All Journals
474 articlesDecember 2015
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Abstract
Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.
November 2015
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The Contributions of Writing to Learning and Development: Results from a Large-Scale Multi-institutional Study ↗
Abstract
Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.
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Revising Letters and Reclaiming Space: The Case for Expanding the Search for Nineteenth-Century Women’s Letter-Writing Rhetoric into Imaginative Literature ↗
Abstract
The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.
October 2015
September 2015
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Abstract
“Volume 5.1 continues our mission of publishing a wide variety of rhetorical scholarship on a vast expanse of important contemporary topics. Articles in this issue span the sacred and the secular, the deeply personal and the broadly political. The articles share an interest in movement—how rhetoric moves and exhorts audiences to move”
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Abstract
There has been a remarkable surge of interest in creativity in a wide variety of disciplines in recent years. Taken in aggregate, this body of work now theorizes creativity as a—foundational aspect of human cognition and intelligence. If we theorize creativity as a highly sophisticated and valuable form of cognition, it must also then be regarded as a necessary—and indispensable part of the curriculum in the writing classroom.
July 2015
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Abstract
Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.
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Personal Writing in Professional Spaces: Contesting Exceptionalism in Interwar Women’s Vocational Autobiographies ↗
Abstract
This essay draws on genre theory and recent conceptualizations of the personal as rhetorical in order to investigate the collective stakes of writerly self-representation. Contextualizing and analyzing a widely published early twentieth-century genre, the vocational autobiography, I argue that female professionals made use of the rhetorical resources available in the genre to personalize their professional identities, counteracting a widespread discourse of exceptionalism and flouting widespread advice about the necessity of strict separation between personal and professional identities. By using personal narratives to depict their gendered and embodied presence in powerful professional spaces such as laboratories and newsrooms, female writers made use of this genre to normalize their presence and to open up access to such spaces for other women.
June 2015
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Abstract
We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.
May 2015
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“Out of Her Safety into His Hunger and Weakness”: Gendered Eating Spaces in Eudora Welty’s “A Wide Net” and “Flowers for Marjorie” ↗
Abstract
In “Flowers for Marjorie” and “The Wide Net,” Welty adopts masculine vantage points from which she explores denials of feminized civility. The similarities of these stories allow for a discussion of three major elements: First, the gendered eating related to a pregnancy; second, the refusal to eat in the homespace in favor of eating in spaces of homosocial bonding; and third, the partaking of liquor and the gendered alignment that signifies. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark article “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!”—and many theorists who have come after him—suggests that male figures in American literature seek out spaces in which they can commune with other men and avoid the traditional responsibilities of the homespace (providing for a household, being responsible to a family, etc.). These male characters cannot avoid the home-space forever, though, and must eventually return to the realm they perceive to be primarily feminine. In light of such arguments, this article examines Welty’s male characters’ evasions of and returns to the homespace as they relate to Southern foodways.
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Abstract
This article describes the key features of the WAC program at the Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Cincinnati. the author won a Diana Hacker Award.
April 2015
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Abstract
Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.
February 2015
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Abstract
Technology is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives in and out of schools, yet it escapes the sustained scrutiny of education researchers who contribute to the wider “orthodoxy of optimism” (Selwyn, 2014) accompanying all things technological. Challenging such orthodoxy begins with greater precision in language, replacing the broadness of technology with the more accurate specificity of software (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). This essay conceptually frames how software space—a term I use to refer to complex computational assemblages—affects the teaching of literature, arguing that software-powered technologies can be conducive to rigorous forms of literary study and research if they are used with an understanding of both the nature of software and the contexts in which software is produced and promoted. I draw on English education and related fields to propose the establishment of what I call new literatures.
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Abstract
Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12–17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship,—sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls’ voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold, eds. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography Eli Goldblatt PHD (Po H# on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Elaine Richardson Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp
January 2015
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Abstract
The authors call for more flexible dissertation projects but also argue that problems with graduate education range far wider than the doctoral dissertation. Many faculty resist the idea that the humanities can train students in skills that are useful, even marketable, outside of higher education. Graduate programs must find ways to stress these transferable skills and do better at preparing students for nonprofessorial jobs within and outside academia—including taking new approaches to the dissertation requirement. Humanists who take refuge in the seemingly high-minded idea that the humanities are only valuable for their own sake, or because they lack utility, make it harder to address these issues.
December 2014
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Abstract
This article addresses the current nationwide emphasis on job-readiness programs by (1) pointing to the “utility” of studying creative writing and (2) outlining a plan for including engagement strategies in the construction of a two-year creative writing degree.
