at civil rights mass meetings remains an often-overlooked aspect of the movement. Elizabeth Ellis Miller's Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting provides a rhetorical history of the mass meeting by examining how these meetings drew upon ritual liturgies to facilitate collective political action. Miller's primary argument throughout the book is that the mass meeting drew upon the genres of prayer, song, and testimony to provide attendees rhetorical scaffolding for political participation. The book shifts attention from the speakers and speeches of the mass meeting, about which there exists a wealth of scholarship, to the constituent members of the mass meeting themselves: ordinary Black Americans. The book offers an important theoretical contribution by moving scholarly attention beyond the bounds of normative deliberation toward the rhetorical role of religious practices. As a result, the book will not only interest those who study public and religious rhetoric but also those interested in affect and deliberation.In the first of six chapters, Miller lays out the rhetorical concept of “liturgy of change” and grounds it in genre theory to facilitate her goal of examining how the mass meeting transformed “audience members in seats to activists” (106). The next three chapters include analyses of three genres that typified the mass meeting: song, prayer, and testimony. Miller draws on archival research to reconstruct the mass meeting, including notes and schedules, first-person accounts, and interviews. The chapter progression of the book is designed to reflect the order in which liturgies would be performed in the Black church. The fifth chapter explores the rhetorical significance of the liturgies by examining the frequent presence of counter protestors at mass meetings. This complication of the rhetorical situation highlights the mass meeting as a “watched, visible space,” specifically how activists responded with a radical pacifism made possible through liturgical enactment (130). The concluding chapter turns to the contemporary use and limits of liturgy as activism.Chapter two, “Sounding Civic Identity: Freedom Song Invention at the Mass Meeting,” attends to activist song as an example of genre invention and, at the same time, the rhetorical potential of sound “as a constitutive resource” (50). Freedom songs required the leader to engage in “selection, adaption, and performance” (50). Miller explains how these songs articulated a collective identity often in the very spaces where this identity was denied (50). Thus, songs like “Woke Up this Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom” and “This Little Light of Mine” demonstrate the constitutive potential of sound for configuring collective identities and establishing an activist ethos of radical pacifism. In chapter three, Miller turns to “activist prayer,” arguing that it contained a “paradox of peace and the unruly” (79). Miller argues that, while prayer remains an overlooked genre of the movement due to it being “not obviously activist” (77), collective prayer had an important rhetorical function that allowed activists to simultaneously “display peace” and engage in protest in public and segregated spaces (77). Here, Miller examines both directed and pedagogic prayers, with the former defined as prayer led by a speaker and the latter as the collective teaching of activist prayers. Thus, through “genre, gesture, and theology” (79), participants collectively “crafted [a] reverent resistant identity and posture” and, in doing so, “constituted themselves as a peaceful group insistent on change” (78). Drawing on Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt's notion of “unruly genres,” Miller defines prayer as “unruly” because it “violated racialized norms regarding what spaces Black bodies should inhabit” and “unsettled religious norms for where prayer should occur” (79).The fourth chapter explores the use of testimony at the mass meeting. Drawing on the scholarship of Geneva Smitherman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Rhea Estelle Lathan, Miller suggests that testimony provided participants a flexible genre with which to “testify” to their lived experience of racism and to “take the first steps into collective participation and rhetorical performance” (101). The overarching claim of the book, that the mass meeting enabled rhetorical participation and moved attendees toward democratic ends, is most clearly illustrated in this chapter. Miller explains how the “fuzzy” liturgical genre of testimony was “both sacred and free-form,” which allowed participants to articulate their experiences, connecting their individual stories to a collective account of racial justice (102). The fifth chapter contextualizes how the three genres were situated within the broader landscape of radical pacifism. Examining the “external engagement dimension” of the civil rights mass meeting, Miller argues that “faithful genres” were used as rhetorical strategies to respond at mass meetings to the disruptive presence of counter protestors. The genres from the previous three chapters—prayer, song, and testimony—were used to respond kairotically before audiences that included segregationists and law enforcement (146).The final chapter, “Faith, Racial Justice, and Rhetorical Activism in the Twenty-First Century,” turns to the contemporary “limits of liturgy” for activism. Miller distinguishes between Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement, paying specific attention to three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement. Miller argues that comparing the two movements serves to “deepen our appreciation of the intellectual and sociopolitical vision of BLM, while also pointing toward the limits of liturgy as an animating concept in the movement for Black freedom” (151). The three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement are as follows. First, the mass meeting, while ostensibly egalitarian, was still beholden to a “gendered vision of freedom and citizenship” and “circumscribed the participation of women along with queer young activists” (151). Second, leaders of the era acted in ways that were antithetical to the Christian morals and values of the movement, particularly when it came to sexual ethics. Third, the movement was plagued by a frequent misalignment of the movement's leaders’ vision and the issues affecting ordinary Black people. Miller notes how BLM, founded by three queer Black women, has responded to these issues in its adoption of a restorative justice framework and attention to a range of social justice issues, including exploitative capitalism and criminal justice reform (156). In the final few pages of the book, Miller outlines recent examples of liturgy as activism to challenge the “decline narrative” of religious activism in rhetorical studies. Specific examples here include Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, a book that borrows from Black church liturgies and orders of service for its structure, as well as President Barack Obama's eulogy following the mass shooting at Emmanuel Baptist Church, which concluded with the hymn “Amazing Grace.”This concluding chapter seems at odds with the argument that Miller makes in the rest of the book. While the book explores liturgy as collective action through ordinary Black participants, the concluding chapter turns to organizational critique, comparing the leadership and ethos of BLM with that of the civil rights movement. This disjunction between the rhetorical affordances of collective action and a concluding chapter that focuses instead on leaders and organizational structure detracts from Miller's primary argument as I understood it: that the rhetorical power of a radical pacifism was made actionable through the collective enactment of “liturgies of change.” The concluding chapter not only seems inconsistent with the book's argument but potentially overlooks interesting theoretical questions and tensions, such as the relationship between genre and affect within the mass meeting and the broad implications of liturgy and radical pacifism for rhetorical theory. And while Miller attempts to confront the “decline narrative” of religious activism, her examples largely focus on speakers and leaders rather than collective action. Earlier in the book, Miller illustrates how liturgy has unique rhetorical capacities—to reconcile contradictions, to embody radical pacifism in the face of hostility, and to do constitutive work in forming collective identities. Exploring how such genres and practices could be adapted for the present might not only shed light on liturgy's continued rhetorical potential for activism but also open lines of inquiry consistent with the book's premise.The primary contribution of Liturgy of Change is its attention to religious genres as activist rhetorical strategies. Miller calls attention to the mass meeting as a constitutive event, one that was embodied and relied on the affective potential of these genres and their attendant practices: gesture, movement, song, prayer, and testimony. By providing participants with genres of rhetorical participation familiar to the Black church, the mass meeting moved those assembled to political action. Miller's attention to the rhetoricity of religious liturgies and the mass meeting as a constitutive space joins a growing body of scholarship that examines nondiscursive rhetorics that has long been overlooked in favor of the ostensibly rational and explicitly discursive. From a methodological perspective, Miller's book is useful in demonstrating, through its archival research and reconstruction of events, how this kind of scholarship might be done. Liturgy of Change thus succeeds in offering new theoretical trajectories and objects for rhetorical inquiry while providing a methodological approach for studying them. And, as the book encourages us to consider, increased attention to the relationship between religious rhetorics and social movements might indicate new paths for rhetorical engagement, working toward a more just future through genres and practices that show “moral vision, creativity, perseverance, and urgency” (162).

Abstract This essay contextualizes and reads Albert Jeremiah Beveridge's “Government for Porto Rico” in order to discern the ways in which he crafts a rhetoric of Americanity in the Senate debate over the 1900 Foraker Act relating to Puerto Rico. Drawing from textual and archival sources, I argue that Beveridge (operating within a complex political and personal context) crafts a vision of Americanity that articulates social Darwinist commitments to Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy, a reinvigoration of Manifest Destiny, and a unique elucidation of American civil religion. Beveridge draws from familiar tropes in his earlier, and more famous, speeches to argue for a logic of possession that would see Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans owned by the United States but not part of the nation, because such integration would contaminate the body politic.

As national parks saw a significant uptick in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic, so too has scholarly attention to these public symbols increased. The Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands by Mary E. Stuckey offers a complex understanding of how America's national parks and public lands do “political work” (22). By evaluating how American presidents have rhetorically positioned public lands, Stuckey argues that these spaces invite specific discursive lenses to national identity, citizenship, patriotism, and stewardship. She interweaves criticism of presidential rhetoric with case studies of policies involving lands run by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS).For the Enjoyment of the People opens with the story of Mount Rushmore: land stolen from Indigenous peoples and quite literally carved up. Stuckey calls attention to this harm while noting that the NPS has been attempting (although not particularly well) to negotiate their harmful past actions by working with Indigenous people when interpreting the parks. This narrative sets the tone for the rest of the book, pointing “to the importance of rhetoric in understanding the nature and implications of these interpretive struggles” and positioning conflicts about identity—Indigenous identities especially but not exclusively—at the center (1). This book emphasizes how Indigenous voices are neglected within U.S. national narratives. Throughout For the Enjoyment of the People, Stuckey revisits conflicts surrounding Indigenous representation. She emphasizes the importance of using Indigenous-preferred names for places, despite each artifact's clear centering of white settler colonial perspectives. Overall, Stuckey's newest work leans on ideological analyses of American presidential rhetoric, interspersed with criticisms of discourse found within the spaces themselves, to illuminate how America's public lands discursively negotiate national identity. In doing so, Stuckey has crafted a thorough, thoughtful, and deliberately critical guidebook for rhetorical scholars and the American public generally to recognize how the nation's lands perpetuate certain American identities and values.Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of national identity as it is discursively manifested within American public lands. The first chapter explores the erasure of colonialism as seen in overseas national parks: the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa. In “Establishing National Origins: Erasure, Dispossession, and American Empire,” Stuckey discusses how time and space intersect to form explanations and accommodations of identity by examining how U.S. policies regulated Indigenous people and their lands. For instance, by grouping all Indigenous peoples together as “Indians,” white settler-colonists conflated space and time; they applied policies generally to vastly different Indigenous communities across decades despite their unique locales and histories. Political discourse erased Indigenous communities from their lands through erasure by discovery, entitlement, visibility, and interpretation. Stuckey weaves this history with two contemporary case studies. Colonialism is both erased and displayed in the U.S. Virgin Islands as the park is portrayed as scenic and economically beneficial. Colonialism is negotiated in American Samoa as the park is naturally wonderful and contains “pure culture worth preserving” (48). Stuckey presents a thoughtful evaluation of the NPS's interpretations, recognizing that their efforts to improve are “embedded in a colonialist web of historical and cultural interpretation from which it cannot be completely disentangled without foregrounding that colonial history” (42). The first chapter clearly depicts how American public lands were founded on colonial white supremacy and how these effects still resonate. This theme lingers with the reader for the remainder of the book.Chapter Two, “Claiming a National Past: Patriotism and Citizenship,” reveals how patriotism and citizenship are negotiated at Gettysburg National Historic Park, Gateway National Park (formerly known as Jefferson National Expansion Memorial), and Manzanar National Historic Site. Stuckey discusses how these become “places of considerable contestation over what constitutes American patriotism” (55). The chapter brings together theories about citizenship, rhetoric, place, and memory, evaluating how these memorial sites portray authenticity. Each example shows the complex discursive negotiation performed within and around places with shameful pasts, like Manzanar's Japanese American internment camp. At Manzanar, the NPS makes specific interpretive choices, such as whether to freeze oppression in the nation's past or encourage the visitors to relate with the victims.The third chapter asks how history is preserved and interpreted and narrated in NPS museums. Stuckey focuses the entirety of “Asserting a Singular National Narrative: Whose History and Whose Heritage?” on Mesa Verde National Park and on how its museum appropriates, displays, and memorializes antiquities. The evaluation of park museums is complemented by criticisms of the park's advertising, which portrays Mesa Verde—and thus both contemporary and ancient Indigenous peoples—as either primitive or romantic. The chapter concludes with critique of how the NPS interprets marginalized communities, arguing that the federal agency might be “doing better,” but their efforts also expose ongoing conflicts about recontextualizing national history and the accessibility of Indigenous cultures (114).Chapter Four, “Protecting Natural Resources: Citizen Stewards and the Nation's Future,” evaluates how the NPS's education and park management construct visitors as citizens and stewards of American lands. When evaluating Everglades National Park and the public lands of the California desert, Stuckey notes how the NPS educates through park interpretation and how the parks themselves are oriented to establish visitors as citizen stewards (119). As the first park to be set aside primarily for wildlife preservation, Everglades NP exemplifies the debate around what land deserves to be “preserved.” The discourse around the California Desert Protection Act shows how policies can affect American citizenship and stewardship of public lands. Finally, in “Measuring Value: Entitlement in the Land of Opportunity,” Stuckey considers Bears Ears National Monument and Alaskan public lands, noting how “public” lands are valued and their rightful ownership discursively assigned as entitlement. Stuckey links political decision making, land “ownership,” and citizenship through case studies. “Measuring Value” draws attention to the complicated debate around land value and entitlement.While For the Enjoyment of the People is far from the only scholarship about American public lands, its methodology sets it apart. Stuckey skillfully joins rhetorical criticism of presidential discourse about American public lands, evaluations of policy debates about expanding or reducing the lands, textual analysis of the NPS's interpretations of the lands, and rich descriptions of their historical contexts. Rooted in a political rhetorical tradition, this book spans disciplines in its methods and applications. Unlike recent works in rhetorical field methods, For the Enjoyment of the People is far more discursive than material in its approach to space. While this work contributes to the discipline as a rhetorical criticism, embodied work is also needed to investigate these spaces further.This book provides a much-needed update to the literature on parks and public lands as it is intentionally critical of American institutions like the NPS. Multiple chapters are devoted to how the NPS has repeatedly neglected Indigenous voices in park interpretation. Stuckey offers attentive and serious criticisms of the NPS, arguing that “Based in dispossession and erasure on one hand and displacement on the other, [the NPS] remains mired in the rhetoric and other practices of colonialism despite interpretive efforts to overcome those legacies” (53). This criticism recognizes the context of the contemporary moment when American federal agencies are asked to reckon with their colonial legacies. Stuckey concludes with clear calls to the NPS, emphasizing the need for action. Stuckey recommends that the NPS include this complex discourse in their interpretations rather than pretending parks are apolitical. Stuckey also calls for the NPS to position Indigenous voices as contemporary and not just histories, to “include consistent and clear interpretations that speak to Indigenous presence, removal, genocide, and contemporary lives . . . become foregrounded and made manifest in the present” (179). The reader is left with a deeper understanding of how America's parks function politically and, imperatively, with precise calls to public action.For the Enjoyment of the People interrogates identity in a way that is accessible to a public audience. America's national parks, monuments, memorials, and public lands are often depicted as non-controversial symbols of national unity. Quite the opposite is true, as Stuckey reveals, and their history and continued interpretation have profound implications on broader conceptions of what it means to be “American.” Stuckey's engaging style, in-depth case studies, and comprehensible analyses of complex policies and presidential rhetorics make this book eminently readable. For the Enjoyment of the People could serve as a helpful textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses about a variety of topics, from presidential discourse to environmental communication. Alternatively, Stuckey's political-rhetorical lens provides a contemporary perspective on the ongoing conversation surrounding identity and place, an important addition to the cross-disciplinary literature linking political power, space, and identity.

