Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in the present moment.Mark Brenden is a PhD candidate in writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he also teaches writing classes. His current research investigates the digital transformation of higher education, particularly as it relates to writing pedagogy.K. Narayana Chandran currently holds the Institution of Eminence Research Chair in English and Cultural Theory in the School of Humanities/English at the University of Hyderabad, India. An occasional translator and writer in Malayalam, he has been teaching a wide variety of courses and publishing papers in Anglo-American literatures, critical and reading theories, comparative and translation studies, and English in India—its history and pedagogy.Tyler Jean Dukes is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor at Texas Christian University. She specializes in early British literature and the medical humanities. She is also a childbirth doula, a role that informs her scholarly pursuits as she investigates the connections between storytelling and healing. To attend one of her in-person or virtual narrative medicine workshops, please visit https://dfwnarrativemedicine.com/.Sandy Feinstein's scholarship ranges across early literature, most recently on Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac in Early Modern Women; and on Mark Twain and heritage management forthcoming from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. She has also published creative non-fiction on reading Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court during COVID-19. Cowritten articles with Bryan Shawn Wang appear in New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, CEA: The Critic, and Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, among others.Ruth G. Garcia is an associate professor of English and Core Books at CUNY and cocoordinator at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes “Fanny's Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park” in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.An experienced teacher, scholar, and administrator, Sara M. Glasgow has served in higher education for over twenty years. She is currently dean of liberal arts at North Central Michigan College. Prior to coming to North Central, she was professor of political science at the University of Montana Western (UMW), where she was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year for the state of Montana (2013). While at UMW, she taught core courses in American government, theory, international relations and strategy, and political economy, as well as basic and advanced courses in research methodology. She also offered depth learning opportunities in Norse history and culture as part of the university honors program, and majors’ courses in the history and politics of illness, her research focus. She holds a BA in international studies and Spanish from Virginia Tech; an MS in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology; an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University; and an MA and PhD in government and politics from the University of Maryland.Dana Gliserman-Kopans is professor in and chair of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her research centers on the literature and culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, though the pandemic and eighteenth-century epistemologies have been a recent (and necessary) focus. Her teaching interests are far wider, spanning from Gothic literature to the medical humanities. She also serves as the associate editor of The Burney Journal.Eva Sage Gordon teaches writing at Baruch College, CUNY. She has book chapters forthcoming in Innovative Practices in Creative Writing Teaching, edited by Graeme Harper; and Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, edited by Ruth Scobie and Sandra Mayer.Jennifer Horwitz received her PhD in literature from Tufts University and is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research focuses on representations of education in multi-ethnic US literature that help envision and enact the teaching needed in this time of climate crisis.William Kangas returned to college after twenty years as a journalist to complete his MA in English composition and communication at Central Michigan University, while working as a high school substitute teacher and consultant at CMU's Writing Center. He currently is an adjunct instructor candidate for a local community college and will be entering his second year of study for an MA in strategic communication from Michigan State University.Robert Kilgore is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB). He is currently the president of USCB's chapter of the American Association of University Professors.Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, professional communication, and digital rhetoric. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in Pedagogy, Enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.Xiomara Trinidad Perez is a junior studying journalism at Hofstra University, with a minor in fine arts. She hopes to work in the publishing and news industry, as well as in any area that deals with visual media. She finds enjoyment in creative writing, curating visual media, and conducting research.Aidan Pierre was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in film and minoring in history. He has produced, written, and directed numerous short films and is a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Film Production course. He is a part of the Rabinowitz Honors College and has been on the provost's list for two semesters. Outside of class, he enjoys spending his time reading literature and baking bread.Timothy Ponce holds a PhD in English and a certificate in teaching technical writing from the University of North Texas. In addition to serving as an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), he also serves as the coordinator of internships and coordinator of technical writing and professional design in the Department of English.Elizabeth Porter is an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She is a scholar in the fields of eighteenth-century British literature, women's writing, and composition pedagogy. Her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Jody R. Rosen is an associate professor of English and OpenLab codirector at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes the coauthored “Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research” (2020) in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Prameet V. Shah is a sophomore at Hofstra University. He is majoring in pre-medical studies and minoring in biochemistry.Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She teaches a wide range of classes, including composition, STEM communication, science fiction, environmental ethics and STEM, and introduction to humanities; and her writing most often addresses intersections between speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. She is coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features and the environment (2021).Bryan Shawn Wang is an associate teaching professor in biology at Penn State Berks. He has a background in protein engineering and synthetic biology. He has recently published on student choice and learning in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments; on reviving ecologies in South Central Review; and, with Sandy Feinstein and Samantha Kavky, on interdisciplinarity and de-extinction in Comparative Media Arts Journal.Rachael Zeleny is assistant professor of English and integrated arts at the University of Baltimore. Her early research is dedicated to the multimodal rhetoric of the nineteenth-century actress. Her current research explores ways to gamify the classroom using virtual escape rooms and methods of incorporating experiential learning into virtual spaces. She conducts workshops on integrating these methods into the classroom.

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

This study reviews the current underlying theories relevant to writing centers as well as the research methods being used in the early 21st century. The first section covers the theories used in writing center scholarship from the 1980s onward based on influential articles and texts. The second section covers published research both in the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and other publications from 2010 onward and discusses the current state of research methods. Readers may not be aware of some of the fine divisions of theory; for example, the distinction between collaborative learning and social constructivism. Researchers may benefit from the overview of methods, which covers the most popular and current methods (survey and textual analysis) and promising but little-published research methods, such as ethnography. Keywords : collaborative learning, social constructivism, writing as a social process, Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, cognitivism, feminism, transfer of learning, threshold concepts, tutoring encounter, social and environmental justice, survey, mixed methods, textual analysis, descriptive studies, theoretical research, archival research, quasi-experiment, quantitative methods, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case study, usability, ethnography

This essay explores the controversy surrounding the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument (WRPM) that was unveiled in Central Park on 26 August 2020 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. To read the WRPM’s commemorative process and product, I use an intersectional feminist analytic to consider how interlocking concerns of gender, race, and power inflected the debates and decisions that shaped the WRPM. This intersectional analysis explores how the WRPM became an opportunity for the public to wrestle with the ways this statue could (not) address a complicated suffrage history that would celebrate women’s collective activism and reckon with its racist past.

This essay centers the legal and coalitional strategies of Black feminist Civil Rights attorney Florynce Kennedy in pre-Roe v. Wade abortion rights advocacy. Examining the depositional records of the 1969 case Abramowitz v. Lefkowitz and its subsequent distillation into the 1971 book Abortion Rap, we demonstrate how Kennedy’s rhetorical tactics enabled white women’s reproductive experiences to be intelligible—but centered—as expertise in the legal domain. Kennedy’s lines of questioning enabled feelings about unwanted pregnancies to become intelligible as expertise, challenging the authority of established experts. Kennedy impatiently leveraged her expert knowledge of the legal system to manage the state’s objections that threatened the well-being of witnesses and integrity of the case. While Abortion Rap appealed to the intersections of Black women’s reproductive concerns, it also hindered the possibility for coalitional trust to be built between legal experts and Black Power activists around abortion advocacy.

