“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed… Continue reading Visualizing Street Harassment: Mapping the ’10 Hours of Walking’ Street Harassment Meme by Rebecca Hayes

In an era of endless emerging digital possibilities for visibility and representation, popular culture continues to stumble its way through what to do with bodies of color. No longer do hegemonic forces have complete control over signification. For every racist remark made by public figures like Donald Trump, there are numerous respondents replying instantly with… Continue reading Review: Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency by Victor J. Del Hierro

Frankie Condon implores her audience to imagine new ways of performing anti-racist activism and pedagogies throughout her book: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. For Condon, building an antiracist epistemology involves an individual’s ability to weave together the affective and spiritual dimensions of knowing alongside of multiple stories, which highlight… Continue reading Review: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Kelly A. Concannon

What makes racial segregation in the United States especially harsh is that it robs most people of the means they need to bring it down. These include mutual knowledge, trust, and, most of all, a language of engagement that can keep people talking past the negativity, hurt, and hopelessness. In Community Literacy and the Rhetoric… Continue reading Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower, reviewed by Deborah Brandt

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a… Continue reading Diving in to Prison Teaching: Mina Shaughnessy, Teacher Development, and the Realities of Prison Teaching by Laura Rogers

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities. Link to PDF

If rhetoric and composition is taking a “public turn,” Frank Farmer cautions, let’s be sure that the “public” we imagine actually exists. Farmer examines what a public is—or, more precisely, what publics and counterpublics are. His close examination of the punk zines and his new term, citizen bricoleur, highlight the creative ingenuity of counterpublics, and… Continue reading Review: After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth… Continue reading Writing Theories / Changing Communities: Introduction by Jeffrey T. Grabill & Ellen Cushman

This paper draws on our time working together in a community literacy organization in New York, NY. In it, we describe the strengths of the program while also detailing our questions about how our “mentor/mentee” relationship was represented in the organization’s mission statement and fundraising rhetoric: specifically, the term “at-risk,” which was applied to the… Continue reading At-Risk’ of What? Rewriting a Prescribed Relationship in a Community Literacy Nonprofit Organization: A Dialogue by Cherish Smith and Vani Kannen

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to… Continue reading Mad Women on Display: Practices of Public Rhetoric at the Glore Psychiatric Museum by Lauren Obermark & Madaline Walter

Deadline January 10, 2020 Reflections seeks submissions for Volume 20, Issue 1, Spring 2020—a special issue marking the journal’s 20th anniversary. Reflections was the first journal in the field of composition and rhetoric to provide a venue for publishing research and commentary by scholars and community partners on what was then known as “service learning”… Continue reading Call For Submission: Reflections Is Turning 20! Volume 20, Issue 1, Spring 2020 (Closed)

Since the creation of American Sign Language, deaf community activists in the United States have fought to sustain Deaf culture and language in face of an unreceptive—or even hostile—hearing majority. In Signs And Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language, Tracy Ann Morse argues that religious rhetoric has been central to those efforts,… Continue reading Review: Signs and Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language by Elizabeth Bentley

Roughly mid-way through Stephanie Kerschbaum’s recent book Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference, as she reflects on the shifting meanings invoked by her deafness in various contexts, she hypothetically addresses her readers, stating, “When you meet me, you might find that I fit a lot of your assumptions about deaf people and that many of… Continue reading Review: Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference by Tara K. Wood

I recently attended the Rhetorical Society of America (RSA) conference in San Antonio and had the pleasure of listening to Linda Alcoff ’s key note address. The above quote I found on her website and speaks, in part, to this issue. If I could give this issue a name, it would be the Serendipity Issue… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction by Cristina Kirklighter

This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On… Continue reading Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville: Acknowledging a Rhetoric of Conversation by Heather Lettner-Rust

How might current public-spheres theory underestimate the rhetorical potential of an enclave public—portraying, as such theory does, an enclave as an acutely limited resource for rhetorical empowerment (Squires 458)? This is the question this study takes up. To do so, this study analyzes the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex in… Continue reading Recognizing One Another in Public: Reconsidering the Role and Resources of an Enclave by Veronica Oliver

Community literacy workers and publicly engaged teachers of writing have long been concerned with questions not only of learning and writing, but also of social change, equity, and justice. Whether we trace roots through Myles Horton’s Highlander School to critical pedagogy and activism (Branch) or through more institutionally focused efforts of land-grant colleges and organizations… Continue reading Review: Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance by Moira Ozias

On July 14, 2013, a group of education activists in Southern California held the 2nd annual Raza Studies Now Conference at Santa Monica College and presented a draft of the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA), a manifesto for spreading Ethnic Studies in local high schools. Link to PDF

This article draws on an archival case study of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Building on my experience as an activist and working in communities and institutions, I argue that it is valuable to examine and translate the histories and practices of organizations like the CFMN to learn the rhetorical abilities we need to… Continue reading Chicanas Making Change: Institutional Rhetoric and the Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional by Kendall Leon

"Rhetoric and Communication Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault." Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(4), pp. 426–427

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register – specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns – was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency–structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors’ correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency–structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times change and we change with them). Not only is the techne of today’s rhetoric and professional communication changing but we rhetors and professiona...