This article offers a narrative account of how we, graduate assistants at a private, Vincentian university writing center, confronted and addressed sexual harassment within our space. Beginning in the spring semester of 2022, we saw an increasing number of sexual harassment incidents in our writing center. Desperately searching for more effective practices to protect our consultants and clients alike from these experiences, we drew inspiration from Kovalik et al.’s (2021) concept of a community contract, developing a contract tailored to the specific needs and dynamics of our writing center environment. By recounting our experiences, this article highlights the challenges faced by the consultants we mentor when dealing with harassment in their workplace, as well as how we balance policy and agency when looking for a solution. There is little literature currently on sexual harassment in writing center scholarship, so it is our hope that our experiences will inspire future research as well as fill some existing gaps in the academic landscape. We conclude this essay by reflecting on the outcomes of our initiatives and the lessons learned in the process. We hope that this framework will prove valuable to other writing centers currently dealing with similar problems, and that by implementing a community contract, writing centers may preemptively avoid such situations. Keywords : student misconduct, sexual harassment, community contract, writing center policy We quickly learn as writing center consultants that one unanticipated comment can throw off an entire session with a student, no matter how well the session had been going before. This becomes even truer when it comes to unwarranted sexual advances, observations about one’s identity, or illicit, uncomfortable conversation topics. This was true for Maya, [1] a senior writing consultant at our center. The session began as most do, exchanging pleasantries, ensuring that the student-client is comfortable, and determining how the next 45 minutes will be best spent. It was not until a few minutes into the session that her client, a white, male peer, derailed the focus of the session with one comment: “Hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl.” In this moment Maya, taken aback, must take stock of her positionality, the student-client’s positionality, what is at risk, and her own emotions, and then determine how to move forward. Does she address the inappropriate nature of this comment? Does she smile and brush off the affirmation of colorism, moving the session forward? Does she find a graduate assistant or another leader in the writing center and escalate the matter higher? In mere seconds, Maya must navigate an unfair and unjust situation with the means available to her. Though there may be resources available and support surrounding her, at this moment it is very easy for her to feel alone, targeted, unsafe, and unsure. Unfortunately, situations like these are not uncommon. The Association of American Universities (2019) found that on college campuses, 59.2% of women experience some degree of sexual harassment during their time at the university (p. viii). While there is not enough definitive research to confidently assert that these staggering statistics are reflected in writing center spaces, it is clear to those working in these spaces that some level of harassment is making its way through the writing center’s doors from the campus at large. We have found this true in our own writing center especially, a writing center at a private Vincentian university, with the rates of student misconduct growing exponentially in the two semesters following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (namely Spring 2022 and Fall 2022). From racialized comments like the one Maya endured to inappropriate gestures during consultations, from clients derailing writing conversations in order to ask for consultants’ phone numbers to severe incidents of stalking, our writing center has been the background for an array of concerning incidents. As we saw the number of weekly incidents rising, we questioned how to move forward and what the best practices were to keep our consultants safe while maintaining the “homey” and welcoming feel we, and many other writing center administrators, desire our writing center to emanate, for better or for worse (McKinney 2013). The way forward was a journey for us, a journey on which we hope many more writing centers will join, as the work is nowhere near its endpoint. With this goal in mind, in this paper, we will discuss our lived experiences in our writing center as graduate assistants through a narrative format and the way we handled the threat of sexual harassment in our space. We share our collaborative process of creating a community contract for our writing center and offer the final version as a foundation for others to build upon. We create a framework that balances student agency and autonomy with necessary, protective policy that can easily be adapted by other writing centers negotiating their way through the muddy waters of student misconduct in their space. We believe that our work bridges gaps in existing research by demanding an intellectual consideration of sexual harassment in writing centers as a focal issue within student misconduct, something that desperately needs recognition within this field. We both work at our writing center as graduate assistants, so we are invested in the day-to-day operations of our center as leaders. [2] We toggle between our identities as administrators, mentors, and students, and this gives us a complex and unique perspective from which we conduct our leadership. [3] We see what is going on from a higher level– we know what needs to happen from an administrative point of view, what kind of training needs to happen, and how to keep the center running smoothly. But we also see how the job affects our undergraduate consultants in a very real way as we are “in the weeds” with them. Our campus is diverse in race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, economic backgrounds, and more. With this diversity at the forefront, we want our center to be a place that celebrates it, that champions students’ voices, and that feels like a safe space. When we started to notice that some sessions were impacting the space in a negative manner – for both consultants and for clients – we responded as both peers and student-leaders. Because of our unique position as graduate assistants, in many cases, we either saw or heard the incidents that occurred in our space, or were notified shortly after. Additionally, because we share close relationships with both the writing center’s director and assistant director, we felt empowered to act on behalf of our staff while knowing we were fully supported from above. While there were an alarming number of incidents, we have chosen to highlight the three that, along with Maya’s story, exemplify the crux of the issue at hand: blatant entitlement. In the spring semester of 2022, our campus was slowly transitioning back to its pre-Covid status quo. Masks were no longer required, distancing was loosened, and students were opting, once again, for in-person classes. This also meant that the writing center experienced higher traffic than it had in over a year, bringing in new students every day. One of these students was Arthur, a nontraditional student who frequented the center daily. At first, consultants found him a bit creepy but had difficulty articulating why. He had a certain suspicious demeanor about him, and many interactions with him seemed off-putting. He would lurk about the center, even if he did not have appointments, and began to make certain consultants uncomfortable with his presence. He had the tendency to “sneak up” on consultants and startle them when he wanted to ask a question and had little to no awareness of personal space. He acted as if the writing center was his alone, to the point that many consultants acknowledged that they felt that they no longer had access to their own workspace. As his behavior began to worsen, consultants took note. Many refused to be in spaces near him, and others requested to not work with him. When he would make appointments, he refused to make them himself online (as is our center’s policy) but would wait by our front desk until a female staff member was working there and then insist that that staff member make an appointment for him. Similarly, he would consistently book sessions only with our women consultants and come unprepared with no clear goals, thereby putting extra work on our consultants to direct a session that had no inherent direction. Often, he would also demand that these consultants do tasks outside their responsibility, such as plugging in his laptop for him. In one specific instance, one of our strongest and boldest consultants attempted to terminate the session after he presented no assignment to work on; this resulted in his refusal to leave and an attempt to cause an angry scene, demanding to speak to our director (also a woman). After this incident, we asked Arthur to leave our space and deactivated his account on our scheduling platform. He attempted to return in the fall of 2022 and, once again, put up quite the fight with our director, but we were able to stand our ground to ensure the safety and comfort of our consultants. We hoped that this was a one-off incident, but we were sadly mistaken. Our situation with Arthur only seemed to begin an influx of these types of events, heightening our awareness as leaders. In the fall semester of 2022, incidents began to increase both in intensity and number. Lauren, a senior consultant, came to us to report unwelcoming and hostile incidents with a client who happened to be a co-worker in her other campus job as a resident assistant. This co-worker had crossed boundaries multiple times outside of the space, including an instance where he refused to leave her dorm room. This particular client began making appointments with Lauren and usually did not convey clear goals or a specific assignment to work on. Other times, he would neglect bringing in any kind of writing assignment at all; he made appointments simply to chat with Lauren as his consultant. The advances he made during these types of sessions were unwanted and unencouraged, and altogether made Lauren feel unsafe. To address these incidents, we began by simply moving his appointments to other consultants. The student became apoplectic at the thought of his appointments being moved and complained to both the director and assistant director of the writing center, both of whom kindly explained the policy behind their decision. He responded that working with Lauren was a “clear right” as he pays tuition money that funds the center, and by that logic, funds his access to Lauren’s person. The disturbing nature of his presumptuous ownership over Lauren, a black woman, was made further alarming by their racial identities: as a white man, this client’s rhetoric embodied the financial entitlement that has historically commodified black women’s bodies and their labor. His response to our administrators demonstrated the full extent of his assumed privilege to consultant access, time, and intimacy of the consultation space in the center, a notion that we found to be increasingly shared by a vast number of the student population that utilized writing center services. At the same time, the student began to show up in Lauren’s place of residence, unexpected and unannounced. Because of the nature of these advances, the matter had to be reported institutionally with the Title IX office. This student had access to both of Lauren’s places of work, one of which was also her home as an RA. The harassment cornered her in almost every aspect of her daily life, causing distress and questioning/jeopardizing her safety. We wondered if working with a specific consultant truly was a “right,” and if any codes of conduct existed that would suggest otherwise, but our search into this matter institutionally came up empty, prompting us to fill the gaps. During the evening hours at our writing center, a student came in with a creative short story he wanted to get an opinion on. Once again, Lauren was the consultant for this particular session, and by this time, had unfortunately become accustomed to working through difficult sessions. The session began normally, and the story seemed innocent at first. It followed a budding college romance in the residence halls, but the story took a dark turn when the plot morphed from romance to murder. The story specifically explained in detail how the main character kills his love interest, proceeds to rape her inside their residence hall, and later eats her. Reaching this point in the story, Lauren became increasingly uncomfortable and excused herself to alert one of us and asked how she should move forward. At our writing center, we, of course, encourage writings of all types and typically instruct our consultants to help clients even if they disagree with the viewpoints being articulated as it can be a good chance for education and for changing the rhetoric surrounding oppression (Suhr-Systma & Brown, 2011). It is also the responsibility of both the reader and writer to authentically respond (Elbow & Belanoff, 1999). However, with the explicit nature of this story and Lauren’s clear uneasiness, we made the decision to shut down the session. When we explained this to the client, he stated that “he had the right to bring in whatever he wanted ” and work with whomever he likes. We wondered how far is too far with writing, what consultants actually consent to as they enter a session, and how much we can actually protect our consultants from uncomfortable situations. We share these stories to paint a realistic picture of our writing center and to express the urgency we felt to “deal” with the problem. Stories have a unique way of drawing storyteller and listener together into a relationship, even if temporarily; the hardships faced by one will by proxy be felt by the other (Dixon 2017). With this in mind, we invite you into the weeds of our writing center and share with you our collaborative process for overcoming the sexual harassment we saw. With our consultants’ safety risk increasing simply by existing in our space and doing their job, we knew we had to find a new way forward as leaders. To begin, we borrowed Dixon’s (2017) framework of accepting the messy, everyday parts of writing center work as integral to what we do. Rather than looking at these incidents as something to overcome, move past, and forget for the sake of trying to create an idealistic – yet unattainable – space, we addressed the discomfort these incidents left behind. In her research on queering the everyday of writing centers, Dixon (2017) suggests that negotiating sexual harassment and other incidents comes from working through unsettling events and asking how they “complicate our understanding of what it means to make meaning in the center.” In our case, what do these new levels of harassment mean? Do they affect how consultants interact with each other and/or with clients? What kind of environment do we want to build, and how do we get there? Next, we collected whatever resources we could find on sexual harassment and similar occurrences in writing centers. While the scholarship on the subject was relatively limited, a handful of studies aided us in our journey. Harry Denny’s foundational work, Facing the Center, situates sex and gender dynamics in the writing center as a pivotal point of study. He writes that “our sex, our gender, and the politics attendant to them are ubiquitous in writing centers and to the people that circulate through them” (p. 87). To ignore the different power dynamics, privileges, and potentials for harm that accompany sex, gender, and its intersections across multiple identities is to ignore a key component of the work being done in a writing center space. Denny reminds us that though we cannot fight every battle, we must find strategic moments to fight the gender and sex oppressions we see in our centers (p. 111). This sentiment reinforces the importance of the work we are attempting to accomplish. Dixon and Robinson (2019), and Nadler (2019) pushed us to question the space of a writing center itself – we want our spaces to be welcoming, but what does that mean? And at what cost? Nader (2019) discusses online writing center spaces and what kinds of behaviors and attitudes are welcome there. Specifically, he addresses tutor consent– by entering online space what exactly are tutors consenting to? Is this consent clearly defined (typically, the answer is “no”)? Similarly, Dixon and Robinson (2019) tackle what “welcome” means inside an in-person writing center, especially when institutional positionality is considered. The university places rules and regulations on a writing center that directly impact what shape “welcome” takes and who exactly is welcome. They call us to redefine comfort, space, ideology, and practice in order to consider what “welcome” means in practice. This is a call we took seriously as we strived to address the incidents in our writing center because we did not want our space to welcome harm. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) express, writing centers are situated in the midst of institutions that, more often that not, have conflicting agendas concerning the handling of sexual harassment. This is an area that writing centers need to tread carefully, balancing institutional responsibility with the well-being of the students who inhabit the space. Prebel (2015) writes of the implicit harm in mandatory reporting. She argues that mandatory reporting in centers, and across the institution, in reality victimize those who have experienced sexual harassment. Meadows (2021) builds on this work, highlighting key ideas that she believes will spark conversations in writing centers and move us toward finding a solution to sexual harassment that does not leave victims isolated and defeated. She asserts that we must start these conversations with each other and push for some sort of institutional reform – two things we look to accomplish through our work here. Using Prebel (2015) and Meadows (2021) as a springboard, it seemed clear that we needed to tackle the problem of institutional policies versus internal, departmental policies. We had no internal policy in place to deal with sexual harassment or other forms of student misconduct at the time these incidents began to occur. In our center, we try to have as few hard-lined policies as possible because we believe that policies, no matter how good-intentioned, typically tend to fail to serve the entire population which they are intended to regulate and can easily become tools of oppression. Our greatest desire is for both our consultants and our student-clients to have agency in the sessions, and we find that the best way to ensure that is to lessen the authoritarian policies in place. We adopted this mentality from the work of Natarajan, Cardona, and Yang (2022), who write about the policies on writing center landing pages from an anti-racist lens. They argue that policies even as simple as “no proofreading” or appointment allotments can send subtle yet clear signals as to who is welcome or not welcome in a space. Sometimes, policies are created with implicitly biased rationales. While many policies seem neutral when taken for face-value, underneath they expose roots in racism and ableism, disproportionately affecting already marginalized student writers and tutors. To combat this potential marginalization, Natarajan et. al (2022) suggest focusing on the students themselves and how policies affect them, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the actual policy. They delineate the distinction by focusing on the who rather than the what : We wanted to adopt their ideology of people-focused versus policy-focused procedures in our space. While policies do help standardized practices so that every student at the writing center, both writer and tutor, has the same foundation, these policies can also affect the students in different ways. This is something that writing center administrators must be aware of while working with students and when creating the policies meant to protect them. We took this thinking to heart in our writing center, wanting to respect the diversity of our space by keeping rigid procedures to a minimum. We intended our space to allow allow creative expression and autonomy for both writers and tutors to set the boundaries of their consultations. Yet, in doing so, we found that when things get dicey in a session for a consultant, especially concerning sexual harassment, the lack of clear, available policy works toward our disadvantage. Until these incidents, we had almost been scared of power and authority as concepts; it was now our chance to remedy this stance and find a healthy balance between power and autonomy. In writing centers and related scholarship, there is more often than not an acute need to move away from any sort of hierarchy to ensure that work can be done. We know and live by the mantra “produce better writers, not better papers,” focusing on equipping writers with transferable writing skills rather than making sure they have an A+ paper ready to go by the end of a session (North 1984, 438). Similarly, we strive for our centers to be welcoming homes and not stuffy classrooms or remedial-only spaces. Carino (2003) reminds us that peership is elevated in writing center scholarship as the ultimate form of tutoring, a practice we actively promote in our own center. It represents “writing centers as the nonhierarchical and nonthreatening collaborative environments most aspire to be” (Carino, 2003, p. 96). We see consultants and their clients as two equals, two students, two friends . But should friendship truly be the goal of writing consultations? Of course, considering friendship is helpful for many consultations, especially when the clients come into their sessions eager and ready to dive into their writing. But more often than not, it can create an awkward dynamic between tutor and writer. Students do not always come into our writing center with the intention to learn and do so happily; many times, students come into our space with the intention of getting extra credit, having someone to write their papers for them, or, in extreme cases, crossing boundaries. If I only see my tutor as a friend, what is keeping me from crossing boundaries and making inappropriate advances? Friendship is a familiar relationship, one that suggests intimacy. Yes, there is inherent intimacy built into the work of consultation as sharing writing is extremely personal and often feels like sharing oneself. Yet, at the end of the day, writing consultation is a job with specific goals. We want clients to feel welcome, safe, and productive while doing their work with a tutor, yet this desire should never come at the cost of our student tutoring staff’s well-being, all for the sake of “friendship.” There must be some sort of balance between the two extremes of hard-lined policies and idealistic friendship. Tutors need to have agency in their sessions to direct their clients as needed and to add whatever personalization feels right to them, but clear boundaries also need to be established between tutor and client for a safe working relationship to exist. We cannot turn a blind-eye to the power dynamics at play in tutor-client relations for the sake of friendship; this becomes especially important when sessions become difficult. Acknowledging that there is some sort of power dynamic occurring in sessions can help consultants embrace their desired autonomy, not only when shutting down unwanted advances but also in the more predictable difficult sessions, such as when clients are on their phones or clearly have faulty expectations of what writing center consultants can do. Carino (2003) reminds us: While we do not want to cross the line into an authoritarian regime where administrators dictate exactly what can occur in a session and create rules for every little thing, some level of actual authority given to our consultants and policies in place to help guide sessions truly can be a healthy thing. In order to create policies that brought us closer to this healthy foundation, however, we had to navigate institutional systems and authority, which many times proves to be a much trickier task. When it comes to institutional responsibility for a sexual harassment or student misconduct case, the path to accountability and due process can often come with difficulty to alleviate a threatening situation. Institutions are responsible by Title IX to ensure that there is equal access to all University spaces and that such access is not hindered, for example, by another student’s threatening presence. However, institutional responsibility also includes ensuring compliance to reporting, evidence, and investigation standards, some of which have come under scrutiny for taking agency– and consent– away from the victim/survivor. When writing centers welcome individuals into sessions, they do so with the other person’s consent and right to self-determination, but this culture comes to a halt when mandatory reporting practices bind writing centers to situate the victim/survivor outside of their own autonomy. Holland et al. (2021) write that “lack of consent lies at the heart of both sexual assault and universal mandatory reporting” (p. 3).  