Reviewed by: Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook Katherine Backler Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. 240pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2441-7. This book offers a short, focused, thoughtful analysis of how prostitution functions rhetorically in Athenian legal speeches. In each of the five chapters, Glazebrook takes us through a forensic speech in which what she [End Page 209] calls "sexual labor" is at issue and analyses its rhetorical strategies to draw out ways in which Athenians used the figures of "sexual laborers" to articulate and negotiate social values. Each chapter's argument develops the last. The first chapter discusses Lysias 4, a dispute between two men over a prostituted woman they allegedly agreed to "share" but whom one is using exclusively. Glazebrook shows how the speaker repositions the unnamed woman from sex-object to subject, a manipulative influence on his opponent and the trial. The second shows how Isaios 6's portrait of a prostituted woman named Alke suggests the ramifications of her alleged influence by moving her from brothel to tenement-house to household, Peiraieus to Kerameikos to astu, playing on Athenian anxiety about "concepts of oikos and polis and … the roles of enslaved persons, non-Athenians, and even women in these places" (49-50). The third examines the more dramatic (almost panhellenic) mobility of Neaira in Against Neaira, and her more serious supposed threat to the Athenian family, citizen body, and religion. The fourth, on Lysias 3, changes focus to prostituted boys and men, considering how the speaker uses Plataian teenager Theodotos to mark out acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male homosexual desire and behaviour. The fifth, on Aischines's Against Timarchos, uses male prostitution to work through what it means to be a decent, democratic, Athenian citizen—or not. Sexual Labor is refreshingly clearly written. Glazebrook briefly but helpfully explains relevant technical points (for example, on legal processes) and key concepts (like the important but fuzzy ideological distinction between pederasty and prostitution), avoiding over-simplification and acknowledging problems and contradictions. She will offer a variety of scholars' opinions and either pick out the one closest to hers or identify the "bottom line," for example, on what it means to "commit hubris against one's own body" in Aischines 1 (140). The description of Athenian courts (9-13) offers a dynamic, basic introduction to Athenian law but also considers the law-courts as a performance context. The book is useful on terminology, demonstrating that orators use words like pornē, hetaira, and pallakē not so much to denote categories as to evoke a set of connotations to make a point. For example (37), "At two key points [in Lysias 4] … when the speaker accuses the opponent of feigning his injuries and when he asks for the jurors' pity, he refers to [the woman] as pornē (4.9, 19)" which is "both degrading and inaccurate": seemingly she "has been living with the opponent as his personal hetaira or even pallakē (long-term partner)." Further, she argues that the avoidance of the labels pornē and hetaira for Alke in Isaios 6 unmoors her from fixed place-associations (brothel for pornai; oikos for wives and pallakai; symposion for hetairai), allowing her to move within the cityscape, transgressing and disrupting the social order. Glazebrook makes her argument particularly effectively on p. 150 where, through and informing her analysis of Against Timarchus, she shows that as Aeschines "uses kinaidos as a lifestyle and identity for Demosthenes, [he] employs pornos to indicate a lifestyle and personality for Timarchos. His concern is not to show that Timarchos has practiced a profession—no concrete proofs … are offered—but to show that he embodies an identity." [End Page 210] There are some problems. On p. 40, Glazebrook writes that "many of the jurors … may have been familiar with the pornē in the brothel and on the streets, [but] the sex laborer who mixed with citizens at elite symposia … was beyond their immediate circle." This sits awkwardly with her statement on p. 70 that "many Athenians would have experienced [symposia] or at the very least would have been familiar with [their] entertainments and the women...

Communication apprehension can lead to professional challenges for individuals, teams, and organizations. This is the first study of communication apprehension that involved a randomized national survey of working adults in the United States and captured broad representation in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, managerial status, and other factors. The study showed that communication apprehension is common, including in group discussions, meetings, interpersonal situations, and public speaking. It is significantly more common among early-career professionals, women, introverted professionals, and professionals with anxiety. Interpersonal situations appear to be the situations in which contemporary professionals are most likely to experience high communication apprehension. This study suggests more attention is needed to address communication apprehension in interpersonal and group situations. It also frames communication apprehension as a matter of inclusion and team performance.

Abstract This essay offers a rhetorical reading of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings to make sense of how widespread outrage over replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a conservative idealogue was resolved through the invocation of postfeminist motherhood. I argue that GOP Senators and Barrett herself positioned her nomination as the achievement of feminist goals, justified through rhetorics of choice and the idealization of (white) motherhood. These strategies cement Barrett as the logical and defensible successor to both Ginsburg's seat and her legacy of feminist work. I conclude with the implications of this circulation of postfeminist motherhood, with focus on political movements for equality and treatment of women.

Abstract At the 2017 Women's March, Shepard Fairey's We The People posters generated a great deal of excitement for their patriotic depiction of a diverse “people.” But the posters’ success exists in tension with the broader critiques of the Women's March. This essay argues that our current understanding of constitutive rhetoric is ill-equipped to explain this tension. Using the ideas of Danielle Allen and feminist scholars Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Karma Chávez, and Alyssa A. Samek, I perform several readings of the posters to explicate the fractures within our theories of constitutive rhetoric. I demonstrate that our current understanding of “the people” through oneness is hampered by a unity/difference binary that limits our ability to understand heterogenous collectives. Instead, I argue that an approach of wholeness better captures the complex collective life of contemporary coalitions and better attunes scholars to the intricate ways “the people” come into being. I argue that shifting the key terms of constitutive rhetoric to solidarity, vision, and health can help critics develop a more nuanced understanding of diverse coalitions. Overall, this essay offers scholars an opportunity to rethink our theories of “the people” to better account for the emerging strategies, needs, and values of contemporary collectives.

Remembering Women Differently features an introduction, fourteen essays, and an afterword. Yet this review must start with the cover, which cleverly addresses the perennial problem of how to represent that which has been erased or forgotten. It showcases the volume's overall interest in probing stories of historical women that could be remembered differently by visually marrying two case studies from the book. The background is a grayscale photograph of Amos Pinchot and Crystal Eastman in 1915, a nod to Amy Aronson's chapter on how Eastman went from a well-known twentieth century social movement activist to all-but-forgotten in the twenty-first century. We see Pinchot as a smartly-dressed figure with a hat and a bowtie. Yet Eastman appears only as an outline, her silhouette filled in with a colorful painting of flowering plants. These botanicals are the work of Maria Martin, the artist who painted the backgrounds for John James Audubon's famous Birds of America. As Henrietta Nickels Shirk elucidates in the volume, it is Martin's contributions that have faded into the background of public memory. While I'd never suggest you judge the book by it, this cover sets the stage for what is to come: a must-read book for scholars of gender, feminism, rhetorical history, and memory studies.The mother-daughter editorial team of Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey were deliberate in their selection of scholarly contributions that use archival research to demonstrate the range and complexity of topics surrounding memory of historical women. They brought together contributions from “. . . scholars from a variety of humanities disciplines—rhetoricians, historians, educators, compositionists, and literary critics—[to] employ feminist research methods to examine women's work, rhetorical agency, and construction and memory of female representation” (x). Letizia Guglielmo begins the volume with an agenda-setting introduction titled “Re-Collection as Feminist Rhetorical Practice.” This contribution surveys relevant literature to artfully frame themes that are threaded throughout the book, including memory and recollection, ethos and agency, and intersectionality and marginalization.Rooted in the goal of “challeng[ing] traditional conversations, not merely inserting women into existing understandings of the rhetorical tradition,” the essays are grouped into four sections: “New Theoretical Frameworks,” “Erased Collaborators,” “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts,” and “Disrupted Public Memory” (x). The volume's fourteen case study chapters span occupations, historical periods, and geographical locations, which grant ample opportunities for readers to compare and contrast these historical figures, their lives, and their circumstances. To provide a sense of these rich essays, I will discuss all contributions in the “New Theoretical Frameworks” section and the lead essays in the remaining three sections.The first section on “New Theoretical Frameworks” is an innovative collection of case studies that readers are likely to find most generative for projects in feminist memory studies. The section starts with Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher's compelling chapter, which builds on Royster and Kirsch's concept of social circulation to explore professional networks of women physicians, mathematicians, and computers. Based on her study of Rosalind Franklin, Alice Johnson Myatt's chapter offers a useful heuristic for understanding an understudied avenue for feminist memory studies: the historical figure who, once erased, has now had her reputation restored. In the third chapter, Maria Martin (not to be confused with the artist Maria Martin discussed above) details an important framework for studying African women's feminist agency as she explores the case of Nigerian leader and activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Historians of rhetoric will also be interested in the final essay of the section, in which Ellen Quandal traces the “afterlives” of Byzantine historian Anna Komnene as she has been represented by three different scholars. Each of the essays in this section offers insights into the unique circumstances of individual women while simultaneously underlining how their activism, contributions, and memory have been shaped by social, communal, and collective forces.Part 2 features chapters about women who collaborated with men and their subsequent erasure from history and memory in the contexts of the military, art, and education. For example, Mariana Grohowski and D. Alexis Hart's chapter explores how U.S. women service members have consistently had their contributions marginalized, downplayed, or downright erased. Yet they find considerable promise in the corrective and resistive power of digital archives and oral history collections, such as the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, which allow women service members to narrate their own experiences. The authors of chapters in Part 3 ask readers to think differently about how women's rhetorical contributions are valued. For example, Kristie S. Fleckenstein casts Florence Babbitt as a visual rhetor who did valuable labor in crafting a family photograph album, arguing that in our haste to study women as writers and speakers, we ought not forget the “work, especially the memory work, performed by women as imagesmiths—significant figures in the visual rhetorical tradition—and their use of images circulates across the permeable boundaries of the private and the public” (139). Finally, Part 4 on “Disrupted Public Memory” explores how once-prominent public figures are remembered (or forgotten). While forgetting is sometimes the logical outcome of the passage of time, it can also be a complicated and multifaceted process, as Wendy Hayden demonstrates in her study of Lois Waisbrooker, whose ideas found purchase in anarchist, spiritualist, labor, and free love communities during her lifetime but is largely absent from contemporary discussions of nineteenth-century women's rhetoric.The book's afterword is clearly not an afterthought. Especially helpful for those teaching classes in rhetoric, memory, and history, Lynée Lewis Gaillet offers insightful commentary on how the essays could be read differently if ordered chronologically, by theme or genre, or by method and details how students could use the case study chapters in the book as models for their own investigations into feminist memory studies. Here, the editor also pinpoints the most significant shortcoming of the volume: “With a few fascinating exceptions (Martin, Presbey, and Quandahl), this collection focuses on white Western women working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (259). The afterword calls for more scholarship that will “expand the scope of this work, adapting the research materials here for investigations of African American, Eastern, global, indigenous, Latina, and LGBTQI issues, among many others, occurring in a wide swath of places and times” and explains the need for additional collections that explore other facets of gender and memory (259). In this vein, fruitful collaborations may be forged between rhetoricians in English and Communication departments, as scholars in a special issue of Southern Communication Journal (2017, 82.4) have expressed similar commitments.Remembering Women Differently should be read—from cover to cover—by scholars of gender, rhetorical history, and memory studies. This carefully crafted edited volume is a welcome addition to feminist rhetorical studies, one that invites and is sure to inspire further engagement.