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

In our current cultural era of numerous social movements, it is often easy to lose sight of what drives individuals and collectives toward action. As the editors and contributors of Unruly Rhetoric...

Consider the recording studio. Its walls absorb and release sound waves, filtering and reflecting them. It is filled with electronics that further direct and diffract sound: mics, processors, audio...

This essay discusses the racialized politics, histories, and ideologies that inform the crafting and instituting of core curricula in rhetorical studies. As is the case in many rhetoric and writing studies undergraduate majors and graduate programs, core curricula can be counted on to contain survey courses that review the histories and theories of rhetoric and composition—sometimes separately, sometimes overlapping, and always subject to the ideological orientation of the program/department and the scholarly training of its professors. Through critical race counterstory, this essay explores what core curricula are intended to do within rhetoric and writing studies programs/departments.

There is no shortage of research on learner preferences and teacher perceptions of the value of feedback in L2 writing. However, studies comparing opinions from both sides are rare. Moreover, little is known whether L2 proficiency impacts learner preferences for feedback. To bridge these gaps, this study surveyed 70 students and 16 teachers from an intensive English program in the U.S. on their preferences concerning six dimensions of L2 writing feedback: source, mode, tone, focus, scope, and explicitness. The findings suggest that (1) students overall regarded teachers as the most credible source of feedback and wanted teachers to mark all errors in their writing and correct them directly; (2) higher proficiency students showed more positive attitudes towards peer feedback and inclination towards written, comprehensive, and indirect correction; (3) students at the two ends of proficiency (high and low) favored feedback in a mixed tone; (4) while teachers and students were allies on the usefulness of oral feedback, feedback on both rhetorical and language issues, and feedback in a balanced tone, teachers were nonetheless neutral about the benefits of peer feedback and preferred focused, indirect feedback. Suggestions are offered for ESL writing instructors to adapt their feedback for its maximum effects.

The idea of public rhetoric, the first term in this journal’s new subtitle, might seem self-evident. The language of political campaigning and party platforms, the arguments that formulate (or justify) policies and institutional practices, the calls for voter participation — all of this surely is what we might think of as public rhetoric writ large.… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction: Public Rhetoric and Activist Documentary by Diana George & Diane Shoos

In 2009, Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a $600 Canon camera to find and capture the voices of Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence advocates and activists. Their objective was to challenge the dominant narratives of violence, terrorism, and oppression perpetuated by the mainstream U.S. media, and… Continue reading When the Rhetorical Situation Calls Us Out: Documenting Voices of Resistance and the Making of Dreams Deferred by Jennifer Hitchcock

This article examines the use of comic adaptations of Shakespeare in the college classroom. After theorizing the class offering based upon performance pedagogy and inclusive learning practices, the author describes her experience coteaching a Shakespeare class that used three Shakespeare plays in both their traditional and graphic format. The success of the course revealed that comic adaptations of Shakespeare plays offer an accessible, rewarding means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as both texts to be read and works to be performed.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

This article names microaggressions as a rhetorical and pedagogical phenomenon. To make the case for rhetorical and pedagogical intervention, the authors define and trace microaggressions in literature from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies; share cross-disciplinary understandings of microaggressions; and offer illustrations from sites of research, teaching, and service.

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses—tactical technical communication and participatory localization—to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

As discussed throughout this special issue, interest in design thinking as a process, a set of mind-sets and practices, and also a potential addition to writing studies and technical and professional communication (TPC) program curricula has increased recently, opening discussions about the rhetorical nature of design-thinking practices. Does design thinking align with the already rhetoric scholarship on design in TPC? In this working bibliography, we pull together literative from across disciplines, popular media, and higher education media to examine design thinking from a variety of angles and to offer a starting point for peers interested in learning more.

In this special issue, we explore design thinking as a broad conceptual process as well as a tool that might align with the work of technical and professional communication (TPC) programs. But what is design thinking? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the process? Can design thinking be used to help students address rhetorical challenges and complex problems? How is design thinking showing up in the field, and does it belong in TPC programs? Four scholars explore these questions in their niche areas: process, usability and user design, technical communication, and industry and programmatic perspectives.