Regaining this lost sense of autonomy and control is “essential to recovery and healing after individuals experience sexual trauma” (p. 2). However, when an individual– client or consultant– reports to their graduate assistant or directors at the writing center, they may then be subjected to a series of interrogation from one department to another. This may require them to reiterate their stories and endure trauma for the sake of attaining justice, as well as have their consent to privacy be undertaken by university surveillance, the police, attorneys, private investigators, and the perpetrator– all of which came from one nonconsensual report (Know Your Title IX 2021). The ramifications of mandatory reporting become even more pronounced when consultants occupy marginalized racial identities. In these instances, the consequences extend to issues of racialization, mistrust of authority, and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. As with the consultants in our story, the victim/survivor’s racial identity increases their susceptibility to harm from surveillance measures. As Holland (2021) reminds us, mandatory reporting can reinforce the mistrust persons of color already carry as a result of previous racialization, over policing, and personal experiences of police brutality. The fact that “providing safety and support has become synonymous with increasing police presence [and] surveillance” shows what little consideration mandatory reporting policies give to this mistrust (Méndez, 2020, p. 98). In this way, white supremacy becomes enmeshed in mandatory reporting and decreases a student of color’s likelihood of reporting. For Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC), specific gendered and racialized stereotypes can further inhibit them from reporting out of self preservation. Black women who report face being stereotyped as the “angry black woman” to minimize justified anger over sexual harassment (Morrison 2021). Furthermore, race-specific stereotypes that label Black and Brown women as overly promiscuous can lead institutional authority figures to orient their investigation towards the victim/survivor’s credibility (Buchanan 2002). Surveillance as a result of mandatory reporting then turns into a measure of scrutiny rather than safety for BIWOC victims/survivors. For writing centers, this dilemma of institutional responsibility and ethics of care is crucial to our commitment to social justice. In her work on mandatory reporting in writing centers, Bethany Meadows (2021) asks, “if we believe students have the right to their own language and voice, then why do we remove survivor agency with mandatory reporting?” If we acclaim students’ self-determination in consultations, then how can we implicate ourselves in processes that remove autonomy, forcibly re-traumatize, and subject survivors/victims to surveillance from institutions that systematically oppress the racial and gendered identities of those who come forward? For writing centers, these dilemmas of institutional responsibility and ethics of care are crucial to our commitment to social justice. Mandatory reporting removes students from a place where they “can experience some distance from institutional authority” to a space where “the center– and consultant– is more in consensus with the institution than in collaboration with the student” (Prebel 2015). In our cases of consultants facing harassment from clients, the balance between institutional cooperation and the culture of collaboration and care we shared for each other became complicated. As Méndez (2021) asks, “to what extent is having Title IX as the only option available to address sexual misconduct one of the preconditions for silencing a diverse range of survivors?” To be able to actualize the work of reducing institutional harm, writing centers must build “viable responses and healing options for the range of survivors who have been deemed systemically disposable” (Méndez 2021). At our writing center, we created our own code of conduct to give our consultants the option to resolve peer harassment without creating unwarranted surveillance or pressure on a student. Doing so, we hoped to enact an ethics of care for our consultants alongside the ethics of care we pursue for student-clients. Throughout the commentary on the newest revisions to Title IX regulations, there is much debate over the requirement that indirect disclosures, such as through an assignment, must be reported. Under these guidelines, “nearly all employees will be required to report when: they have information about conduct that could reasonably be understood to constitute sexual harassment and assault because they… learned about it ‘by any other means,’ including indirectly learning of conduct via flyers, posts on social media or online platforms, assignments, and class-based discussions” (Holland, n.d., p. 186). According to Prebel (2015), “disclosures of sexual assault made in student essays and reflective pieces like personal statements are considered reportable” and under these circumstances, “the mandate to report can thus be interpreted as a form of textual interventionism, a limit on how individual writers might ‘own’ their texts or develop agency through their writing” (p. 4-5). While Prebel references a client’s disclosure about being a victim/survivor, you will remember from Lauren’s story that our writing center was faced with a client’s fictional first-person narrative, whereas the narrator perpetrated sexual violence and murder, including rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism in a dorm setting. The client’s consultant, feeling physical and mental discomfort, removed herself from the session and a graduate assistant explained to the client that he would not be allowed to bring in writing that was harmful to the consultant’s psychological being. The student-writer lodged a counter complaint that they were denied their right to write about and seek consultancy on any subject matter. This is not a debate distant from writing center scholarship as many have reported the complications arising from “questions about whose it is to adopt or accommodate to whom and to what effect” when it comes to working with a client whose writing threatens respect and dignity for the existence of one or many fundamental identities of the consultant (Denny 2010). However, the social injustices that emerge from a passive or indifferent response to these works create a culture that de-prioritizes the consent and inclusivity of consultants and even other clients. The crux of the issue lies in how a writing center approaches inclusivity. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) write, “inclusivity becomes complicated when writing centers have clients who visit the center with racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive papers.” Arguments to maximize inclusivity of these clients and their ideas often root in taking a writing-based approach that perhaps challenges sources and evidence, but not ethics. While this more objective angle does enhance the comfortability of the client, it does not serve social justice and through performance, indicates an indifference to the personhood of consultants or clients who share the identities being oppressed. Critical to this proposition is the radical social justice praxis set forth by Greenfield (2019) who addresses the issue of allowing writing consultants to help authors “be more effective in communicating their racism or misogyny” (p. 4). Considering the writing center’s positionality within the larger institution, “our privileging of writers over righteousness risks in both small and large ways our field’s complicity in enabling or even promoting systems of injustice many of us personally reject” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 5). When “the work of writing centers is implicated in these various systems of oppression,” then “we have an ethical responsibility to intervene purposefully” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 6). Others may argue that textual or even verbal intervention in violent writing contradicts the core writing center value of championing a client’s language and voice, but then one must also ask, whose voice and what message is upheld in that apathy? Moreover, where is the consultant’s consent to hear and handle writing directly opposing their existence? While consultations often defer control to student-clients in order to practice student-centered approaches, it does not mean that consultants also drop their subjectivity. The process of recognition and response is alive on both ends, and both clients and consultants work to balance the inherent power dynamics in their relationship.  However, when a client presumes entitlement to a consultant’s right to self-determine their boundaries in a session, including a consultant’s right to remove themselves from a space where their existence or autonomy no longer felt welcome, power is wielded to enact control and oppression. An ethics of care for clients grounds much of our considerations on what “comfortable” and “welcome” mean for a given space.  However, it is time that an ethics of care for consultants is also closely considered. It is in that deeper examination that we found the larger implications of student misconduct on our space. Primarily, student misconduct reveals gendered assumptions of consultant work and a client’s rights to the consultant’s mobility, time, intellectual resources, and emotional faculty. Writing center staff is typically female-dominated, perpetuating the stereotype of women as helpers. The notion that women should exist in remedial spaces and provide help to the men that need it and/or desire it, though the men (more often than not) are reluctant to accept such help, is a persistent problem. Denny (2010) writes of this issue: Thus, how we interact with gender in a healthy manner is of utmost importance for the safety of all students that inhabit our spaces, consultants and clients alike. Denny (2010) writes that “our gender and sex are among those political and historical variables that cut through the scene of tutoring. For some, the point of entrée into this conversation vis-à-àvis writing centers revolves around gendered notions of writing—that there are uniquely male, female, feminine or masculine ways of doing and learning it” (p. 89). Gendering in writing centers cannot be escaped– gender is such an outward-facing expression of our innate identities that it is difficult to hide or ignore, even if we wanted to. Similarly, as Morrison (2021) points out, consultants do not leave their race at the door of writing centers, and “racism itself is not dropped at the door of the writing center by anyone” either (p. 120). In and out of the writing center, “experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1243). At these intersections, the dual axis of marginality imposes extra layers of emotional taxation in addition to being stereotyped as nurturing “helpers.” For women of color, their racial identity presents an additional axis that increases the emotional labor placed on them. BIWOC consultants are placed “in a position of constant negotiation” of identity politics, having to perform what Morrison (2021) calls a “balancing act” of filtering responses to racialized hostility to maintain a hospitable work environment, especially if it’s lacking a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices (p. 124). The lack of a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices amplifies the challenges that women consultants of color face, perpetuating an environment where racialized sexual harassment can thrive. For example, while some instances of racialized sexual harassment may be more overt, such as “hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl,” other instances may be more covert, making it harder to validate feelings of racial targeting within sexual harassment. Such experiences “can be incredibly direct and personal for those who live them, while those who perpetrate the acts may deny them or fail to notice them and their exclusionary effect” (Morrison, 2021, p. 128). In the case of Lauren’s client, implying that access to Lauren was “paid for” by his tuition may have been just one final attempt to pre-approve his harassment; but for Lauren, these comments may invoke a scary reminder of the present manifestations of racial capitalism. The sexual harassment here was apparent. However, the racism Lauren felt may go unacknowledged for multiple factors: its covert presentation, the consultant’s need for self-preservation from gaslighting, and the racial consciousness of the writing center at hand. To cultivate an ethics of care for all consultants, it is essential for writing center culture to commit to addressing overt and subtle expressions of systemic racism and the emotional labor they require to overcome. Because writing center spaces offer a welcoming environment that encourages empathy and collaboration, they can often be misinterpreted as informal environments where anything goes. Regardless of gender, consultants have to engage in various forms of emotional labor as part of their daily work. It follows, then, that women consultants are already doing a great degree of this type of labor before adding in the gender bias that disproportionately affects them. Navigating gender bias itself takes a great degree of emotional labor, a labor that could easily weigh on a consultant long after the session concludes. This begs the question of what kind of emotional labor is required of students in writing centers, especially of consultants. Mannon (2021) asserts that emotional labor is typically something we simply expect of writing center consultants without training. It is something we believe is central to working in a writing center, yet we treat emotional labor as if it is something consultants should inherently understand and know how to navigate. It is not something trained or taught; rather, it is simply expected. However, when we ignore this type of work as a very real and very valid part of the writing center experience, we create a space “where the work of managing writers’ emotions is invisible, devalued, and disheartening” (Mannon, 2021, p. 145). Complicating further the consultant’s emotional burden is the neoliberal idea that students at a university are consumers whose needs must be met at any cost. As displayed in the three stories we shared, there is an overarching theme of entitlement– entitlement to the consultant herself, her time, to the writing center space, to have any sort of behavior accepted, etc. Universities do everything in their power to attract high performing (and high-paying) students, promising an array of services in return, ranging from state-of-the-art gyms to trendy residence halls and to, of course, writing center and tutoring services (Mintz, 2021, p. 88). In this kind of framework, the “customer is always right,” which leads consultants in writing centers to consistently navigate what the client expects of them– another emotional juggle that is not taught, and further, should not have to be. This becomes extremely problematic in writing centers where the front-facing consulting service is primarily conducted by women. The underlying notion of client-as-consumer tips the scale of the power dynamics between client and female consultant before the session even begins. When dealing with the emotional labor and trauma that accompany sexual harassment in sessions, the conjunction of neoliberal ideals and gendered expectations exacerbates the problems faced by our women consultants. By failing to create a space where emotional labor is validated as hard work as well as having limited policies in place that empower consultants in this emotional labor, both consultants and clients suffer. Nadler (2019) affirms this when writing about student consent for both student-consultants and student-clients. What do we consent to? What do we not consent to? How is this communicated? How does this change depending on the space we find ourselves in? He asks, “when consultants lose agency because of undesirable circumstances they have no choice in entering, how is that not the ultimate form of harassment?” (Nadler, 2019, pt. IV). We centered this question when attempting to find a way forward in our own sexual harassment situation and determined that lacking space for the acknowledgement of emotional labor and the protection of agency in our own center was becoming increasingly problematic. Protecting the consultant’s agency and giving them a clear route to achieve this became our top priority. Searching for a way forward proved difficult as we wanted to strike an appropriate balance between policy and agency. Denny (2010) raises the question of gender and sexuality in the writing center, asking, “whose burden it is to adapt or accommodate to whom and to what effect. Like the dynamics around sexuality, these moments of gender conflict are fraught with policy and political complications” (p. 93). How do we protect consultants? How do we have clear policies while steering clear of total authoritarian attitudes? We found a solid foundation in the work of Kovalik et al. (2021). Their work in community contracts for online spaces gave us a foundation for our own solution and ushered in a new way to handle policy in writing center spaces. Given the problem of emotional labor Mannon (2021) makes clear, the weight of responsibility writing tutors have when sessions go awry is clearly problematic, especially considering power structures, different identities, and different uses of language. The issue of harassment and misconduct in a writing center muddies the waters for tutors and can cause harm in a space that is supposed to be open and safe (Kovalic et al., 2021). Additionally, because students are typically not trained to handle misconduct (and we must ask – should they be? Is this their responsibility? In their pay grade?), the responsibility falls solely on the tutor experiencing the problem, isolating them and asking them to negotiate in the moment far more than a session agenda. Many tutors shrug “off their uncomfortable interactions, thinking they would never come into contact with the student again– so why bother?” (Kovalik et al., 2021, p. 2). Their idea to combat these inequitable dynamics was to create a community contract, specifically for their online sessions, to take the full responsibility off of their tutors and to share the responsibility equally across the tutor-client relationship. The contract stated what a session is, what its purpose is, what will happen in the session, and what is not to happen in a session. Everyone must sign the contract, ensuring that everyone understands what is expected. This study by Kovalik et al. (2021) became the bedrock of our own– it revealed to us an equitable way forward and promised a bright solution to the problem that had been darkening our center. In brainstorming sessions with upper administration, there were questions about what this contract posed theoretically for the power dynamics within writing center culture. Contracts, in a broad sense, are prescriptive agreements between two parties, a set of rules and regulations to abide by that are designed to protect individuals by limiting interpretation and scope. Given that writing center practice prioritizes anti-hierarchical and student-centered approaches to collaboration, contracts in the space can seem too authoritative on the consultant’s end, considering the power they inherently bring to the session. However, according to the collaborative theory of contracts (Markovits 2004), a shared sense of intention and obligations actually sustains cooperation and collaboration better than otherwise. Framed as a legal theory in this context, Markovits’ theory the sustainability of collaboration and community through contracts or promises holds profound implications for how writing centers can reassess the importance of establishing healthy, clear, and secure boundaries. This reconsideration can enhance the comfort of both clients and consultants, fostering a collaborative environment where they can work towards a common end-goal without apprehension of inappropriate motives. Having a community-contract certainly changes the relations among the clients and consultants who engage in them, but these changes can enhance opportunities for collaboration despite their formality. Markovits (2004) writes that promises “increas[e] the reliability of social coordination and promot[es] the efficient allocation of resources” (p. 1419).  