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ABSTRACTThis article builds four composite characters from the international Zika response to demonstrate each role’s position relative to inclusive health communication. I argue that a lack of jurisdictional stasis is at play in decision-making practices about transnational risk communication approaches. During emergency health responses, this lack of jurisdictional stasis functions to maintain the status quo in order for stakeholders to leverage their power in prioritizing local deliberations in transnational public health discourse and decision making.KEYWORDS: Transnationalstasishealth communicationcommunity engagement Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. In keeping with norms of global health discourse and of the context of this study, I preserve the gendered language used by the organizations throughout this manuscript that refers to women and girls. Terms such as “women of reproductive age” are consistent with the WHO and were used nearly exclusively to refer to people with uteruses who could be affected by Zika in utero or by giving birth to a child with congenital Zika syndrome. This term also reflects the history of gender-based violence that has predominantly affected people assigned female at birth. That said, the author acknowledges that this language can be harmful and reductive, particularly because transgender and non-binary people with uteruses are reproductive agents and that people who identify as women of reproductive age may not be able or choose to reproduce.2. More recently, the global health discourse community has dropped “communication” from the disciplinary title to account for the various way that behavior change interventions can be broader than what’s traditionally considered “communication.”3. Often, in my experience, these issues were tabled for pandemic preparedness discussions or for “lessons learned” documents meant to support future outbreak responses.4. All names of individuals and organizations in the narrative composites are fictional.5. Here, I reference Galison’s (Citation1997) trading zone, referred to by Wilson and Herndl (Citation2007) in their argument that a knowledge map created a boundary object to facilitate understanding of how knowledge from different areas within the interdisciplinary group that they were working with created a zone through which knowledge important to disparate parties about a shared area of concern could pass.6. For more on empowerment, refer to chapter 4 of Dingo’s (Citation2012) Networking ArgumentsAdditional informationNotes on contributorsJulie GerdesJulie Gerdes is an assistant professor of technical and professional writing and rhetoric at Virginia Tech. She works at the intersection of technical communication and global public health. Her interdisciplinary research examines methodologies for understanding and implementing inclusive risk communication, particularly during public health emergencies.

Reviewed by: Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self by Adam Ellwanger Ryan McDermott (bio) Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08593-7. This book moves metanoia and related concepts of transformation and conversion to the center of our theoretical understanding of ethos. Whereas for Aristotle ethos had depended on the audience—did they consider the speaker trustworthy?—now the speaking subject determines how ethos ought to be recognized, and the audience must defer to the subject's self-understanding. As a rhetorical device, Ellwanger shows, metanoia is one of the most important means by which subjects can establish ethos in either of these models. This book's consistent concern is to analyze how, precisely, metanoia is employed in the service of ethos in various contexts and rhetorical and ethical models. At its best, Ellwanger's study adopts a comparative method—what he calls "paratactical rhetorical analysis"—that allows different understandings of metanoia to clarify each other by contrast. Ellwanger also approaches his topic diachronically, telling a story of development or transformation in the practices of metanoia. This narrative gives the book its structure, moving from classical and ancient Jewish sources to early Christianity, then the Protestant Reformation, post-Enlightenment modernity, and what Ellwanger characterizes as the postmodernity of today. Each chapter's narrative section culminates with a theoretical elaboration, which is then worked out in a section of comparative examples. This reviewer found the heuristic, second section of each chapter the more effective. For example, Chapter One compares five different Christian conversion stories (all post-1850), including the Sioux Indian Ohiyesa's memoirs of his transition From the Deep Woods to Civilization, two accounts of conversions in China, and two testimonies from members of the rock band Korn. Ellwanger is able to compare these diverse experiences with impressive conceptual clarity. The major conceptual contrast that runs throughout the book is that between metanoia and epistrophe. When speaking of the contrast, Ellwanger characterizes epistrophe as a 360-degree conversion, a return home. He reserves metanoia for 180-degree conversions, which renounce the past self and result in a rebirth, a replacement of the original subject by a "completely" new subject. In Ellwanger's account, all Christian metanoia "is a substitutive transplanting of identity," and it "locates the substitution at the core of one's being" (95). Modern, secular conversions can also involve renunciation of a previous self, but they lean more heavily on epistrophic unveiling of and return to the original, authentic self. Epistrophic conversion never renounces the real self, but rather the former illusion of self. Theoretically, this contrast harbors considerable explanatory power. It helps make sense of why ethos can reside alternately in audience or speaker. When a speaker seeks to establish ethos by claiming that her previous self is dead and she is now a new (and better) self, she might appeal to the audience to authenticate whether she is indeed new and better. But when a speaker [End Page 93] claims to have discovered and returned to her original, authentic self, she expects the audience to acknowledge her authority to authenticate herself. The contrast between ethoi established by metanoic or epistrophic conversion narratives plays out in fascinating ways in the contrast between Bruce Jenner's coming out as gender-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezol's racial transition from identifying as a White woman to identifying as a Black woman. In public responses to each narrative (which unfolded roughly contemporaneously), Ellwanger identifies both metanoic and epistrophic discourses. Each kind was employed by both critics and defenders of the respective claims to identity. The conflict between metanoic and epistrophic understandings of identity transition help account for the intense scrutiny and controversy each story attracted. The weakest part of the book is its narrative of secularization, which frames Christian and modern models of conversion as mutually exclusive. Ellwanger asserts that "in Judeo-Christian thinking metanoia and epistrophe were two fundamentally opposed models of conversion" (100). By contrast, "the definitive feature of modern transformation is a reconciliation of" the two models (p. 143). Likewise, "Christianity is especially...

Abstract This essay argues for shifting the focus of a literary theory and criticism course to the institutional, social, and historical forces that shape English studies. Rather than promoting disciplinary introspection, the authors understand their approach as raising questions regarding elitism and the long historical entanglement of knowledge making with the interlocking forces of racism, colonialism, and sexism.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

Abstract In this essay, the authors discuss how collaborative course design fundamentally reshapes power structures within the classroom, opening traditional texts and canonical authors to generative readings. Through the design of an introductory-level literature course centered around a single celebrity author, Charles Dickens, the co-teachers detail how students came to see authorship as an inherently collaborative act, and through the lens of Foucault's “author function,” how these students came to see themselves as both collaborators and authors. This course, from inception to execution, was a collaborative effort grounded in feminist pedagogy, and as demonstrated by student feedback and the project examples included in the appendix, this pedagogical approach empowered the students to recognize themselves as co-creators of knowledge within a classroom.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo 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); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.