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters by Robert Pinsky; reviewed by Rob Wallace Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges: Inside and Outside of Classrooms by W. Norton Grubb with Robert Gabriner; reviewed by Keith Kroll Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines by Laura Wilder; reviewed by Abigail Montgomery
November 2014
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Abstract
While the topic of plagiarism in student writing has received much attention in previous research, relatively few studies have examined teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, and these have tended to focus on how teachers from English L1 countries understand plagiarism (Flint, Macdonald, & Clegg, 2006). Yet given that approximately 80% of English teachers worldwide are nonnative English speakers (Braine, 2010), research that can shed light on these teachers’ practices of defining, detecting, and preventing plagiarism in student writing is urgently needed. The present exploratory study considers teachers’ perceptions and cultural constructions of plagiarism in student writing in Taiwan. Results from a survey and interviews with 23 Taiwanese teachers reveal that a number of cultural factors influenced student plagiarism during writing. These teachers understood plagiarism as being influenced by the Chinese words piaoqie (to rob and steal) and chaoxi (to copy and steal). They also suggested that an emphasis on social relationships and reciprocity in writing, in addition to students’ lack of experience in citing sources appropriately, may lead to both intentional and unintentional plagiarism in students’ writing. These results suggest that plagiarism in this Taiwanese context might be a by-product of the Confucian educational tradition that emphasizes memorization and repetition. Unintentional plagiarism could be closely linked to unawareness. In this case, lack of intentional wrongdoing by students may be due to the influence of culturally rooted definitions of the word plagiarism, suggesting that inexperience is likely to be a contributing factor behind student plagiarism. Implications for pedagogy and further research are suggested.
October 2014
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Abstract
Visual sign systems have become an essential means of communication in places where large numbers of people of different nationalities gather, such as at international airports and the Olympic Games. That they can effectively increase accessibility among users not necessarily sharing a common language speaks to their potential usefulness in other situations. A homeless shelter in a western North Carolina community received funding to build a new facility. With the clientele's widely diverse communication abilities, including those who are illiterate or have limited reading skills, those who are non-native speakers knowing little to no English, and those who are coming from different cultural contexts, a visual sign system was designed to facilitate navigation for all visitors. Using Peirce's theory of signs, Neurath's ISOTYPE, and the least action principle borrowed from physics as a framework, this case study shows how the signs were designed and usability tested to ensure increased accessibility.
August 2014
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Abstract
With graduate training only in literary research methods, the author built a successful career focused on issues of student plagiarism. Gradually, however, she came to realize that her claims about plagiarism were based on local observation and personal experience; they could not persuade wide audiences. Late in her career, she began doing large-scale, data-based research that allows her to persuade wider audiences; the data-based research has also challenged and revised some of her earlier claims about plagiarism.
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Reconceptualizing Cosmopolitanism in Language and Literacy Education: Insights from a Singapore School ↗
Abstract
By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include politicalspeeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.
June 2014
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Abstract
Sisters and Brothers of the Struggle: Teachers of Writing in Their Worlds Charles Bazerman Internationalization, English L2 Writers, and the Writing Classroom: Implications for Teaching and Learning Terry Myers Zawacki and Anna Sophia Habib
May 2014
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Abstract
Holdstein examines the threads that connect three seemingly disparate books in composition studies: Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act by Rebecca S. Nowacek, The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University by David Bleich, and The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, edited by John T. Gage.
April 2014
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Abstract
Between 1884 and 1926, such publishers of technological information as Henley Publishing, Audel Publishing, John Wiley, Van Nostrand, McGraw-Hill, and Practical Publications put out dozens and dozens of technical catechisms on a wide variety of technical subjects. Then, around 1926, these publishers ceased releasing texts called catechisms. What made the genre so popular? Did it disappear? The answers to these questions provide a case study of genre adaptation, genre change, and genre persistence within technical communication.
February 2014
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Abstract
ABSTRACTThough popular in the nineteenth century and widespread since, the elements of the hoax form can be traced to the origins of rhetorical theorizing, principally in the strategies of probability and counterprobability developed by the early orators and sophists. This article begins by defining features of the hoax as a textual event and then describes how hoaxes use traditional rhetorical techniques of both probability and improbability to transport viewers from credulity and acceptance to doubt and disbelief, demonstrating technical mastery over rhetorical conventions of the genre to mock their targets and to entertain and instruct their audience.
January 2014
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Abstract
Drawing on the appraisal framework from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this article examines patterns of stance in a corpus of 92 high- and low-graded argumentative papers written in the context of an upper-level course in economics. It interprets differential patterns of stance in students’ texts in light of interview commentaries from the instructors, exploring how their judgments of students’ levels of “critical reasoning” and “analytic rigor,” among other qualities, may be influenced by recurring configurations of stance. As a methodological contribution, the article demonstrates how appraisal analysis of student writing, when used alongside instructor interviews, can reveal types of stances that are tacitly valued in the specific context. Results suggest the need for greater awareness among faculty in the disciplines of what is “going on” when they are reading student work and how they can make their expectations and judgments more explicit to students when assigning and evaluating writing.