This is because promises “establish a relation of recognition and respect– and indeed a kind of community– among those who participate in them” (Markovits 2004, p. 1420). Recognition and respect are the feedback loop which defines the bond between a consultant and a client. As Trachsel (1995) writes, “the intersubjective dynamic of recognition and response, the relational self in close connection with another self, is crucial to the successful enactment of a learning process centered around the student” (p. 38). Even more so, staying honest to a promise or contract “enable[s] persons to cease to be strangers by sharing in the ends of the promises” and fulfillment of their joint intentions (Markovits 2004, p.1447). When clients and consultants can each hold up their end on the promise to conduct themselves with respect for the other’s boundaries and self-determination, they “cease to be strangers and come to treat each other, affirmatively, as ends in themselves, by entering into what I call a collaborative community” (Markovits 2004, p. 1451). Within the nuances of this theory and its application on our own writing center community contract, one can see how what seemed authoritarian actually comes to be integral in sustaining a respectful community. With the spirit of collaboration and an ethics of care, our methodology for designing a contract included an all-staff meeting as well as an accessible brain-dump document where all consultants could anonymously pose suggestions for what boundaries would allow them to ensure safety and self-determination in a session. It was easy for us to invite the consultants into these conversations as non-hierarchical collaboration is modeled to us through our own position as graduate assistants, and because their voices are incredibly important to a document that directly affects their experience in their workplace. Consultants were eager to be a part, and were active participants throughout the process. Our writing center staff is committed to one another, as friends and as colleagues, so everyone took the drafting seriously in the hope it would strengthen the already existing bonds in our space. As we can see here, many of our consultants posed their concerns side-by-side in what textually feels like solidarity to protect each other and themselves. The root of many of these issues– such as phone distractions, expecting a consultant to “fix” papers, crossing personal boundaries– rested in the harmful assumption that a consultant’s time and intellectual resources could be disregarded and disrespected. In this document, the staff brought together what they believed defined the contractual obligations or promises of the relationship between consultants and clients from their personal experiences. Most of all, they emphasize a need for shared intention to be present and active with writing to work on in a session. Shared intentions, as per Markovits’ (2004) analysis, is the foundation to coordination. For example, one of our consultant’s suggestions, “must have intention to work on their own writing” better allows for both client and consultant to move forward with the session. When one party does not share this intention, then the consultation moves backwards in progress. These statements relate to our mission, to the expectations of a client so that a consultation can be collaborative, and to the non-negotiable behavior in a workplace. We wrote this first draft of the contract towards the end of the semester, when student misconduct and sexual harassment reports had lessened, but we still felt its impact across the space. Examining the language here, such as posing every statement with “I agree” and requiring initials, one can interpret how we feared losing the safety of the writing center space, alerting us of a need to be stricter with policy writing and interpretation. To the process of initialing and signing, we also added that these were “non-negotiable” rules for a client to “abide by.” While the language here emerges from the anxiety and need to protect interpretation so that another client could not bend our policies to justify their inappropriate behavior, it nonetheless exacerbated power dynamics in client-consultant relationships. It was focused on giving the power to dictate rules and control interpretation to the hands of writing center staff, rather than welcoming collaboration from our community– something we would later revisit and revise. Writing this draft, there was much concern about how certain terms would be interpreted and how we could best enforce a culture of accountability that served social justice. One critical method we implemented here was writing what would be considered a breach of this contract. As Markovits (2004) theorizes, “contracts enable persons who are not intimates nevertheless to cease to be strangers; and breaches do not just reinstate the persons’ prior status as strangers but instead leave them actively estranged” (p. 1463).  This means that a contractual relationship allows for community building (rather than remaining strangers post-consultation) when recognition and respect of intentions, goals, and obligations are met. However, when they are breached, the contract itself contains the codified authority that allows for a clear discontinuation of that relationship. Because we did not have a clear policy on student misconduct and what breached appropriate behavior in our writing center, clients often felt not only entitled to returning to the writing center but also entitled to working with the same consultant that they had harassed. By having a written document that clearly defined what constituted a breach of appropriate behavior and the consequences for such, consultants and clients could easily point to their right to remove themselves from a consultation and disengage in any unwanted future relationship. After we had returned from break, graduate assistants and upper administration sat down with our previous draft of the contract. Significant changes were made as we had returned to the community contract with our mission to practice care, collaboration, and non-hierarchical praxis in mind. We removed the initials and replaced “I agree” statements with language to indicate these terms as expectations rather than rules. Removing initials and signatures came from our desire to emphasize that this is a shared community document and to maintain a horizontal relationship with our clients and each other, rather than the traditional vertical hierarchy of promisee and promisor often found in more traditional contracts. By doing so, we also hoped to reiterate these guidelines as part and parcel of community-building in the writing center. We removed the term “non-negotiable” from the title as we began to realize that “writing centers become arenas where the support they provide and the cultural assumptions that go along with them present unfamiliar points of contact between people who might not otherwise be thrown together” (Denny 2010, p.100). As Denny questions in his article, we too considered how we might ensure the safety of our staff while still maintaining spaces that “embrace a diversity of bodies, identities, and practices?” To this point, we altered the language of this contract to match our embrace of restorative rather than punitive approaches toward clients who commit misconduct while still upholding the consultant’s autonomy and feelings as valid and deserving of a righteous response. Our final community contract and its terms represent a culmination of emotions, thought, scholarship, and advocacy we all experienced in the previous year. Outside of structuring the contract in a more welcoming and supportive tone, we also hoped that our specific terms would assist us in facing interpersonal as well as larger institutional issues we encountered. Our first item establishes our intentions and goals as consultants by pointing clients towards our mission statement. Items two and three as well as term five continue on the mission of creating available and clearly stated expectations to be shared between consultants and clients for greater cooperation. Item four is designed to lower instances where a consultant feels overburdened in the emotional labor they provide to a session. As Mannon (2021) writes, “affective engagements are central to writing center practice” (p.144). By asking clients to come to a consultation when they are ready to be actively engaged and indicating exactly what that labor of engagement involves, clients can hopefully better imagine this often-invisible emotional laboring on the client and consultant’s part. For consultants, “emotional labor might take less of a toll in environments that define it, value it, and establish conditions where it resonates positively” (Mannon 2021, p.161). Mindful of this, term seven also seeks to validate a consultant’s autonomy by authorizing their feelings as sufficient enough reason to end a consultation. Items six, seven, and eight are designed to protect consultants and clients psychologically and physically. Specifically, in term eight, we sought to clearly answer what Dixon (2019) asks writing centers to contemplate: “We perpetuate the idea of comfort to foster a setting for vulnerability, yet how do we know what is comfortable, what welcome means, for everyone who comes into our space? Who do we prioritize welcome for and how?” In term eight, we assert consultations as spaces with professional boundaries despite being peer-to-peer relationships. In both of these terms, we also hoped to “intervene purposefully” (Greenfield 2019) in the institutional taking of survivor/victim consent through mandatory reporting. By asserting the right of clients and consultants to end a session without having to report to others, we hope this contract can provide one template by which writing centers can “expand anonymous and voluntary reporting options that survivors can control” (Holland 2021, p.3). Following our student-centered model, this contract as a whole provided our writing center the status of a community with a heightened sense of empowerment and choice. Rather than enforcing the hierarchical practice of signing the contract, which demands a client’s acknowledgment toward the higher power of the staff’s voice against theirs, we decided to place the contract at the bottom of our homepage for clients to view and know before entering a session (see figure 4). While the client still retains the responsibility of knowing the terms of the contract, we do not necessarily present the contract in a way that might fashion hostility before the consultation even begins. At its end result, this contract shows how collaboration works best when boundaries are clearly drawn, rather than ambiguously assumed. This becomes increasingly important as the writing center at our university is a female-majority space where consultants’ identities are publicly visible via our scheduling platform. With high rates of sexual harassment on campuses, a female-majority space requires distinct protections necessary for collaboration to flourish. While there is a concern that boundary setting will enforce too much formality, thereby prohibiting consultants and/or clients from feeling comfortable in their sessions, it is important to note that these boundaries in actuality enhance the comfortability of both clients and consultants to work without fear of losing their agency or of tolerating inappropriate behavior (Carino 2003). With the contract in place, consultants and clients enter sessions with clear expectations of what comprises successful sessions, and they have a written and agreed upon exit strategy should a session go awry for any reason. It is our deepest desire that the steps that we took at our writing center will bring a tangible lasting change. As both of us are moving on from that university, our involvement in the day-to-day interactions with consultants will be at a minimum, so we lose a little of our ability to monitor the contract’s success. However, we left ways for the future graduate assistants in the space, as well as other administrators and consultants themselves, to keep track of the safety of our consultants. We employed, like Kovalik et al. (2021), a behavior log to keep track of student misconduct and the circumstances surrounding it. This will help our writing center keep track of incidents and potentially be able to predict them before they occur if we see patterns form. We will do this through the center’s scheduling platform, WCOnline. Typically, consultants create client report forms to send to the client as a recap of the session, but they can also be internal reports for the center itself. If there is any problem, discomfort, or misconduct in a session, we can make a report that stays in our system. This will be useful for any future research that will be done in the space and will be helpful for us as we monitor the appropriateness of sessions. Additionally, we suggest that the future graduate assistants do regular well-being checks with the staff at staff meetings, to see how things are going from their perspective, as well as work to educate new staff on the contract. Because we are a staff completely composed of students, there is much turnover, a problem any academic knows too well. While the student staff that helped create the contract knows the contract well and understands its importance, it is imperative to continually educate future hires of the contract as well, so that it does not lose its credibility or its place in our center. In the same vein, it is our hope that this contract will be a living document, constantly evolving to suit the needs of the writing center population. As new staff comes in and learns of the importance of these policies, we invite new conversations to be had and new iterations of the contract to be created. This is not a project to be sealed shut and packed away– active contributions will keep it alive and ensure that the spirit of the project remains. We share this process in the hopes that other writing centers across universities will be able to adopt and transform this framework in ways that accommodate their unique spaces and students. We also share the process with the keen desire that we see more scholarship addressing these issues as our work is in no way comprehensive. There is an array of different writing center environments and factors that could change the scope of this work and must be considered. We pose a few lingering questions for future researchers: what happens when misconduct occurs in a center that has evening hours when no administrators are around? What happens when the sexual harassment or misconduct occurs between members of the staff, rather than between a staff member and a client? Even more severe, how do we come alongside students that may feel harassed by their own administrators, beyond whatever institutional measures are already in place? And, lastly, while this work accounts for the sexual harassment of women, especially BIPOC women, how might we consider the other communities that may be at risk of this type of harassment, namely the LGBTQIA+ community? We also want to encourage the administrators who deal with student misconduct in their centers to remember that they are not alone. Because of our deep level of care for our center and for the students we interact with everyday, we experienced extreme fatigue while working towards a solution. We often speak of protecting the emotional labor of the writing consultants, but confronting and mitigating these incidents requires emotional labor on the part of the administrators as well. Unfortunately, as administrators, there is sometimes no higher authority who can offer the validation of having your needs and labor recognized. This further adds to the emotional labor taken upon by administrators. We experienced this in real-time, and we want to acknowledge how painful it is to juggle institutional expectations and personal commitments. It can sometimes feel fruitless, especially when the atmosphere of your space has changed, and you work desperately to get it back. It is hard but meaningful work. If you are feeling these things, give yourself some grace. Know that the work is worthwhile. All in all, we believe that the community contract is a helpful tool to writing centers to make concrete policy that protects student workers and student clients alike, all the while maintaining the collaborative, non-hierarchical feel that most centers desire to achieve. We are incredibly grateful to have been able to work with each other and with the undergraduate staff at the writing center to develop this community contract. After seeing the toll that these numerous accounts of student misconduct had on our undergraduate consultants, it feels good to know that we have something in place that will hopefully be able to help. Sexual harassment is an ongoing and under-researched problem in writing centers, something we would like to see change in the near future. We hope that these narratives along with our solution provide inspiration to other centers to begin to tackle the problems of sexual harassment head-on. The work is not over, and it will take all of us, writing center staff and students alike, to change the writing center landscape for the better. [1] Throughout this paper, all names will be changed, and stories anonymized to protect the identities of our student population [2] We would like to take a moment here to acknowledge and thank the third graduate assistant in our WC, Chris Ingram, who worked closely with us as a student-leader as these incidents were occurring. He was instrumental in helping us mitigate these issues in real-time, as well as helping us consider alternate strategies of addressing the misconduct, some of which can be found in Appendix B. [3] Our position is relatively undefined. We exist in a liminal space between the WC’s administrators, the director and assistant director, and the undergraduate staff. We work closely with the center’s assistant director and help him with any administrative tasks (such as scheduling and leading staff meetings) that need to be done. Our primary role, however, is still one of consulting and working with students one-on-one. Approximately 30% of our work is administrative. This makes our position as graduate assistants very fluid; no one day is the same. We often find ourselves liaisons between the administrators and the staff, simply because we are part of both “worlds.” Buchanan, N. T. P. D., & Ormerod, A. J. P. D. (2002). Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American women. Women & Therapy , 25(3-4), 107–124. https://doi.org/10.1300/J015v25n03_08 Carino, P. (2003). Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring. In M. A. Pemberton & J. Kinkead (Eds.), The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship (pp. 96–113). University Press of Colorado. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review , 43 (6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 Denny, H. C. (2010). Facing Sex and Gender in the Writing Center. In Facing the Center (pp. 87–112). University Press of Colorado. Dixon, E. (2017). Uncomfortably queer: Everyday moments in the writing center. The Peer Review , 1(2). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/uncomfortably-queer-everyday-moments-in-the-writing-center/ Dixon, E., & Robinson, R (2019). Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue. The Peer Review , 3(1). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/ Elbow, P. & Belanoff, P. (1999). Sharing and Responding (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Humanities. Meadows, B., T. (2021). Cracks in the system: Ethics and tensions of mandatory reporting for writing center professionals. The Dangling Modifier. https://sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/cracks-in-the-system-ethics-and-tensions-of-mandatory-reporting-for-writing-center-professionals/ Greenfield, L. (2019). Introduction: Justice and Peace are Everyone’s Interest: Or, the Case for a New Paradigm. In Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement (pp. 3–28). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvg5bszx.4 Holland, K., Hutchison, E., Ahrens, C., Goodman-Williams, R., Howard, R., & Cipriano, A. (n.d.). Academic Alliance for Survivor Choice in Reporting Policies (ASC) Letter on Proposed Title IX Regulations. https://psychology.unl.edu/sashlab/ASC%20Response%20Letter%20to%20Proposed%20Title%20IX%20Mandatory%20Reporting%20Regs.pdf Holland, K. J., Hutchison, E. Q., Ahrens, C. E., & Torres, M. G. (2021) Reporting is not supporting: Why the principle of mandatory supporting, not mandatory reporting, must guide sexual misconduct policies in higher education. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , 118(52), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116515118 Know Your Title IX. (2021). The Cost of Reporting: Perpetrator Retaliation, Institutional Betrayal, and Student Survivor Pushout. Retrieved from https://www.knowyourix.org/wp- content/uploads/2021/03/Know-Your-IX-2021-Report-Final-Copy.pdf Kovalik, J., Haley, M., & DuBois, M. (2021). Confront student misconduct at the writing center. The Dangling Modifier , 27. Mannon, B. (2021). Centering the emotional labor of writing tutors. The Writing Center Journal , 39(1/2), 143–168. Markovits, D. (2004). Contract and collaboration. The Yale Law Journal , 113, 1419–1514. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/224_ah6tbit6.pdf Méndez, X. (2020). Beyond nassar: a transformative justice and decolonial feminist approach to campus sexual assault. Frontiers, 41(2), 82–104. Mintz, B. (2021), Neoliberalism and the crisis in higher education: The cost of ideology. Am. J. Econ. Sociol., 80: 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370 Morrison, T. H. (2021). A Balancing Act: Black Women Experiencing and Negotiating Racial Tension in the Center. The Writing Center Journal , 39 (1/2), 119–142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27172216 Nadler, R. (2021). Sexual Harassment, Dirty Underwear, and Coffee Bar Hipsters: Welcome to the Virtual Writing Center. The Peer Review , 3(1). Natarajan, S., Galeano, V., Cardona, J. B., & Yang, T. (2022). What’s on Our Landing Page? Writing Center Policy Commonplaces and Antiracist Critique. The Peer Review , 7(1). North, S. M. (1984). The idea of a writing center. College English , 46(5), 433. Prebel, J. (2015). Confessions in the writing center: Constructionist approaches in the era of mandatory reporting. The Writing Lab Newsletter, 40(3–4), 2–8. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v40/40.3-4.pdf Suhr-Sytsma, M., & Brown, S.-E. (2011). Theory in/to practice: addressing the everyday language of oppression in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 31(2), 13–49. Trachsel, M. (1995). Nurturant ethics and academic ideals: Convergence in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 16(1), 24-45. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/43441986