This essay examines the queer rhetorical capacities of what the pornographer, poet, professor, and tattoo artist Samuel Steward called latriniana—sexual graffiti located in public lavatories. While this genre’s rhetorical objective is often associated with sexual solicitation, this essay argues that latriniana proffers a destabilized logos—always in motion, roving along a continuum of cohesion and disintegration, while never truly landing on any definitive form. As a result, the genre exemplifies what Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes have cited as queer composition’s impossibility. Using samples of latriniana collected from gay bars in San Francisco and New York City, the essay traces the rhetorical gestures inherent to the genre, exploring the way latriniana enables a multiplicity of readings, and thus embodies the chimerical, uncontainable queer logos.

The United Nations Population Fund publications in 2011 and 2014, The State of the World’s Midwifery, both argue that midwives in poor countries need to be professionalized for the good of their countries and of women and children worldwide. These narratives of professionalization as the road to stability, health, respect, and women’s welfare are tangled within broader narratives of neoliberalism. These broader narratives borrow familiar commonplaces from the feminist health movement and colonial reasoning to limit global midwifery’s scope to a neoliberal system of value within a neocolonial development agenda. Using definition as a grounding commonplace to argue for the professionalization of midwives in poorer nations, these reports potentially disenfranchise many birthing people and their attendants in these nations who do not fall under the professionalized definition of midwife.

ABSTRACTDuring a 2018 sentencing hearing of former Olympics and Michigan State University doctor Larry Nassar, 156 survivors offered Victim Impact Statements, and Judge Rosemarie Aquilina made national headlines for her impassioned responses to each survivor. This essay shows how Aquilina’s responses use epideictic rhetoric to make audible a judicial practice of feminist witnessing of assault testimony. In so doing, Aquilina challenges the way blame “sticks” to survivors and casts a scrutinizing gaze on a culture that silences survivors; praises the individual act of testimony and constitutes a collective of “sister survivors,” thereby fostering connection and potential for coalition building; and reframes sexual assault testimony as a public act with socially transformative effects.KEYWORDS: Epideictic rhetoricfeminist judicial theoryfeminist witnessingsexual assault Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I rely on the VIS reproduced on the website In Our Own Words, a resource created by Heartland Independent Film Forum and sponsored by the Michigan Daily Newspaper, MSU’s student paper. Because the statements were published with survivors’ permission on inourwords.org as an educational resource, I have used the survivor’s name if it was released. In cases where it was not, I use the number or symbols that appear on inourwords.org.2 The VIS followed Nassar’s guilty plea to seven counts of sexual misconduct. Although the plea deal meant there would be no public criminal trial during which survivors could testify, Aquilina invited any survivor impacted by Nassar’s abuse, including parents, to offer a statement.3 Aquilina’s vengeance-focused comments also received criticism from feminists, even as they often acknowledged them as an understandable response to Nassar’s abhorrent acts (Gruber; Press). Her comments, in this moment, demonstrate the limitations of what Elizabeth Bernstein calls carceral feminism, wherein criminal prosecution is viewed as a solution to gender violence, without attention to the ways criminal law is entrenched in “masculinism, racism and cruelty” (Gruber).

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This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s major limitations; the invitational model demands significant emotional and interpersonal labor, especially on the part of the initiator, which is only appropriate and productive in certain contexts. When combined with self-reflection, articulated positionality, and study of systems of oppression, writing centers can help facilitate antiracist community building by deploying their one-with- one pedagogical practices to call in accomplices beyond the writing center.