Design thinking—at times described as a mind-set, practice, process, method, methodology, tool, heuristic, and more—is a productive, iterative approach used to engage divergent thinking. Often made up of stages incorporating empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, design thinking provides a framework for identifying and approaching problems. Design thinking, however, generally lacks a critical–rhetorical–methodological structure that makes room for what Rebecca Burnett called “substantive conflict,” or “conflict that deals with critical issues of content and rhetorical elements.” This article situates design thinking across the professional and academic spaces in which it is heralded and implemented in order to explore how it can be used in collaborative contexts to support substantive, productive dissensus. The authors lean on the ways in which they engage in design thinking in their different roles to situate the good, the bad, and the ugly of design thinking. They conclude by suggesting a rhetorical methodology for cultivating design thinking that facilitates dissensus, addresses resistance, and considers ideological variables.

Looking into the definition of rhetoric in the digital space, one often encounters the view that rhetoric is too remote or too “ancient” to be used as a conceptual, theoretical or practical framework for researching digital media. However, a substantial body of contemporary media research applies the theory of rhetoric, using a modern conceptual apparatus (e.g. cognitive theories of metaphor). Based on Kenneth Burke’s model of the pentad, the article aims to show that media messages in the digital environment are based on the notion of the rhetorical situation and demonstrate that the rhetorical apparatus has a crucial role in discerning the ways to modify the discourse space in human-computer-human communication. The source of modification in the traditional model of a rhetorical situation is the interactive nature of communication in digital media and the fact that the recipient [agent a] is bestowed with the role of an active participant who can influence the content of the message. Thanks to the use of the rhetorical model of pentad, the argument goes that in contrast to traditional media, modifications in the model act 1 → agent → agency → act 2 are possible and they result from the inclusion of external participants [agent b] and changes in the ontological status of the digital medium from the role of an intermediary to an active participant in the communication process [agent c].

On a cold night in December 2010, the experimental documentary Rothstein’s First Assignment was screened at Virginia Tech. After the film, the audience asked questions of the panelists, who included Dr. Scott Whiddon, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Transylvania University and composer of the original music in the film; the film’s director, Richard… Continue reading Small Stories: Public Impact: Archives, Film, and Collaboration by Katrina Powell

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes – even subtitle changes – are no small things, so we begin with a… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Diana George, Cristina Kirklighter, & Paula Mathieu

Dora Ramirez-Dhoore In March 1969 at the first national Chicano Liberation Youth Conference hosted by the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado, a young poet named Alurista read “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” which forged the ideas of “the bronze continent” and “Aztlán” (Anaya and Lomeli 1). This historical document, often deemed a manifesto of… Continue reading The Rhetoric of Aztlán: HB 2281, MEChA and Liberatory Education

Using the work of Keith Gilyard (Voices of The Self) and Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps) as models for interrogating his own development as a writer of color, Cagnolatti explores the way HipHop influenced his rhetorical education in the urban and militant environment of a Los Angeles magnet high school. Through his detailed analysis of the E.M.E.R.G.E.… Continue reading Battling to be Heard by Damon Cagnolatti

In Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, a provocative new addiction to the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Adam Banks offers a fresh perspective on the relationships between race, technology, and scholar-activism. Like the figure of the griot—a masterful storyteller who simultaneously preserves and shapes history—Banks mashes up past and present… Continue reading Review: Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age by Adam J. Banks reviewed by Steph Ceraso

For several decades now, the scholarship of rhetoric and composition studies has shown an increased interest in community literacy and community-based pedagogy. Many point to the emergence of the Ethnography of Literacy (see studies by Heath, Barton, Cushman) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, among others) as an origin for this initial focus on community… Continue reading Rewriting a Master Narrative: HBCUs and Community Literacy Partnerships, Introduction by Reva E. Sias and Beverly J. Moss

This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the… Continue reading Richard Allen and the Prehistory of Engaged Community Learning at HBCUs by Elizabeth Kimball

This article discusses found literacy partnerships—collaborations around literacy practices that emerge unexpectedly when Spelman College students enact the spirit of service and activism that has defined the historically black liberal arts college for women since its inception. Through an examination of institutional rhetoric, a required general education course and three student cases, the article considers… Continue reading ‘Found’ Literacy Partnerships: Service and Activism at Spelman College by Zandra L. Jordan

In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, winner of the 2009 JAC’s W. Ross Winterowd Award for composition theory, Kristie Fleckenstein presents a provocative theory of social action and describes how it can be used to help students recognize personal, cultural, and social injustices and gain tools to make changes in the… Continue reading Review of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom by Kristie S. Fleckenstein reviewed by Tanya K. Rodrigue

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on… Continue reading Public 2.0. Social Networking, Nonprofits, and the Rhetorical Work of Public Making by Phyllis Ryder

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new… Continue reading Viral Advocacy: Networking Labor Organizing in Higher Education by Kevin Mahoney