This study explores the impact of multimodal feedback types on student experiences with asynchronous writing tutoring. Through analysis of survey responses from students who utilized Drop-Off Essay Review appointments at a small, private college, this study finds that the combination of written and video feedback enables students to better understand and engage with asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Findings indicate that most students prefer video feedback or a combination of video and written feedback, noting that the video feedback helps elaborate on the tutor’s written comments. Results also suggest that offering multiple feedback options may help writing centers reach a wider range of students, as participants expressed varying individual preferences for different feedback types. Furthermore, the asynchronous format appears to provide a more comfortable entry point into tutoring for some students. This study contributes to the limited research on multimodal feedback in asynchronous writing tutoring and highlights the importance of examining how combined feedback types impact student experiences. Keywords : asynchronous tutoring, multimodal feedback, writing centers, student engagement, inclusivity Asynchronous methods of tutoring, in which tutors and students provide and review feedback on their own schedule, have been increasingly introduced in many college and university writing centers. While asynchronous tutoring is not a new concept, such tutoring methods provide the opportunity for students to receive feedback on their writing without ever needing to meet with a tutor, which brought great value during the online times of Covid-19 and led to these methods becoming more widespread during and after Covid restrictions. Often, asynchronous feedback is received in a written format, though asynchronous tutoring can also utilize audio and video feedback from tutors. As a new tutor providing asynchronous feedback to students, I often noticed students would not review all forms of feedback provided to them; many would ignore the screencast video provided with their written feedback, and this brought forth the question: were both feedback methods necessary? This study aims to understand how multiple feedback types (written feedback, in which the reviewer uses forms of written communication such as imbedded comments, emails, or letters; audio feedback, in which the reviewer records their voice talking through their feedback; and video feedback, an expansion on audio feedback in which the reviewer provides a video both talking through and showing their feedback) impact student experiences with online writing tutoring when used in combination with one another. This article will first examine previous research on asynchronous feedback methods, looking at comparisons between asynchronous and in-person feedback, considering the specific pros and cons of asynchronous tutoring, and exploring the impact of written versus media feedback, before presenting data from a study that explores student experiences and perceptions of online, multimodal feedback. Overall, I argue that using multiple feedback types creates a valuable relationship between those methods, allowing students to better understand and address asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Previous research has compared asynchronous and face-to-face tutoring (where tutors and students meet at the same time to discuss that paper), finding that the online format can change various aspects within tutoring. In Bell’s study on 10 asynchronous sessions, she found that “tutors are not simply applying the tutoring techniques and strategies they use in in-person session in a new online setting, but they are adapting these tools and approaches” (2019). Buck et al.’s study investigating online tutoring comments also notes how an online setting impacts feedback, explaining that the asynchronous format “introduces many interpretations of the tone” which can shift how feedback is received (2021, p. 38). Separate pieces of research investigating the difference between in-person and online formats also comment on how this difference impacts the tutor-tutee relationship. Buck et al. explain that the “tutor and writer cannot have conversations setting the agenda for the upcoming session,” and that this lack of communication among each leads to a shift in focus between the two, with the tutor and tutee often maintaining different priorities (2021, p. 39). These researchers continue to explain that the lack of contact between the two results in the tutor being unable to adjust their tutoring style in ways that is often done within face-to-face sessions. As tutors are unable to see how students will respond to their feedback, they are unable to get to know their student as a writer in their session, which is often vital to adjusting tutoring feedback based on the writer’s abilities (Buck et al., 2021, p.  39). Bell also explores the tutor-tutee relationships in her research, noting that tutors often made more attempts to define roles between themselves and the student in their sessions in order to “define relationships in an asynchronous setting where participants are not both present to otherwise negotiate and establish roles” ( 2019). Bell also found that tutors adapted to the online setting by finding different approaches to keeping attention on the subject at hand. Within face-to-face tutoring, it is common for tutors to read papers aloud in order to stay on the same page as their tutees. Within Bell’s study, she found that asynchronous tutors utilized screencast videos as a visual prompt to draw attention to the section tutors focused on ( 2019) . Other findings on the shifts between in-person and asynchronous tutoring consist of the format itself. Breuch (2005) explains that the media within face-to-face tutoring remains consistent across sessions, with tutoring always occurring within a physical space and through speaking to one another. In online writing centers, however, there are numerous options to communicate, and communications can take place in a variety of formats such as email or Microsoft Word (p. 23). These differences between the tutoring methods can ultimately impact a student’s experience with writing tutoring. Various literature also demonstrates that many students prefer and value online options for tutoring specifically. A study conducted by Bell and others finds three common variables for why students opt for asynchronous appointments: time, physical space, and feedback. Students feel asynchronous options make “best use of what little time” they have available in their busy schedules, provide a space for those with distance to travel to reach the center or that is more comfortable for those not finding the physical center accommodating for their needs, and provide feedback types that students find favorable (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 6-7). Another study highlighting how many students appreciate online options for tutoring found that 40% of participants from asynchronous appointments said that they would only come for online tutoring, while 57% of in-person respondents said that they would only come for in-person tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). This fact highlights the value placed on each tutoring form by students and shows that despite the changes from in-person to online, both options are valued by different students. Aside from students’ preference for the option, online tutoring brings many advantages. As mentioned, previous research establishes the benefits of time, change in physical space, and feedback (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 7-6). Chewning (2015) also comments on the benefit of time in online tutoring, elaborating that such methods provide more freedom to students “particularly in terms of when contributions to the process can be made by either party,” allowing for both tutors and tutees to address the appointment when they are ready and able to (p. 59). Gallagher and Maxfield echo this sentiment, explaining that the online format allows for students to “take breaks and work on certain revisions” before revisiting feedback, allowing for students who might get overwhelmed from large portions of comments to review their tutor’s feedback at their own pace (2019). Another benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring is the permanence of the feedback. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) explain, while students have to rely on memory and any potential notes taken in face-to-face tutoring to inform them while making revisions after an appointment, students in asynchronous appointments are left with written or multimodal artifacts to reference at any point when working on revisions. They further explain that such an artifact can be utilized by students “to build a personal library of supplemental material over time” (2019). Bell and others also discuss this advantage in their study, explaining that because feedback is given in a more permanent format through comments or videos, students are able to revisit this feedback whenever they desire (2021, p. 7). Finally, an interesting benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring methods is that such options provide the ability to reach new students, bringing an aspect of inclusivity that may be lacking from in-person opportunities. In a study that incorporated several new tutoring options onto their campus, including an asynchronous option that they refer to as Written Feedback, it was found that “the more traditional in-person modality was the only modality where a majority (54%) of writers identified as white (191 of 356 respondents)” which suggested that while white students opted for “traditional in-person tutoring,” non-white students tended to prefer non-traditional methods of tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). Thus, this study concluded that nontraditional tutoring such as asynchronous tutoring allowed the typical boundaries of the writing center to be stretched in order to reach students who wouldn’t utilize in-person options. A similar finding came in a study investigating why students choose asynchronous options, stating that “those using online tutoring services may do so because in-person writing center programming is not always easy to access and not always designed to be inclusive” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). Thus, various research indicates that asynchronous and online tutoring reaches new audiences, often including students within marginalized groups, who might not feel comfortable visiting the physical writing center. There are also various findings displaying the disadvantages of asynchronous or online tutoring. For instance, Chewning (2015) explains in his findings through implementing online tutoring in his institution that there is value from in-person tutoring that simply cannot be recreated through online tutoring without proper resources which come with financial cost and the need for more staff or training. Due to this need, he states that a hybrid approach where writing centers offer a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous tutoring options, rather than solely replacing face-to-face tutoring with online options, would be more effective for institutions like his that are unable to provide the necessary funding and staffing (p. 61). Breuch (2005) discusses how the frustration people have with online writing centers stems from expecting these online options to function the same as in-person tutoring, but online writing centers need to have their own approach and adapt to the online format in order to be best suited for their format (p. 32). Chewning (2015) discusses how personal preference also means that some writers or even professors may be more receptive to face-to-face tutoring over online options (p. 59). Other research establishes, however, that there is a lot of preference for online formats. A study conducted by Wolfe and Griffin (2012) found that “87% of student writers who participated in an online session either preferred the online environment or had no environment preference” (p. 81). Satisfaction with feedback was also analyzed, and the study “found no significant differences in our expert raters’ perception of the instructional quality of the sessions; moreover, participants were equally satisfied with the consultations regardless of environment” (p. 83). Research on the use of different feedback methods is also crucial to understanding how asynchronous tutoring works. While there has been investigation of the use of video feedback within instructors’ feedback to students for over 10 years, only in recent years have there been writing center-specific research about asynchronous videos. Despite this drawback, findings from outside of the writing center can still inform how writers interact with different feedback types. Research on written feedback is wide with many interesting results. First, there are various ways that written feedback can be provided. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) discuss how asynchronous feedback delivers writing in the format of advice letters, which differs from the common practice of utilizing embedded comments in student papers. These researchers explain how this format “still allows the tutor to address very specific passages, just as embedded comments do, by copying and pasting them into the advice and making them an integrated part of a more global discussion,” allowing the written feedback to focus on larger portions of the text more easily than is done when embedding comments, which focus on a specific section of the paper. Another study incorporated a pilot program testing different online tutoring options. In this study, both email and message board tutorials were utilized as written feedback forms, and it was found that message board tutorials were more effective for this institution (Chewning, 2015, pp. 60-61). As marginal or embedded comments are a more common form of written feedback, however, most research focuses on this type. A study on the effectiveness of online tutoring (ETutoring) comments found that this feedback type results in effective revision from students, explaining that “student revision in response to tutor commentary is typically of a high quality” (Buck et al., 2021, p. 38). A study utilizing Microsoft Word to make marginal comments as a form of written feedback to students in the classroom found that this feedback type tends not to be perceived as conversational by students, even if the instructor makes specific attempts for feedback to be worded conversationally (Silva, 2012). In discussing audio feedback, many researchers point out the humanity that this feedback type brings to the table. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) comment that “A student then knows from page one that the work submitted was reviewed by another person, that a human being has invested time and energy in the student’s success.” This sentiment is echoed within studies done in the classroom setting, in which students comment that their instructor’s video feedback “added a more personal touch” and that “it was fun to put a voice with a name” (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, p. 126). Research on video feedback specifically, rather than simply audio feedback, finds that “Satisfaction with online asynchronous screencast tutoring was readily visible throughout the data, but the importance of offering other tutoring options was also clear” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). In her own study, Bell (2019) also analyzes how screencast videos impacts tutor feedback, explaining that “tutors rarely relied on a single technique or strategy” while creating their video feedback, and that “In addition to providing feedback, tutors appeared to use multiple tutoring strategies and techniques to encourage audience awareness, reflection, and critical thinking, encouraging and engaging writers in the learning process.” Furthermore, in video format, it is found that the combination of visual and auditory feedback provides opportunities for focus on larger concerns while still providing the opportunity to point out specific portions of text (Silva), similarly to how embedded or marginal comments function. Cavanaugh and Song’s (2014) research also noted some comparisons between the two feedback types. They explain, “Students in the study noted that the instructor’s tone was quite favorable when receiving audio comments. They found this in contrast to the tone communicated in written format” (p. 126). Their research also highlighted another difference between the two feedback types in which the focus of feedback provided shifted depending on the feedback type. Within written feedback, it was found that professors often focused on micro-level issues such as grammar and mechanics, while audio feedback typically focused on macro-level issues such as organization and overall topic of the paper (pp. 126-127). This finding was echoed within Silva’s (2012) research in which she explains that written feedback drew attention to specific sections of the paper such as specific words or sentences, while video feedback “afforded detailed discussion of macro level issues.” Students further noted that written feedback tended to be more specific, but audio feedback often was more detailed in providing examples (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-128). In discussion of these findings, the researchers suggest that audio feedback provides a more similar experience to face-to-face instruction, which is echoed by some students’ opinions on how the audio feedback was more engaging in maintaining attention similar to when in the classroom (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 128-129). Buck and others (2021) comment on similar findings as it pertains to written feedback, finding that students often utilized written comments from their tutors “to make the most formal revisions, such as changes in spelling, punctuation, and usage” (p. 38). In fact, this study finds that even when tutors do focus on macro-level issues in their written feedback, students “do not respond to those comments most frequently,” and instead opt to focus on micro-level issues (p. 38). Student preferences for feedback types tended to differ, with these studies by Silva, and Cavanaugh and Song highlighting the importance of both options. Both studies show that students found written feedback to be valuable for the revision process but enjoyed the more personal mode of feedback within the video or audio feedback (Silva, 2012; Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-129). In the case of Silva’s research, the students who participated requested that their professor utilize a “hybrid approach” of the differing feedback types at the end of the study. While the research above highlights many findings on asynchronous tutoring, this study intends to fill the gap in research on multimodal feedback methods within asynchronous writing tutoring. This study emphasizes the importance of how student experiences may change depending on various feedback types, particularly when one type of feedback is used in combination with another type. While previous research focuses on the impacts of separate feedback types, often not within a tutoring setting, this study investigates how a structure containing multiple feedback methods enables students to engage with their writing feedback in a tutoring setting. At a small, private, comprehensive college in the Mid-Atlantic, Drop-Off Essay Review (Drop-Off) was introduced to the Writing Center in the fall of 2019 to implement asynchronous tutoring alongside in-person and Zoom options. Students are able to sign up their paper, prompt, and rubric through an online submission form for a Drop-Off appointment and receive feedback from a writing tutor by 9 pm the same day as their appointment. Drop-Off utilizes three main forms of feedback: marginal comments left directly on the student’s paper, a cover page attached to the top of the student’s paper, and a screencast video made through Vidgrid provided through a link in the cover page. Tutors are provided instructions for conducting Drop-Off appointments. Such guidelines include leaving feedback that address higher-order concerns such as organization and local concerns such as grammar and mechanics feedback where appropriate. These guidelines also instruct tutors to utilize their recordings to either summarize or explain the feedback they provide through comments and the cover page summary. Finally, tutor instructions for Drop-Off are to spend up to 60 minutes on each appointment without going over this time limit. The cover page summary portion of feedback includes various pieces of information for students to review. First, the rubric provides a section for the tutor to greet the student and introduce themself by name. The next section of the cover page provides a link to the video summary or explanation that the tutor created, while the third section is optional for tutors to utilize whenever additional disclaimers are needed. A notable disclaimer is one warning the student that the tutor did not receive the assignment instructions, and, as such, was not able to ensure that the paper met all requirements; however, multiple disclaimers exist for tutors to utilize (Fig. 1). The rest of the cover page provides the assignment requirements and tells the student which requirements were met, provided that the student attached instructions to their appointment, and gives the three priorities that the tutor focused on when providing feedback. Then, the cover page provides sections for the tutor to point out what the student did well in their paper and what they could change to improve upon their paper. To view the full Drop-Off cover page and its contents, see Appendix A.