The cover art for Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World is startling and alluring.1 A Black female human-animal defiantly meets one’s gaze. With bull-like horns and ears jutting out of both sides of the head, thick, matted hair (fur?) migrating from the crown of the head to the brow, this portrait of a hybrid species challenges the senses and the imaginary. Leaning into the spectator’s eyeline with shoulders angled and breasts partly obscured by the enveloping shadows out of which she emerges and seems to crouch into, this Black female human-animal provokes questions: What sort of being is this? What kind of being is the Black woman? Becoming Human is a complex, and at times dense, meditation on these and related queries into anti-Blackness, new materialism, and the roles that Black women’s bodies have played historically and contemporaneously in philosophical and biological discourses on the human. Recent studies interrogating the “genre” of “Man” range across literary studies, aesthetics, geography, Black studies, and animal studies. Jackson’s work thinks alongside and rebuts claims developed in these fields by centering “gender, sexuality, and maternity in the animalization of blackness” (4).Becoming Human is expansive and involves eclectic case studies: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” the mercurial artistry of Wangechi Mutu, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. What links these diverse aesthetic “objects” and artistic practices are their interventions into how we come to see, feel, and know the (non)being of Blackness and the ongoing reproduction of Blackened bodies. There is much to commend in Becoming Human—its explorations and critiques of the supposed binarism involved in positing human/culture divides, its explications of some foundational philosophies assembling the tenets of anti-Blackness, and its recognition of the significance of signification; that is, its mobilization of a mode of rhetorical thinking. Moreover, Jackson delivers some truly engaging and unique discussions of discursive forms, paying particular attention to “blackness’s abject generativity” (69), a phenomenon she also calls Blackness’s “natal function” (70). This ambitious project unfolds along three interdependent, yet distinct registers: (1) a philosophical questioning of the underpinnings of anti-Blackness, (2) a robust critique of aesthetic formations and their potentiality for altering the terms of (non)humanity, (3) an encounter with materiality’s discursivity—or, discourse’s materiality. This review delineates each register, keeping in mind that each register is deeply imbricated in the others.It has become relatively normative in thinking about anti-Blackness and racism to assert or proffer the notion that Blackness is barred from the ontological status of human (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). That is, to premise one’s intervention into racialization of diverse kinds on how technologies of slavery and colonialism (and their afterlives) deny Blackness ontological ground as a human being, indeed, to repudiate (Black) being as such. There is, of course, strong evidence of such an absolute exile operating as the condition of possibility for what counts as human life and the fungibility of Blackened bodies. But since Jackson seeks to trouble binarism itself, she asserts the “concept of plasticity, which maintains that black(ened) people are not so much as dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously . . . being everything and nothing for an order . . . constructs black(ened) humanity as privation and exorbitance of form” (35). In this formulation, the essential question is no longer whether or not Blackness is animalistic, it’s what specific labors are accomplished through discursive practices of animalization? Jackson posits that there is a “selective recognition” of Black humanity alongside violent exclusion. And so, what logics govern the selection? In short, these logics go by the name anti-Blackness and generate historically contingent abjection, debility, and disposability. Jackson interrogates foundational Western philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger to show how treatises like the latter’s Introduction to Metaphysics worked to separate what counts as philosophy from “Hottentots” and primitivism writ large. Jackson asserts that Hegel’s perceptions of Africa and Africans as possessing no history or development, representing the antithesis of the fullness of Dasein as human essence, haunts Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, the philosophical capacity for human being to build worlds (utilizing the natural resources of earth) gets counterposed in Heidegger to those Black bodies that lack this human capacity—those bodies and populations that are locked permanently within the animal-earth relation, the Black (98–99). Becoming Human, then, seeks to disturb these foundations by reiterating “that blackness, and the abject fleshy figures that bear the weight of the world, is a being (something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything), and I aim to reveal and unsettle the machinations that suggest blackness is nothingness” (83).The more difficult challenge facing readers of this work is embedded within the relations among the various figurations of the Black female body as a sexuating, reproducing organism. Here the conceptualization relies on how the Black female body is treated in discourses of biology as capable of bringing new (male and female) bodies into the world and not capable of being truly feminine, a caesura that begets and preserves white femininity. Jackson relies on queer science fiction to illuminate and cast doubt upon these anti-Black operations. Chapter 2 features an analysis of the “postcolonial science fiction” (88) of Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and chapter 3 forwards the “insect poetics” (121) of Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Although each work offers very different versions of Black woman futurity, they allow for Jackson to think about Blackened female bodies and the biopolitical imperatives of reproduction. How might, Jackson asks, Blackened female bodies resist or transform the ongoing commands issued by biopolitics to make more bodies even as this reproduction diminishes the self? In the case of “Bloodchild,” Jackson contemplates how discourses of species are racialized to provide warrants for the domination of not only animals—like Blackened female bodies—but also “insects and microorganisms, such as parasites, viruses, protoctists, fungi, and bacteria” (132). Jackson is, in short, attempting to illustrate how anti-Blackness invents multiple forms of organisms as the “‘enemy of man’” (136), thus proposing that (inter)planetary alliances among Blackened bodies (even microscopic ones) are possible and necessary for liberation.To offer plasticity as the mode of anti-Blackness is to conceive of racism as an exceptionally potent assemblage of aesthetic practices organized by and housed within biopolitical aesthetic regimes like the slave plantation. From this perspective, Becoming Human contemplates the shaping, constituting, and mutating forces acting on individual and social bodies and things. Importantly, among these “things” are Black female bodies and the artistic practices of those very bodies. Hence, Jackson understands anti-Blackness as a biopolitical and economic generative force through which one can witness how “the coordinates of the human body are forcefully altered into a different shape or form—bizarre and fantastic: human personality is made ‘wild’ under the weight of blackness’s production as seemingly pure potentiality” (70–71). In the case of chattel slavery, the slave body was made to become whatever it must become to serve the fickle and gratuitous interests of the slaver’s fears and desires—to bear the lash, to bear children, to bear unimaginable grief. The Black female human-animal is an object of an aesthetics that cannot be dissociated (in reality or in phantasy) from the conceits of the aesthetic values attributed to whiteness. Becoming Human, therefore, engages a variety of aesthetic forms as it maps the terrain of anti-Blackness. For the purposes of this review, there are two notable examples in addition to the Black female human-animal worth elaborating upon: the slave narrative and the novel’s unique status as a literary form.Prior to taking up Morrison’s Beloved as a neo–slave narrative, Jackson comments on the genre of slave narration and Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical performances. A genre is not simply an arrangement of elements that constrain artistic practices—although it is that—it constitutes and mobilizes affective logics governing systems of social relations. As such, the slave narrative depends on “sentimentality,” a “privileged rhetorical mode” that establishes “empathic identification” among speakers and audiences (56). Although this rhetorical mode may build “bonds of kindness” important to abolitionism, it also reifies racial hierarchies and social laws pertinent to anti-Blackness’s continuation and revision. Douglass’s “‘formal mastery’ of genres of masculine, republican elocution” (56) cannot disable the racist aesthetics of animalization. Nor can it transfer his conditional humanity onto other Black bodies. In this respect, the genre of the slave narrative has less to do with Black freedom; it solicits Black artistic practices as a “pretext for racial hierarchy in the form of a pedagogy in white ideality and the pathologization and criminalization of blackness” (58).Jackson’s critique of the racializing affects of Western aesthetics continues with a consideration of the historical context of the emergence of the novel as honored literary form. The prestige of the novel as a literary form is involved in the elevation of rational man and its forms of speech. Taken to be a reflection of immanent subjectivity and the transcendence of nature, the novel operates as a metaphor; it signifies the attainment of high culture and the vulgar existence of Black flesh that lacks the powers of self-reflection. The novel is also popularized through market economies constitutive of global colonialism and chattel slavery. Importantly, the novel participates in and furthers a “certain nationalist myth of language” engendering a reverence for its literary form as white-nation speech. This is the historical-aesthetical formulation into which Beloved and Brown Girl intervene—as counterstatements to this racist aesthetics and as ways to imagine worldly relations differently (90–99) (see also Bakhtin 1986).By centering the concept of plasticity in its analysis, Becoming Human produces an aperture through which one can appreciate the rhetorical character of anti-Blackness and the aesthetics of racism. Throughout the work Jackson reveals a sensitivity to discursivity. When discussing the genre of the slave narrative, she refers to the “rhetorical inheritance” passed down from the “literary cultural industry” regulating the form slave narratives can take (52). Genre, therefore, offers up and excludes from consideration specific topoi for rhetorical invention. But as Jackson works her way through this register involving the entanglement of genre, trope, and the Black female body, the “natal function” of Blackness ushers into view the idea that “the slave is the discursive-material site that must contend with the demand for seemingly infinite malleability, a demand whose limits are set merely by the tyrannies of will and imagination” (72). Plasticity is an effect of this discursive-material relation as it violently seizes and molds bodies, in part, by continuously enlisting various forms of biopolitical administration. The implications and limitations of this relation get teased out in the work’s final chapter, “Organs of War: Measurement and Ecologies of Dematerialization in the Works of Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde” (159–98). Rather than explore Jackson’s examination of Mutu and Lorde, the final stage of this review tries to clarify the stakes for rhetorical theory expressed by Jackson’s staging of her critique.Beginning with the traditional biocentric view that human beings are determined by biological processes, and that culture is subsidiary, Jackson utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter to engage “sociogeny” as a refutation of biocentricity that has gained traction over the past two decades. Instead of privileging biology (forgetting that biology is itself discursive like metaphysics), Becoming Human questions the “and” posited in “discursivity and materiality” (160). Indeed, “antiblackness itself is sexuating, whereby so-called biological sex is modulated by ‘culture’ . . . at the registers of both sign and matter, antiblackness produces differential biocultural effects of gender and sex” (159). In this sense, patterns and forms of discourse are biotropological—they are assemblages of biotropes (Daut 2015; Watts 2021). Such discourses habituate bodily (and subjective) responses, neurochemical processes that have values and feelings inscribed through them; they have the capacity to trigger ideas, preferences, ways of knowing, modes of visuality operating “as if it was instinctual.” This “as if” is paramount, for it elides the fact that the human subject is “semiotically defined” (162). Matter itself can be understood as an effect, at least in part, of the mechanics of discourse. Becoming Human understands this “as if” as a racist rhetorical strategy: it sponsors “mutations” in human-animal, calls them nature’s “monsters,” and “reasons” that they need to be studied, dissected, policed, and incarcerated or killed. To be sure, Jackson does not label the work as an investment in rhetorical theory one might suspect because her assessments and critiques of philosophy and metaphysics tend to treat rhetoric as a set of devices that “biological discourses” mobilize. From this reviewer’s point of view, this tendency is another effect of “as if”—as if biological discourses, especially when manufacturing the Black female human-animal, are not rhetorical through and through. Despite this quibble, Becoming Human offers provocative analyses of anti-Blackness and the multifaceted worlds it repetitively and distressingly (rhetorically) invents.

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, w jaki sposób amplifikacja retoryczna wpływa na dyskurs, nadając terminom naukowym wydźwięk emocjonalny. Przedmiotem studium jest polski dyskurs genderowy w jego wariancie politycznym. Artykuł składa się z pięciu części. Po zdefiniowaniu w części wstępnej pojęć gender i dyskurs, zwrócono uwagę na narzędzia amplifikacji retorycznej. Materiał badawczy – polskojęzyczne teksty internetowe prezentujące różne stanowiska w debacie na temat płci – przeanalizowany został pod kątem typologii używanych mechanizmów amplifikacji.

This makes me wonder, isn’t the whole point of having easy access to healthcare to enable human beings to live a better life, irrespective of their race, religion, gender, nationality, class, or economic status? Isn’t healthcare a basic human right provided even to the minority ethnic populations, like myself, so that we can live a life of dignity and good health?