2014
December 2013
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, by Peter Elbow, Reviewed by Patrick Sullivan, and by Annie Del Principe and Holly Hassel, with a Response from Peter Elbow From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974, by David Flitalicing, Reviewed by Chris Warnick Agency in the Age of Peer Production, by Quentin D. Vieregge, Kyle D. Stedman, Taylor Joy Mitchell, and Joseph M. Moxley, Reviewed by Sean Barnette Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, by Rebecca S. Nowacek, Reviewed by Deanna Mascle How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish; Several Short Sentences about Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Reviewed by Peter Wayne Moe
October 2013
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Abstract
Since the 1960s, computer scientists and enthusiasts have paralleled computer programming to literacy, arguing it is a generalizable skill that should be more widely taught and held. Launching from that premise, this article leverages historical and social findings from literacy studies to frame computer programming as “computational literacy.” I argue that programming and writing have followed similar historical trajectories as material technologies and explain how they are intertwined in contemporary composition environments. A concept of “computational literacy” helps us to better understand the social, technical and cultural dynamics of programming, but it also enriches our vision of twenty-first century composition.
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Abstract
To interrogate the field’s current understanding of writing as central to learning in the sciences, this study offers results from a qualitative, emic study of college students and their scientist mentors at work in an NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates. I observed that the work of this professional research laboratory mainly recruited and developed literacies, such as manual dexterity and visual acuity, other than language-based ones. Describing here the various laboratory activities that fostered higher-order thinking and knowledge transformation, I conclude that “writing to learn” research must consider how writing fits in with an ever-developing understanding of the complexity of learning.
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Book Reviews: Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines, the Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, Visual Strategies, a Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists & Engineers, Document Design: A Guide for Technical Communicators, the Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations with or without Slides ↗
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Abstract
Technical communication increasingly occurs in distributed, cross-cultural, and cross-organizational environments in which stakeholders may have widely disparate—even conflicting—perspectives. Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) is one such environment. Balancing complex and conflicting perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups is a challenge, and unstable stakeholder participation is a widespread problem in ICTD projects. The study presented here shows that stakeholders’ participation in a project was sustained most easily when the value that the stakeholders would gain from such participation was congruent with their respective national and organizational cultures. This study has implications for technical communicators working on cross-organizational projects, particularly projects that occur in distributed, cross-cultural environments.
September 2013
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Abstract
Based on interviews with fifty-seven scholars in rhetoric and composition, this article addresses multiple topics in relation to the job search process. I emphasize the need for a more critical examination of job market procedures field-wide, taking into consideration the ways in which hiring committees might be unknowingly enacting exclusionary practices.
July 2013
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Abstract
Scholars have become increasingly interested in how organizations communicate with external stakeholders, such as consumers. Recent studies have looked specifically at consumer response to the use of English in advertising texts in a number of different European countries. The use of English in such texts is part of a commonly used marketing strategy to standardize advertising campaigns that builds on the assumption that English is not only neutral but also widely understood. This article presents the results of a survey of the attitudes of Emirati consumers toward the use of English in advertising texts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The survey findings are discussed in terms of the unique social and cultural fabric of the modern-day UAE, as well as of the Emirati community as an economically powerful Muslim population.
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Abstract
To contribute to critical public relations (PR) and communication research, the authors employ an institutional perspective in examining how actors conceptualize PR and make sense of PR practice in relation to their shared and competing logics. Specifically, they highlight the primacy of logics and identities in the social construction of PR by exploring how a wide range of actors interpret and understand PR in Chinese cultural contexts. In conducting 40 semistructured interviews with PR agency consultants, in-house PR practitioners, media journalists, and industry association officers, the authors have found multiple and competing logics within the field that, in turn, confer reconciled identities on Chinese PR. The Chinese cultural contexts serve as a repertoire for stakeholders to draw institutional logics and legitimize their interpretations of PR practice in China.
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Abstract
In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.
June 2013
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Abstract
Abstract In 1951, the American Federation of Labor produced a map of the Soviet Union showing the locations of 175 forced labor camps administered by the Gulag. Widely appropriated in popular magazines and newspapers, and disseminated internationally as propaganda against the U.S.S.R., the map, entitled “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.,” would be cited as “one of the most widely circulated pieces of anti-Communist literature.” By contextualizing the map's origins and circulation, as well as engaging in a close analysis of its visual codes and intertextual relationships with photographs, captions, and other materials, this essay argues that the Gulag map became an evidentiary weapon in the increasingly bipolar spaces of the early Cold War. In particular, “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.” draws on cartography's unique power of “placement” to locate forced labor camps with authenticity and precision, infiltrating the impenetrable spaces of the Soviet Union as a visually compelling mode of Cold War knowledge production.