This essay examines how the Swedish disability movement creates policies involving naming practices as a means for self-presentation.The study takes its departure from two kinds of empirical data: websites of specific disability organizations and an interview with representatives of a national disability organization.Different angles of problems associated with terms for selfdescription are discussed mainly from a rhetorical-agency perspective.Through the analysis of data, I show how different political goals are connected to naming practices, resulting in ambivalence toward ongoing linguistic innovation processes, especially those with roots in norm criticism.

This article details an assignment that provides students opportunities to develop critical thinking skills native to the process of what it means to “think like a lawyer.” By asking students to map and compose a narrative about a contested public issue that describes the issue’s various dimensions (social, cultural, political, legal, economic) and how they interact to animate the issue as a matter of public concern, the assignment invites students to reimagine their roles as authors and see themselves as having the capacity to assemble and set a problem for analysis and deliberation rather than accept a problem as pre-structured. While completing the assignment, students witness firsthand the constitutive nature of the structure of legal discourse and the intra-operations of the distinct facets of legal critical thinking. Through explaining the assignment’s design and rationale, this article demonstrates how writing assignments that emphasize problem setting prepares students well to navigate the transition to law school and ultimately begin laying the grounds for successful professional careers.

Black mentorship is key to the professional development of Black scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC) and writing studies. Blending narrative ethnography and grounded theory, this article extends existing investigations into mentorship among Black professionals, by exploring how mentorship and rhetorical kinship among Black TPC and writing professors enrich their professional development. With implications for both academia and industry, this article highlights how Black TPC scholars develop, negotiate, and sustain Black professional ethos.