Pamela VanHaitsma's Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers an insightful queer historiography of romantic epistolary rhetoric that opens the reader to queer possibilities in the rhetorical practice of nineteenth-century American letter writing. The author's stated intention is to queer the binary distinctions between public and private life that often push queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education (4). With the genre of letter writing, VanHaitsma not only transcends queer recovery in American letter writing but also effectively reconsiders queer engagement, practice, and pedagogy within the rhetorical process of romantic epistolary.The introduction begins by citing the rhetorical and queer foundations of scholars like Charles E. Morris and Karma Chavez (6–7), previewing the methodological queering of rhetorical education. VanHaitsma first defines the key terms for consideration, including romantic epistolary and rhetorical education, and then situates epistolary rhetoric as a cis-heteronormative genre. Although the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing during this time exclusively privileged opposite-sex romantic discourse, VanHaitsma makes the case that the genre allows for queer openings. For example, queer possibilities existed in same-sex friendship correspondence; and queer invention emerged through a dialogue of the personal as political given race, gender, and sexuality were imbedded within romantic letter writing. VanHaitsma's archival research examines “complete letter writing manuals” (44) and romantic correspondence archived at the Connecticut Historical Society and Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archive. As the author navigates romantic correspondence, VanHaitsma makes thoughtful choices that focus less on the sexual identity of the subjects and more on the “queer rhetorical practices” (11–12) of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus in chapter two and Albert Dodd in chapter three.The first chapter frames letter writing manuals as rhetorical (26) and then situates teaching manuals like the “complete letter writer” as inherently a heteronormative genre. The author considers the manuals as a launching point for analysis because of their ubiquity and circulation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth-century postal age. Complete letter writing manuals, according to VanHaitsma, were organized similarly by genre and served as a “model” for letter writing with respect to rhetor, audience, and purpose (25). For example, chapters are labeled as “on friendship,” “on business,” or “on love, marriage, and courtship.” By situating complete letter guides as rhetorical education, the author suggests that the teaching and learning guided by the manuals uses “language from the heart” to connect romantic epistolary to social inquiry, including class, education, and family; these matters of course were touchpoints in “appropriate” heteronormative correspondence. VanHaitsma advances three dimensions of heteronormativity encouraged by the manuals: (1) normative gendered romantic coupling; (2) normative pacing in romantic exchange; and (3) letter writing as practice toward the normative conventions of marriage. For example, manuals marked a letter as “masculine or feminine” via salutation like “From a Gentleman to a Lady.” Pacing was marked by dating the letters, and a normative convention of time, especially in romantic exchanges, would proceed slowly, cautiously, and without “passionate outbreaks” (34). Finally, the goal of romantic exchange was achieved only through its “heteronormative telos and generic end” (35), which was marriage between a man and woman. The paradox advanced by VanHaitsma is that the same three rigid cis-heteronormative constraints of letter writing manuals are also the dimensions that offer queer openings. The author suggests two “strategies for queer invention” (37); first, through “queer failure,” that informs a critical and queer “re-imagination” (46) of letter writing outside the genre. Second, VanHaitsma argues convincingly that if manuals are constructed as a resource for invention so that a letter writer may “write from their heart,” those generic conventions are already susceptible to queer challenge.Chapters two and three operationalize the call for a critically queer re-examination of American letter writing toward “queer effect,” first through the everyday romantic correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then a more formal civic training through the letters, diaries, and manuals of Albert Dodd. Chapter two begins with a call for more perspectives on epistolary same-sex correspondence beyond the discourses of public and political figures. To this end, VanHaitsma examines the romantic exchange between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, “two freeborn African American women” (51-52) who corresponded during and after the American Civil War. In this chapter, the author is interested in how letter writers learn to participate in romantic exchange when formal training is perhaps inaccessible. As the author notes, even with access to manuals, there was no same-sex romantic correspondence modeled in the complete letter writers, so VanHaitsma considers what the rhetorical practices of these letters tell us broadly about queering romantic epistolary. The author studied the correspondence of Brown and Primus not only through a same-sex lens but also cross-class as Primus was a schoolteacher born to a “prominent African American community in Hartford Connecticut,” while Brown was uneducated in formal schooling and “worked primarily as a domestic” (51). VanHaitsma finds that Brown and Primus learned and used the generic conventions taught by complete letter writers, including salutation strategies and dating each correspondence for pacing. What differs, of course, is the queering of salutations which range in tone from a familial connection like sisters, to friendship, and even romance (55). The pacing of the correspondence reflects an urgency and intensity outside heteronormative convention with quick replies, often within a week (57). The correspondence also defied a marriage telos given the societal constraint that marriage to each other was an impossibility; as a result, the romantic exchange was never scaffolded around that particular generic convention. Finally, the author illustrates how Primus and Brown queered the rhetorical parameters of the manuals by incorporating political discussions alongside romantic exchange (61). Chapter two concludes by describing how the romantic exchange between Brown and Primus borrowed from poetry to compose and queer language of the heart. The most compelling take-away from this analysis is how the correspondence from two everyday, same-sex, cross-class, African American women adopted the generic conventions of inaccessible manuals and then crafted queer inventions to challenge generic norms.Chapter three examines the letter writing and training of Albert Dodd. Where Brown and Primus lacked access to formal rhetorical education, Dodd—an upper-class white cis-man—studied rhetoric as civic engagement at Trinity College and Yale, where he wrote a poetry album and a “commonplace book turned diary” (75). What interests VanHaitsma about Dodd is how he used classical training to repurpose rhetorical and civic education toward a romantic end, which became a multi-genre and genre-queer epistolary practice. Through his formal training, Dodd possessed a rhetorical awareness of generic letter writing conventions that allowed him to negotiate public and private binaries. VanHaitsma illustrates how Dodd's training developed into a queer rhetorical practice by broadening the genre of letter writing through an introduction of epistle verse, letters, poetry, and same-sex erotic correspondence (92). VanHaitsma connects Dodd's formal training to Brown and Primus through a “queer art as failure” (98) where the correspondence of all three defied normative training when the generic conventions could not be met; instead, the rhetors re-purposed the generic strategies for their own queer effect. Building from this connection, the author's concluding chapter is a pedagogical gesture toward “queer failure” (104) in rhetorical studies. As a challenge to the status-quo orientation and cis-heteronormative expectations of rhetorical education, VanHaitsma turns to queer movement studies and implores scholars in the histories of rhetoric and sexuality studies to stay vigilant to the “failures” of queer pasts.Pamela VanHaitsma's compact book is poignant and an important contribution to rhetorical studies, particularly in realizing queer possibilities in spaces dominated by normative histories. Exploring American traditions of letter writing, the author makes a sophisticated and accessible critique of the hegemonic democratic practices of civic engagement, public and private spheres of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality in the histories of rhetorical education. As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies. As the author notes, queer romantic engagement has always existed but with limited scholarly attention. The case made throughout these chapters advocates for a critical break and crucially, an intentional movement toward “non-normative historiographic ways of knowing” (101). VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary.

he first class I ever took as an undergrad with Dr. Mara Holt was titled "Women's Rhetorics. " I barely knew what rhetorics were (testing out of first-year composition via the AP exam was a mixed blessing for someone who became an English major), and I certainly didn't know what the word "pedagogy" meant. The first readings in Dr. Holt's course-Nancy Schniedewind's "Teaching Feminist Process" and Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What Is Feminist Pedagogy"-left me a little blindsided. Not only did both address concepts that felt above my understanding, but what I could make out focused on teachingsomething that seemed, from my inadequate understanding, as distinct from the focus of the class. (The teacher might be interested in articles like these, I thought, but why would the students be?) This reaction is the almost textbook response of a student who had, until then, been inculcated in the traditional power dynamics of a teacher-focused educational system. Only gradually would I come to understand how different, and important, it was that Dr. Holt was making clear her own pedagogical influences and opening these up for discussion.

Using a multi-methodological approach, we analyze member comments in Watts Up With That (WUWT), a climate skeptical Facebook group. Quantitative topic modeling revealed that members claim hyperrationality to undermine climate science. Science-based terms were often connected to other topics, such as immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, creating rhetorical constellations that shifted rhetoric from technical spaces into political and ideological ones. These findings have implications for dealing with the challenge of misinformation’s circulation on social media.

This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

The women’s talking group featured in this article theorizes the community literacy practice of thanduk—“setting something aside”—that members practice together. Sanduk—with an s and translated as Arabic for “box”— has a long, well documented history involving informal, rotary credit and savings associations practiced among people in Africa and of African descent. Rather than using the s, the group’s spelling is distinctively Nuer— thanduk—harkening back to indigenous versions of the practice documented throughout areas of East Africa and beyond. Thanduk invokes nommo, a distinctly African spiritual and philosophical value that strives for harmony and balance among interdependent members of a community. This article aims to make legible how the women in this study employ thanduk to thwart the transnational, intergenerational impacts of indirect colonial rule and neoliberal economics in pursuit of individual and collective thriving.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