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Purifying Islam in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Corporatist Metaphors and the Rise of Religious Intolerance ↗
Abstract
Abstract Following a democratic uprising in 1998, the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia embarked on a transition from four decades of authoritarian rule to become the world's third largest democracy. A recent surge in religious intolerance, however, has sparked concern over an apparent backlash against the political and religious pluralism of the new democratic era. As the world looks to this vast country of 237 million as a model for other Muslim nations now rebelling against their own dictatorships, it is important to understand this political turn marked by a growing incapacity to deal with otherness. This article examines public discourse surrounding accelerating attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia to provide insight into a similar rise in intolerance worldwide, and to address a pressing question for many rhetoric scholars: how does religion work to legitimate or eliminate violence?
May 2013
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Abstract
This special issue of College English brings together well-established scholars of intellectual property as they present fresh work to the field. Their essays offer wide-ranging, provocative explorations of intellectual property as a cultural artifact over the past three centuries.
April 2013
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Abstract
In this article R. F. Yeager offers a history of the development of the John Gower Society, by way of encouraging others who seek a process model by which wider audiences, and classroom recognition, for currently little-read texts and authors can be obtained.
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Abstract
The Prik of Conscience is a lengthy and widely distributed medieval poem (more than 9,600 lines, more than 115 surviving manuscripts). But should we call it literature? Spurring vigorous discussions of aesthetic value and providing a vivid introduction to spoken Middle English, the Prik of Conscience functions as a usefully disruptive classroom “voice.”
February 2013
January 2013
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Abstract
This project employs a student-generated geographic database that links the Commedia to relevant passages from Dino Compagni’s Cronica and visual records at appropriate locations in Florence. The database records evidence for social structure, physical infrastructure, and historic events, as well as the civic/religious ritual of the city, in order to consider the broader meanings of the built environment. This database is displayed on satellite images of the city using the open-source SIMILE widget Exhibit. The student can then analyze this evidence and consider how Dante constructed his allegorical societies, infernal, purgative, and paradisiacal, from the life of his contemporary Florence. It is suggested that this permits more rapid immersion into the dynamic of the poem and enables more effectively focused student research.
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Abstract
Much of Renaissance art reflects a Dantesque worldview. Addressed here is Dante’s link to early trecento art; to burgeoning pious art patronage resulting from Purgatorio’s salvific promise; to rising individualism resulting in growing civic identity, the cult of artistic fame, the art of portraiture, and biography as an early art historical methodology; and to an enduring fascination with antiquity, all made palatable and patriotic for later generations by glosses widely known in Commedia incunabula.
December 2012
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Abstract
Early status reports on WAC call for engagement with the disciplines, robust research about writing, and a transformation from missionary work to a more wide-ranging model. A Taxonomy of WAC describes common characteristics of WAC programs as well as organizing those characteristics into a progression from initiation to change agency.
November 2012
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Abstract
This article provides an initial approach for capturing moments of talk about, around, and for writing to explain why writing groups and writing conferences are so often considered “transformative” for the people involved. After describing the widespread and yet disparate transformations so often attributed to collaborative writing talk, I introduce applied conversation analysis (CA) as a method for getting at what is often difficult to identify, document, and explain: the intricacies of moments that underlie, if not directly account for, transformations. At the core of this article, I present a case study of a writer, Susan, and tutor, Kim, and analyze their talk and embodied interactions around writing. In particular, two sequences of their talk—the first an example of “troubles telling,” or attending to a reported trouble (Jefferson, 1981, 1984, 1988) and the second an enactment of humor that names asymmetrical power relations (Holmes, 2000)—illustrate the ways in which building affiliative relationships might allow for naming and poking fun at, if not restructuring, power relations. Further, self-reports from interview data indicate how the occasions of talk between Susan and Kim mark shifts in thinking about themselves, their writing, and their commitments—shifts that can be attributed to their relational, affiliative interactions and that provide supporting evidence for the transformative power of collaborative writing talk.
October 2012
July 2012
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Abstract
In 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commemorated its 50th anniversary by launching an anniversary Web site, which includes links to a photographic timeline, videos, and documents that the agency views as important in telling its history. This article uses concepts from narrative theory and visual rhetoric to analyze the images used in the NASA History Timeline, paying special attention to why certain images were selected as historical markers over other photographs that are more widely published and televised. Specifically, the author uses arguments from Sontag’s On Photography and Barbatsis’s “Narrative Theory” to explain how NASA’s photographic narrative provides a story with a plot that spans from triumphs and tragedies in space exploration to pioneering efforts in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.