The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

While thoroughly theorized in rhetorical studies, the body primarily is understood as or through text. Following a literature review of the body in rhetorical scholarship, this article argues that the situated, concrete body is integral to ideological identity through its function as doxastic warrant in enthymematical argumentation. The article finally outlines a rhetorical-ethnographic orientation for investigating the points of expression for a doxastic body of a specific field.

Verbatim source use (VSU) in integrated argumentative writing tasks may enhance linguistic complexity of writing performance. This assistance might present an unequal advantage for test-takers across levels of writing proficiency, engendering validity and fairness concerns. While previous research has mostly examined the relationships between source use characteristics and proficiency levels, the relationship between VSU and linguistic complexity remains underexplored. To further unpack these relationships, this study examined both the direct impact of VSU on linguistic complexity of writing performances and its indirect impact through interaction with writing proficiency. Using natural language processing tools and techniques, we examined 34 linguistic complexity features and three VSU features of 3250 argumentative writing performances on a university-level English Placement Test (EPT). We performed exploratory factor analysis to identify linguistic complexity dimensions and applied mixed-effect models to examine how VSU features and proficiency level impacted these dimensions. Post-hoc analyses suggested weak direct impacts of different VSU features on linguistic complexity, which might reflect different essay writing strategies. However, no meaningful indirect impact was found. The findings help unravel the impact of VSU on argumentative writing and provide empirical evidence for validity arguments for integrated writing assessments.

This research methods article introduces the open source PERSUADE 2.0 corpus. The PERSUADE 2.0 corpus comprises over 25,000 argumentative essays produced by 6th-12th grade students in the United States for 15 prompts on two writing tasks: independent and source-based writing. The PERSUADE 2.0 corpus also provides detailed individual and demographic information for each writer. The goal of the PERSUADE 2.0 corpus is to advance research into relationships between discourse elements, their effectiveness, writing quality, writing tasks and prompts, and demographic and individual differences.

The study explored EFL students' development of syntactic complexity by employing the Latent Class Growth Analysis (LCGA) approach. A total of 214 tertiary EFL students from Southwest China were invited to write four argumentative essays over an academic semester. The unconditional models of LCGA were utilized to explore the optimal latent classes of students' development trajectories of syntactic complexity. The conditional models of LCGA were employed to investigate the predictive effect of English proficiency on the optimal latent classes. Results of the unconditional models revealed different latent classes of development trajectories for six indices of syntactic complexity rather than the remaining ones, which offers tentative evidence for the heterogeneity of L2 development trajectories. Results of the conditional models showed that English proficiency did not predict the membership in these latent classes. These results are discussed and implications for L2 instruction are attempted.

This case study offers examples of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools at a small nonprofit workplace dispute resolution center. It explores the limits and strengths of these AI tools, as well as the mediation field's concerns around using AI as a replacement for mediation work. Further, it explores the implications of AI tool use for the ethos of the writer and the AI tool itself as well as for the current pedagogy deliberations occurring in the technical writing field at large.

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

This essay analyzes the rhetorical framing tactics of a group of disability activists to understand how they use key words, topic shifts, and other framing maneuvers to amplify marginalized voices in public debates. Focusing on a town hall meeting and a legislator update meeting between activists and lawmakers, the author uses stasis theory to analyze how these maneuvers (1) create gateways for marginalized voices to enter the discussion and (2) anchor deliberations around topics of importance to the disabled community. This suggests a more complex role for framing in face-to-face deliberative contexts than studies of framing strategies in written texts have traditionally considered. I argue that a multidimensional view of framing uniting consideration of word choice with attention to interactive dynamics is necessary to appreciate how framing maneuvers can not only shape the content of debates but amplify the voices of people excluded by the tacit rules of democratic deliberation.

This article aims to explore how psychologist Aleksandra Sileńska, known online as Mom Therapist, addresses the mental health of mothers in her Facebook posts. Through content analysis and rhetorical tools, including the categories of topos and the triad of ethos, pathos, and logos, the study examines Sileńska’s communication strategies. The findings reveal that she predominantly employs pathos and ethos in her posts. Additionally, her promotion of the Cared-for Mom model contrasts sharply with the traditional Polish Mother topos, which often overlooks the mental health of mothers.

ABSTRACT Since at least the work of Plato, the Western philosophical tradition has observed an ambition to detect fixed truths in the swirling movements of discourse. Related to this is the tension at the heart of our understandings of “argument,” a tension between a set of fixed propositions abstracted from the dynamic of human exchanges, and those exchanges themselves, alive with the uncertainties of experience. This article explores this tension with a view to recovering a sense of “argument” that stays true to the ways in which it is lived in everyday situations.

ABSTRACT Despite Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s well-known influence on argumentation studies, it is striking that their theory of argumentation no longer stands out as a living project in the field. On the one hand, critics argue that their theory is inherently relativistic and therefore incapable of aiding argument evaluation. On the other hand, critics argue that, even as a descriptive theory, it fails to sufficiently justify its own systematic ambitions. This article addresses these dual concerns by returning to one of the most neglected yet most innovative aspects of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation—its rhetorical methodology. Reconstructing two key aspects of this methodology in phenomenological terms, the author discusses that the theory of argumentation found in The New Rhetoric is a philosophically neutral framework for describing the already norm-laden practice of argumentation.

AbstractDespite increasing interest in studying arguments from deontic authority of the general form “(1) $$\delta$$ δ is a deontic authority in institution $$\varOmega$$ Ω ; (2) according to $$\delta$$ δ , I should do $$\alpha$$ α , C: therefore, (3) I should do $$\alpha$$ α ”, the state of the art models are not capable of grasping their complexity. The existing sets of critical questions assigned to this argumentation scheme seem to conflate two problems: whether a person is subject to an authority of an institution in the first place and whether the command issued within the context of a particular institution is eventually binding. For this reason, we introduce (1) a set of Basic Critical Questions to scrutinize the former issue, and (2) a set of more detailed questions related to specific features, also referred to as “parameters”, of institutional environments (Intra-Institutional Critical Questions). We identify major elements of institutional environments in which authoritative utterances are made and the crucial parameters of arguments from deontic authority. The selected evidence from the decisions of the Polish Supreme Administrative Court helps us show how these parameters may be used to reconstruct subtypes of this argument scheme, with their associated sets of critical questions. In specific institutional contexts, such detailed schemes are capable of grasping the complexity of appeals to deontic authority and thus should be used rather than general schemes. The reconstruction of argumentation schemes with critical questions shows how particular arguments may successfully be attacked.

AbstractThat bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning fail to instantiate persuasive argumentation is an often informally presented but not systematically developed view. In this paper, I will argue that this unpersuasiveness is not determined by principles of justification transmission but by two straightforward principles of rationality, understood as a concept of internal coherence. First, it is rational for S to believe the conclusion of an argument because of the argument, only if S believes sufficiently many premises of the argument. Second, if S doubts that a source O is reliable and believes that information i is delivered by O, then S rationally suspends judgment about the truth of i. This paper aims to accomplish two tasks. First, it provides a thorough analysis of why bootstrapping argumentation is not an instance of rational persuasion. Second, it contains a more general theory about preconditions and limits of persuasive argumentation.

This My Favorite Assignment (MFA) article features 11 teaching innovations first presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held Denver, Colorado, USA. These assignments are designed to boost students’ writing, persuasion, crisis management skills, and personal and professional development.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

In Organs for Sale: Bioethics, Neoliberalism, and Public Moral Deliberation, Gillespie examines human organ debates to critique neoliberalism's predominance in and preemption of public moral deliberation. Although organ sales have been previously analyzed by economists and philosophers, Gillespie employs a unique rhetorical lens to discern the positions, justifications, and typical lines of argument representative of each camp. This distinction allows Gillespie to hone in on the argumentative dynamics of public advocates and construct a thorough overview of the debate. The rhetorical landscape is positioned as an exchange between two main camps: the market advocates, who rely on the “autonomy, efficiency, and consistency” allotted by markets, and the altruism advocates, who insist that “virtue, justice, and civic community” are better norms with which to guide the exchange of organs (196–197). This debate is framed in the terms of neoliberalism, a political theory that “asserts the centrality and priority of individual rights, marketization, and free markets in human well-being.” (18) Gillespie argues that the expansion and resonance of neoliberal rhetoric weaken public morality by shrinking the civic duty to deliberate, relegating moral deliberation entirely to supposedly neutral, amoral market forces.In Sections 1 and 2, Gillespie outlines the current organ donation policy and conducts a rhetorical analysis of the main arguments, tropes, keywords, testimonials, horror stories, and urban legends that each camp deploys. The altruistic camp, whose position is reflected in current U.S. law, argues that altruism is “inspirational,” “enacts justice,” and “promotes and performs civic community” (59). The case for the altruistic system is undergirded by an emphasis on civic virtue, an “attitude” that needs to be cultivated and publicized to increase organ supply (55). Official stories, like those on OrganDonor.gov, feature testimonials of organ recipients and public service announcements meant to inspire others to donate. Celebrity organ recipient testimonials, such as those of Alonzo Mourning, Steve Jobs, and Tracy Morgan, give voice to the altruistic system and tend to garner more mainstream attention. Fictional accounts, including films, television shows, and novels, also contribute, albeit in artistic or dramatized ways, to the organ debate. Social media campaigns, either for publicity or crowdfunding, play a similar role in characterizing donors and recipients. These various forms coalesce into a rhetoric of altruism that promotes “a particular view of the virtuous citizen,” who contributes to the organ deficit through the selfless act of donation (51).Market advocates, whom Gillespie contrasts with the altruists, seek to persuade the public that financial compensation for human organs, either through a regulated market or through incentivization, “is rational, efficient, and consistent with public values” (60). Here too, Gillespie conducts a rhetorical analysis of the prominent stories told and language used by market advocates. The horror stories of botched black-market surgeries and deceitful medical malpractice are used ubiquitously by market advocates, implying that a regulated, transparent market would eliminate illicit sales (60, 66). Market advocates also argue that the altruistic system is already undermined by an otherwise thriving market in body parts—like sperm, ova, and plasma—and in the thousands of dollars paid to doctors and medical personnel for transplants. Stories of willing buyers in the United States and of desperate sellers in economically impoverished areas testify to the existence of a market, ostensibly whether altruism advocates like it or not. These arguments, often oriented toward “choice” and “transparency,” make the case for an organ market on the neoliberal premise that it would maintain autonomy, efficiency, and consistency with current practices (83).In Sections 3 and 4, Gillespie crystallizes his critique of neoliberalism, first by providing an overview of the pluralistic dilemma of liberal democracy. Pluralistic democracy demands that “ethically diverse” members of society reconcile their moral doctrines through public deliberation, a perpetual “tension” emblematic of the “cooperative search” for the good life (214). For Gillespie, the quality of contemporary public discourse regarding the morality of the sale of human organs resembles a limp rope rather than a tension. The reason, he argues, is that the supposedly neutral market has become a “default” setting that preempts moral deliberation altogether (177). The neoliberal predominance of the “Civic Restraint Principle,” best known by the colloquial maxim “You do you, and I'll do me,” centers individualism as the essential ethic (99).Dumping the burden of moral deliberation onto the Civic Restraint Principle does not make us principled, Gillespie argues; it makes us pragmatic. This is not to say that neoliberalism is necessarily immoral. Gillespie writes to reinvigorate a public deliberation that “argues about morality—even if those arguments are fierce and at some level intractable,” rather than resigning to individualistic relativism (205). He argues that neoliberalism shouldn't be defaulted to without proper consideration of the ethics of organ sales. If total individualism is taken as an ethic, it effectively opts out of important moral disputes. When “bracketing” is taken as an ethic in itself, the result is a vacancy of any ethic. In this way, neoliberal rhetoric “hijacks the very practice of and space for public moral deliberation,” conceiving it strictly as an individualized affair (201).Gillespie maintains that tolerance is a virtue, albeit a flimsy ethic on its own. Indeed, Gillespie concedes, “the liberal virtue of tolerance is vital” given the dilemmas of pluralism (152). In a healthy democracy, however, citizens owe much more to each other. Moral deliberation cannot be minimized to individualism. In Michael Sandel's words, “‘moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor’” (16). Moral disputes, which are often categorical, must be justified in the public sphere, given normativity through good reasons. The weighing of reasons is done rhetorically; the stories, characters, and language that make up public moral deliberation have rhetorical force that persuades deliberative participants to make judgments about which reasons matter most. Gillespie sums up his deliberative theory unambiguously: “The search for moral truth, to be codified under law, is collective and procedurally intersubjective, but morality itself is not” (152).Ultimately, whether “dignity is or is not violated by organ sales” represents a key turning point in the organ market debate (158). Markets, even regulated ones, can exploit vulnerable and socioeconomically exploited populations. If a kidney or a piece of liver were worth fifty-thousand dollars, “a struggling low-income person would, ostensibly, be unable to turn down such an offer” (172). The asymmetrical nature of the exchange suggests to status quo altruists that a certain degree of exploitation is taking place. They insist that market mechanisms are blind to the “background condition that makes the actual contractual engagement—even if undertaken voluntarily—morally suspect” (169). Gillespie notes, however, that “the need for an organ by a person in dire straits and facing death is not exactly an empowering situation either” (172).Market advocates use the concept of dignity differently. They consider the blindness of market mechanisms to be a form of fairness and neutrality from the moral paternalism of the allegedly dignified majority, or worse, the state. Dignity, in neoliberal logics, inheres in the freedom to choose whether selling an organ coincides or conflicts with one's own moral compass. Restricting this choice would be to impose a bourgeois definition of dignity on less privileged classes. What dignity means, market advocates argue, may be established by the tyranny of the majority, and thus should remain an individualized, privatized concern.Gillespie ends with a short self-reflection, wherein he acknowledges that, even after gauging the moral complexity of the question of the organ market and criticizing the lethargy with which neoliberalism addresses it, it would make sense, under certain circumstances, to buy an organ. Readers should not look to Gillespie for an answer to the moral question of organ procurement. He insists, rather, on a revitalization of public deliberation on the matter. Public deliberation cannot be reliant on a neoliberal, marketized principle of civic restraint in place of affirmative moral considerations (101–102). Students and scholars of the rhetoric of science, bioethics, and political theory, particularly in the areas of discourse theory and pluralism, would benefit from Gillespie's exploration of the moral deliberation surrounding organ sales.