Though only two names appear as authors of this volume, it would take a crowded eighteenth-century-style title page to include everyone whose work is included. The content as well as the format of this volume are collaborative, in the best senses of the term, making it of great value to teachers in the humanities with specialties well beyond the long eighteenth century. Bridget Draxler, of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and Danielle Spratt, of California State University, Northridge, take on crucial questions of engaging a wider audience with the scholarly dynamics of cultural history, and add to the rhetorical strategies of defending the humanities along the way. Their resolve to show both successful assignments and those that went wrong, and to prominently include the voices of imaginative and supportive administrators (thank you, John C. Keller at University of Iowa), inclusive museum and library directors such as Gillian Dow at Chawton House, and especially students and community collaborators, provides a reflective model for other educators. Austen scholar Devoney Looser's reflection that she had to “reinvent [her]self” to be “an engaging ambassador for the past” (52) speaks to the spirit of the volume: seeking participation without sacrificing attention, urging students and faculty to work beyond campus without condescension.Draxler and Spratt use a six-part structure to organize the volume: “The Street” takes on what Spratt calls “the savior complex” in service-learning projects, discussed in greater detail below. “The Library” and “The Museum” are differentiated based on the structure of student projects from “The Archives,” “The Digital Archives and the Database,” and “The Eighteenth Century Novel, Online.” Their theorizing of the connections between what service learning can look like in the humanities with the promises and limits of digital humanities strengthens the book. Some examples involve institutional support in terms of available collections and opportunities for enhancing the meaning of study-abroad programs, while others approach digitization strategies for institutions and students without access to such resources. “In the face of an expert-scoffing, diversity-averse, post-truth society that rejects care for language as mere political correctness it has never been more critical to teach the past with a public purpose” (8), the editors write in their introduction. From this, the examples of accountability and self-reflection to avoid a “savior complex” in connecting publicly engaged learning with literary studies, including undergraduate seminars on Austen, develops into an argument that expands from Austen into other examples.Austen's prominence in the title (and on the paperback cover) functions like Austen's name in lights in programming announcements and course titles: it brings in an audience who may have been exposed to Anya Taylor-Joy's expressive eyes in the most recent Emma or Ciaran Hinds's life-giving sideburns in the 1995 Persuasion and signed up for the books themselves. Once in, the connection to other cultural productions of the long eighteenth century besides Austen can ensue. The opening two chapters engage the most with Austen, while teachers in other historical fields might benefit the most from reading the later sections on digital archives. Emma is the most-cited novel, finding among its merits a fine object-lesson in a sort of “savior” complex: Emma's condescending visits to the cottages of the local poor, whose dingy interiors have been briefly illuminated by her visits. Spratt's opening chapter “The Street” augments recent Emma studies in a way that would make any reader want to enroll in her class, as she is able to use Emma Woodhouse's visits to the local poor as an object lesson to understand the class dynamics to be aware of in service learning. Two examples of complex moments in teaching Emma in the undergraduate classroom are used for extended examples. Both are helpfully presented, and one changed my mind in a way that parallels Spratt's account.From Emma the painful scene of Mrs. Elton, newly arrived in Highbury from Bristol, seeking to arrange Jane Fairfax's expected need for a position as governess has been one of the most famous in Austen studies at least since Edward Said (1993) centered the discussion of Bristol's role in the Atlantic slave trade in Culture and Imperialism. Spratt theorizes her approach to teaching this scene in ways that have become widely shared, but concludes that Emma's silence during a scene of discussing both “the sale of human flesh” and what Jane Fairfax calls “the sale of human intellect” and the suffering attached to unprotected governesses at the time demonstrates Emma's indifference to these topics. Certainly, Emma Woodhouse is no antiracist activist, any more than Austen was a Wollstonecraft, yet it is still possible to read her silence here as a shocked response to the arrogant, domineering, presumptive behavior of the newcomer. More convincing is Draxler's discussion of how student investment in their projects—especially preparing to lead discussions of each Austen novel at the local public library—changed her long-established feelings about the character of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. If the received reading of his famous harangue of Catherine endorses the novel's critique of Gothic fantasy, her students’ engaged response to Henry's “Remember that we are English, and that we are Christians” (qtd. on 92) positions him not as an ideal but as “his father's son”: “A few months before the #metoo movement started, my students taught me that it's not just the General Tilneys and Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps of the world who disempower women through villainous abuses of power; it is also, importantly and heartbreakingly, the Al Frankens and the Henry Tilneys, with their uncouth jokes and thoughtless entitlement” (92). At the time as such references may seem to risk a limited shelf life, this volume also includes one of the most thoughtful and useful definitions of “presentism” and its dangers that I know of, as it moves from a shared definition to a memorable, useful phrase many teachers will use: “Presentism occurs when we interpret historical phenomena according to the concepts, vocabulary, values, problems, or opinions endemic to our own time period, leading us to misapprehend the actual nature of our historical object of inquiry. Presentism interprets things as we are, not as they are” (emphasis added, 214). To write, and to teach, with the pull toward contemporaneity modified by this historical imagination comes close to my definition of the liberal arts, and that last sentence will show up in my class notes soon.The discussions of Austen's textual history, of the editing of primary sources from the long eighteenth century (with an extended example from the writings of Sarah Fielding), and of the undergraduate (and, in one chapter, graduate) productions that emerge from these sources would look quite different (the pandemic notwithstanding) at large institutions with substantial print-based library resources. For this reviewer, and for most of the teachers for whom their work is intended, the focus on digital access and shared resources for students at a range of schools other than Research 1 institutions are welcome and helpful, and even for those of us with commitment to printed texts and joyful unplugged reading, profoundly democratic and portable. Amy Weldon's contribution describing the guided tours she's led for her Luther College students to key Romantic-period author sites (which she presented brilliantly at a recent conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) also shows the need to theorize and complicate our historical experiences. Throughout the latter chapters the emphasis on making the work of editors and scholars understandable to students functions as another beyond-Austen structural example. This volume goes far to explain and contextualize for students the role and function of editors, which for the contexts of open-source and user-modified materials retain a special importance. Spratt's example from a graduate classroom of creating a digital edition of Sarah Fielding's 1759 novel The History of the Countess of Delwyn functions as a useful case study in this area. To the question of why digitization in itself cannot be the answer to every need, the inevitable challenge of the medial s remains instructive for teachers at every level: that is, from a high school history class encountering what looks like “Congrefs” in images of American Revolutionary documents, to the “Boatfwain” bellowed to in the opening dialogue of the First Folio: these cannot be scanned without intelligent, contextualized preparation of a reading text, even without the question of where and when to annotate. Austen's texts are among the first to transition away from the medial s in printed English, but even there such non-digitizable artifacts as paper quality (the acidic near-newsprint of the unknown author's first 1811 printing of Sense and Sensibility vis-à-vis the pleasantly heavy paper and generous margins of John Murray's 1816 first edition of Emma) provide useful reminders of humility for even the most passionate advocates of the digital humanities. Still, this volume features insightful analysis of how the implications of collaborative digital approaches challenge the philological precedents of what became the expected practices of modern literary scholarship. As part of a pattern of quoting students in this work, Draxler cites Alison Byerly from a Newberry Library seminar on a point that extends the interest of the book beyond the long eighteenth century to any “data-driven” “inherently collaborative” approach: “At some level, this requires us to abandon the notion that meaning can be generated only through the power of the individual mind. A different kind of meaning is exposed when technology uncovers patterns or information that would otherwise remain invisible. Coming to terms with that meaning requires a different way of thinking” (154). As much as this is in keeping with other theoretical approaches shaped by poststructuralist linguistics, the figure of “uncovering” the process of both editing and the selection of texts for attention provides a dynamic approach to a period of historical literature that won't keep still.Is 2018 already long ago? For teachers at most institutions, it certainly feels that way. The Enlightenment, and its spirited critique by many of the Romantic generations, created many institutions: the museums, libraries, schools that many current educators are working to make more accessible and inclusive. As remote learning, live-streamed events, and other virtual programming have become essential with the ongoing pandemic, the collaborators in this book are well positioned to help scholars in related fields with meaningful transitions. Though even the mention of sharing pizza at a class where students edit Wikipedia entries for eighteenth-century women writers, or of friendly talk and laughter among undergraduates and local senior citizens at Austen-related book discussions held off-campus take on a moving resonance of the power of in-person events, this reminder of the need for contact and synchronous discovery provides valuable inspiration as we move forward.