Assuming the mantle at R&PA was a weighty responsibility for me, personally as well as professionally. Very few people likely know this, but I was a graduate student editorial assistant at Texas A&M when the journal started. Back in the day, I helped vet essays prior to publication, which meant trudging over to the library to pull books and journals off their shelves to check citations. Like many others in the field, I have submitted manuscripts to be considered for publication in this journal and been rejected. One of my greatest professional regrets is dropping a revise and resubmit I received from R&PA while in graduate school—I did so, I told myself, to focus on my dissertation. Never would I have thought I would become the journal's editor. Nevertheless, I am honored to be editor of a journal that has produced so much work that resonates so powerfully in the areas about which I research and write. Its scholarship has proved so influential in my thinking and research over the years that much of the readings I assign to the graduate students in my rhetorical criticism course come from its pages.I had an affectionate, yet sometimes contentious, history with the founder of this journal. Marty was my professor, served on my MA committee, provided a reference to graduate school, published my work, and offered me guidance as I became an editor myself (you have to “ride herd” on reviewers, he told me). I often have wondered what he thought when I was selected as the editor of R&PA; he was still alive at the time.When I first agreed to edit Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I knew I wanted to have an invited issue—something I did not do for either of the journals I edited previously. When the field erupted in a justifiable uproar a number of years ago, I remained silent. I did not do so to be complicit with existing power structures. I did so because others’ voices needed to be heard more than mine; our community did not need my voice merely making noise or filling space. An invited issue—in the journal around which much of the controversy came to the forefront—thus seemed to me a particularly poetic and apt opportunity to provide a vehicle through which I could magnify others’ voices.As I began to conceptualize a special issue, I knew I wanted to do something that gestured to the journal's past while acknowledging our present. I also wanted to do something that would create an inclusive space for voices not typically published within its pages, providing an opportunity for scholars not as advanced in their career trajectory to publish in R&PA. I had an idea to take a page from the journal's (and the discipline's) past and flip the script a bit.In the Spring of 2000, Michael Leff guest edited a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs (following a presidential rhetoric conference) about what scholars perceived as President Abraham Lincoln's moment of greatest rhetorical leadership. The scholars in that issue approached the question from a wide variety of perspectives. Some analyzed a single text (varying from the famous to the obscure) whereas others used multiple texts. Some discussed the affirmative rhetorical choices Lincoln deployed whereas others discussed how Lincoln effaced himself in his discourse. All focused on the rhetoric of one orator—a celebrated and official leader of the United States of America.Realizing that rhetorical leadership looks different to different populations or within different contexts, I reached out to authors I thought could bring a unique perspective to the conversation. Not all of the scholars to whom I reached out responded. They might have missed my email, incorrectly thought the offer was a widely cast one, did not have the time or the capacity to write something, or did not want to be published in this journal. Some of the scholars who did respond were unable to draft an essay at this time or ended up being unable to do so for various personal and professional reasons. I know readers will wonder why certain voices were not included. Please know that I tried to have more perspectives represented and that I hope more voices that research different populations will be included in the pages of this journal in the future. This one issue is not enough.I invited the scholars within this issue to answer the question, “What does rhetorical leadership look like” to different people or in different contexts? I wrote to the invited authors that rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, can look different to different populations active in the public sphere. Consequently, what constituted rhetoric, leadership, and rhetorical leadership, were all “open” concepts. What counted as a text, who communicated—or did not communicate—and about what they communicated were left to each scholar to be determined, according to what each would view as appropriate to their area of study. I wanted the call to be cast as widely as possible to allow creativity and agency in authorial response, yet I also wanted to maintain a discernable theme. I did not want my thoughts on the subject to lead, but to provide a site for authors who specialize in different areas of study to formulate the conversation. (This is not to say that I did not provide editorial guidance.) I asked, moreover, for the authors to keep the essays relatively short—shorter than the essays we typically publish—so that more voices and perspectives could be included within the issue. I am excited for the readership of R&PA to engage with the ideas presented by the authors.The essays in this issue of R&PA explode the idea of what constitutes rhetorical leadership. They show us that rhetorical leadership is not monolithic, it does not have an identifiable genre, and it is not speech- or discourse-reliant. Rhetorical leadership enables voices to be heard in transgressive and transformative ways through different channels of communication, through the embodiment of place and ideas, and through actions. Rhetorical leadership can be fluid and/or guided by geographic space. The essays in this issue largely reject notions of leadership that are patriarchal and adhere to traditional leadership structures. The authors often reconceptualize notions of power and forefront discourses that have not received much scholarly attention, have been neglected or silenced, or have been differently empowered. Many essays show rhetorical leadership in communal contexts, rejecting traditional pathways of power that made previously conceptualized understandings of rhetorical leadership possible.In his essay, “Queer Rhetorical Leadership: ‘Ethical Sluts’ in Modern U.S.-American Polyamory as Exemplar,” Thomas R. Dunn queers the idea of leadership, opening leadership up to “possibilities and potentialities” rather than definitive generic markers. Dunn examines how Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton's book, The Ethical Slut, uses “joyful, radical revisioning; the use of transformational vulgarities; and cultivating comfort in irresolution” to enact a form of queer leadership. Queer leadership, Dunn explains, values adjusting to contemporary issues and concerns, enjoys a “colorful linguistic style” some may deem vulgar, and invites ambiguity and a lack of resolution. Although a queer leadership style “is necessary to rethink the social norms that too often constrain queer life and which, when reinvented, can make new ways of living life queerly possible,” Dunn clarifies that queer rhetorical leadership can be used by anyone to address issues that previous understandings of rhetorical leadership have not been equipped to address.In their essay, “Led by the Land: Recovering Land Agency and Interconnectedness in Social Movement Scholarship,” Noor Ghazal Aswad and Michael Lechuga look at social movements that understand leadership through “leaderless,” land-based, shared geographic space. Ghazal Aswad and Lechuga “envision a form of rhetorical leadership that distributes responsibility, risk, and rewards to all members of a group.” Land can create political subjectivities and social connections. Using the Syrian revolution as a case study, they use the people's response to the Assad regime's practice of sieges and land-burning to demonstrate how the reclamation of the land for subsistence can be generative for survival with the land. Through practices of seed-smuggling and bottom-up farming, enabled through a cooperative agrarian network, the community's relationality and subjectivity is created through emplaced rhetoric that is intersectional and connected.Allison Hahn investigates how technology enables marginalized committees to participate in community development planning in her essay, “Rhetorical Leadership of a Data Story.” During the COVID global pandemic, technological advances such as video teleconferencing have enabled traditionally marginalized communities to participate in the deliberative process. Through her analysis of Diana Wachira's presentation of evidence-based research over a Zoom meeting to an international audience about the eviction of the Kariobangi North community in Nairobi, Kenya, Hahn shows how Wachira employs emplaced rhetoric, making known what might be unknown—or at least lesser known—otherwise. In Wachira's case, she used her own research to provide context and information about the magnitude of persons to be displaced as well as their history with the land upon which they live—information not shared via typical news networks. Wachira's emplaced rhetoric provides a powerful example of how a marginalized community can use their own narrative to counter the dominant narrative to protect human rights and to advance environmental justice.Luhui Whitebear uses counter-colonial intergenerational storytelling to examine the ways in which Indigenous rhetorical leadership advocates social change by bridging multiple worlds, across generations and between Indigenous and colonial systems in her essay, “Our Voices Have Always Been Political: Indigenous Feminist Rhetorical Leadership.” Whitebear examines the rhetoric of three Indigenous women—Zitkala-Ša's boarding school era poetry, Laura Cornelius Kellogg's popular press publications, and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's speech from Alcatraz—to show not only how these women survived settler colonialism, but also how they resisted colonial systems and practices to preserve their own cultural Indigenous knowledge systems and values within “spaces designed to exclude them.” The rhetorical leadership of Indigenous rhetoricians represents their larger tribal community and history, advancing Indigenous rights while preserving and perpetuating Indigenous culture.In their essay, “The Greta Affect,” Justin Eckstein and Erin Keoppen look at how claims to youth get circulated in the public sphere as a rhetorical resource to create an affective response to effect change. The authors use popular memes of Lisa Simpson, projecting the ethos of Greta Thunberg, to show how a hopeful and naïve leader gets deployed in the public sphere to advocate for change by shaming adults for their lack of action. According to Eckstein and Keoppen, “the Greta Affect mobilizes affect through the moral claim of right makes might to move an intimate public.” Within the public sphere, the girl is complemented for encouraging courageous leadership and criticized for her pushy naivete. The authors contend that, although Thunberg was constrained through the Simpson memes, youth framing creates unique parameters for public deliberation, opening space for a consideration of the obligations the current generation of leaders owes to future generations.In his essay, “México Pésimo: Colosio's Metanoic and Magnicidal Leadership,” José Ángel Maldonado analyzes Luis Donaldo Colosio's 1994 Mexican presidential campaign speech, “Yo Veo un México,” that allegedly led to his assassination. In his speech, Maldonado tells us, Colosio uses his head as a metaphor for leadership (since the Mexican language does not have a direct translation for leader), acknowledges the existence of Mexican pessimism while calling for the end of pessimism via a series of opportunities that could lead to reform and transformation in the country. Colosio's speech, combined with his assassination, present a metanoic pessimism that awaits new opportunities for Mexican socioeconomic advancement.In his essay, “Lo Único Que Tengo Es Amor Para Amar: Rhetorical Leadership and the Journalism of Alfredo Corchado,” Richard Pineda investigates how the journalist Alfredo Corchado enacts leadership in the borderlands between two countries and identities. Through an analysis of two of his books, Pineda finds that Corchado advocates hybrid identity, resilience, and accessibility. Through accessible writing that relays common experiences of people living on the border, Corchado provides an example of how to negotiate liminal spaces for his audience(s). He uses personal and communal stories to highlight the reliance of Mexican Americans in the United States and in Mexico. He also uses language that connects his audience to their geographical roots while embracing the challenges of their present existence, which offers hope to his readers that they are not alone in their embodied experience.In his essay, “Legacy Leadership: Elaine Brown's ‘Education for Liberation’ Bolstering the Fight for Black Women,” Darrian Carroll examines Brown's 2014 speech to University of Georgia students to explain how Brown encourages activists to continue advocating for liberation through “legacy leadership.” A commemoration of the successes and struggles of the past, legacy leadership provides a model of Black female leadership by reminding the audience of the movement's ideological commitments, retelling the conditions of the past and present that create the need for liberation, and encouraging her audience to do all they can to fight for liberation. Brown empowers listeners to act in their everyday experiences for Black liberation through her personal narratives of leading the Black Panther Party.From these essays, we learn that rhetorical leaders may be, but they do not have to be, individuals in official leadership positions. Leaders, and leadership, abound around us. These essays help us understand that rhetorical leadership gains force from the communities from which these communications derive. Leaders(hip) thrive(s), encouraging their populations in a multitude of contexts. To see rhetorical leadership at work, we can look to the narratives and the lessons that arise from within our communities, as leadership results from a need to change and to adapt, as well as from our traditions, our geographic spaces, our shared histories, our triumphs and our challenges, our needs and concerns, our future hopes and dreams, and our search for place and belonging. People and things that speak to those things exemplify leadership. The form of leadership looks different, depending on the specific contexts from which the leadership emerges and through the eyes attuned to see it.When I assumed the mantle of editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, I did so with a commitment to rhetorical studies as a pluralistic effort. The essays in this issue evidence the diversity of work possible. As diverse as this collection is, however, it does not—and cannot—represent the totality of scholarly and personal perspectives. Space in our journals must be opened for additional, new, and emerging voices and perspectives.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

This study investigates infant feeding rhetoric from the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), a World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnership that prioritizes exclusive breastfeeding. The study approaches patient education materials as user documentation and analyzes the materials for kairos and metaphor. The author argued that the materials function as documentation for the birthing parent’s body operating within the system of the BFHI. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and for creating infant feeding resources that provide critical access to the healthcare system by rejecting the body-as-machine metaphor and reflecting families’ diverse situations, not just the situation of the U.S. healthcare system or BFHI.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.