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern.1 The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.Its usurper is de Dijn's second concept, with advocates as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century's Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model worried the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their legacy survives in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone.2 Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.De Dijn's narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women's suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West's most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.3Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn's account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what's happening now.4 In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent rightwing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn's two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.In politics, modern freedom is advocated most assertively by the Republican Party and most aggressively by those at the rightward reaches. In 2010, a group of these activists posted a “Contract from America” online, ostensibly revising and updating the 1994 “Contract with America” that had helped to prompt a conservative surge in Congress. Calling for a variety of crowd-sourced initiatives and claiming to speak for “the people,” this document articulated an agenda attractive to a narrow set of demographics, demanding to preempt the sort of democratic deliberation that might more accurately reflect the will of a diverse nation. At the outset of his I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, Paul Elliott Johnson characterizes the Contract in familiar terms. It “figured the relation between the freedom of the population and the authority of government as one of inverse proportionality,” he writes, meaning that, “the less ‘the people’ are governed, the freer they are.” Surveying a short list of policy goals including fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Johnson notes that, together, these imagined the “real” population of the United States to be “a set of radically autonomous individuals united in their possession of liberty,” with economic and popular liberty fashioned identically and used interchangeably throughout.5 For the Tea Party and its legacies, freedom has meant nothing more or less than the removal of government constraints from personal and corporate activity, consistent with a set of assumptions about who these persons and corporations are supposed to be. Fully realized, theirs is a world in which one does whatever one wants, provided only that one is one of us.For Johnson, this atomized collective is the animating ideal of conservative populism, a rhetorical mode through which a distinctly white, masculine resentment is gathered and arrayed against a nefarious liberal establishment. Cast at once as both central and marginal, the subject of this discourse is the disenchanted silent majoritarian, the white citizen with an empowered self-concept but without power itself, or at least without power in proportion to certain others with more than they deserve. “By positing a population simultaneously sure of its identity, positioned outside or beyond the messy world of politics, and in possession of a vitality self-same with freedom,” Johnson writes, “conservatism's ‘people’ is oriented with hostility toward the democratic side of the liberal democratic equation.”6 Conservative populists speak the languages of grievance and privilege, claiming entitlement unbound by accountability and indignant at restraint, especially when delivered with official sanction on legal ballots. Reproved once-too-often by electoral defeats, their rhetorical fetishization of freedom must be either abandoned entirely or validated through anti-democratic violence. In October of 2021, at an Idaho rally featuring conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, this tension was expressed succinctly by an audience member who asked his demagogic host, “When do we get to use the guns?” When the crowd responded with laughter and applause, the befuddled young man assured everyone that he was purely in earnest. “That's not a joke,” he said. “I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”7 Here de Dijn's image of the battering ram becomes especially evocative, updated, and weaponized.Though populism as a rhetorical style is traditionally deployed by mass movements against elites, conservative populism draws its boundaries vertically, uniting a portion of the mass with a portion of the elite and activating race as the applicable category for exclusion.8 If the modern concept of freedom has traditionally proven useful to the white managerial class as a means to reinforcing its prerogatives, it has also attracted the white working class with promises of autonomy and status. In each case, the appeal pledges to relieve a self-consciously self-reliant and overwhelmingly white faction of any obligation to the maintenance of a welfare state that, they suppose, caters primarily to black and brown people who do not want to work. Johnson assigns race a central role in his analysis, situating the rhetoric of conservative populism within a larger biopolitics that aligns whiteness with life and blackness with death. The white and the black circulate ominously within the conservative worldview, constituting discourses that inform and mobilize the conservative “people.” If past theoretical treatments of conservative rhetoric have understated these racialized dynamics, I the People centers them.To make his case, Johnson surveys key moments in conservative history, starting with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy, proceeding through Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory, through Newt Gingrich's 1994 takeover of the House, through Tea Party opposition to Barack Obama in 2009, and, finally, an analysis of Donald Trump as candidate and executive. Overall, Johnson convincingly charts a rhetorical trajectory most notable for its consistency, arguing against those who claim that conservatives learned identity politics from the Left or who cite Trump as a one-off perversion of an otherwise rich and nuanced intellectual legacy. On the contrary, Johnson argues, the conservative tradition in the United States has long been driven by the same impulses that drive it today, including overt commitments to whiteness and masculinity, to hegemony and marginality, to individualism and freedom as against government and its pretensions to the common good. Stirred and mobilized still by a dogged populist tone, the movement today is the same as it ever was, if further amplified and pronounced. Proponents of democracy should be candid about what conservative populism is, and responsive to the threats that it poses.Among religious constituencies, the modern conception of freedom has been received most warmly by white evangelical Christians. Remarkably active and reliably Republican, white evangelical voters have ensured the election of conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Their support proved especially decisive in 2000 and 2016, a pair of contests in which the President-elect lost the popular vote while clinching the Electoral College.9 After the latter race, in particular, when exit polls revealed that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical voters had gone for Trump, the racial, religious, and political identities had become so deeply entangled that pastors, pundits, and scholars were moved to revisit the age-old question of what, exactly, an evangelical is.10 For critical observers both within and without the fold, such an examination was necessary to explain how the teachings of Christ could possibly have moved millions into the politics of Trump. In the years since, books pledging to answer the central questions have been published to impressive sales and critical acclaim.11 One of the most recent and most nuanced has come out of rhetorical studies.In her Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin suggests that white evangelical voting behavior is intelligible, at least in part, in the light of evangelical sermonizing. Following the dramatic housing market collapse of 2008, Martin wondered whether the “Great Recession” would prompt white evangelicals to question the linkage between their theological and economic commitments—their concomitant beliefs in the holiness of God and of free markets. Between 2010 and 2018, she transcribed and analyzed hundreds of sermons delivered in evangelical megachurches across more than three dozen states, coding specifically for economic themes.12 Because these large churches are joined weekly by such a high volume of congregants, their discourses would provide a useful window into demographic thought and practice. And because their sermons are streamed and archived online, they would be easily accessible from home. In 2016, Martin attended to election framing as well, performing the analysis that eventually culminated in a different sort of project.Decoding the Digital Church a pair of key to the The first is that, because white evangelical megachurches are for conservative citizens, they as for the of ideas and assumptions that circulate in conservative in the to the in the these reinforcing a high degree of rhetorical or what Martin de In this made by or on with made by the on the between and politics long Though have agency in their they are also to the and of the people in the a that further the of and And because the of the and most churches make their sermons for their work is and by of as well. the conservative discourse second is that, in 2016, the political of a a rhetoric of active to the questions and of the The of most evangelical not Trump for the they delivered of an otherwise that their political while guiding their to the the of is an he by God and for by committed citizens, and who have to this and citizens should the that, this the were If by the on he so do The are the are and the is not finally, the an tension between his first two it in the his to vote their vote the and God with the the to vote as the active of the the assurance of delivered the effectively and fears and the from any accountability for the by the and candidate that their political would persuade them to one of this story is that the linkage between white evangelical identity and Republican by by by the collapse of religious and by certain to further a rightwing religious politics more committed to hegemony than to in to and by this is likely to back that small government and the to would not to be be only that they are Their provides a against the education is the of democracy have themselves, once as of Conservative advocates of have that, as should be able to their to a of their either public or to the In this way, would be within an driven by market to and or the democratic that should be and through the movement to power from and it to thereby education into in which de modern conception of freedom to the democratic his and the of How characterizes the as a between of public The first is best represented by John who that democracy with public education as an for this rather than for and have been made to of as community Because everyone in a is in the citizens are into with their and are in the generation to is to to the about how should be and are from the as in the larger public Their is their influence on an to and They in a citizens, working to an system through which citizens are second is represented by and the who first of as a means to education books such as and to and of the the to in the and while individualism as a means to economic and political the driven as an in a world of collective they imagined an in which citizens may act and without by individuals would be free to their it by and by more than personal And because individuals in a with and other the to them as They this with from a pair of and the By for and by to with a set of and they that any community could citizens an of in which to a generation of of community the democratic and are of different his analysis of and that the of the market and the on which as as the by the in a Though the United States is to a tradition of and our does the and work of we our means of education around without in the community as a that, in to democracy as a of we to practice it at the starting with the should be to and of with education advocates in that the democratic has but that it has to be the best to American education would be to with democratic institutions and then their and than and such a system would young citizens in and to in which individuals rather than certain individuals to the of the the market in education a variety of to public these are and by a common rhetorical They are in a that has proven useful for conservative notes that, their the deployed the style of a of and by “the and of individuals the of In this means that they their as in a market framework that Unlike who are to themselves in and market that appeal to a and Their key are to driven by and of with American beliefs and Their on individuals and as political and economic has If their is to be proponents of democracy in any must to their with and is not a in any case, and with at the many to speak or years from these about the decline of American democracy may either or Their critical on the American Right and its advocates in the Republican Party may either or it is to if only for the of that the scholars that American democracy is in and that the is a may more a to American politics be only of For citizens to understand the across a of the books are each of them, the threat to democracy is animated by a of or at least a of of and proponents of this modern conception the as and able to and act in the world without from others or by of both political and economic this freedom the two into a with a of and to citizens as and to an identity, it is white conservatives that they built this and to that this was built upon a set of and that, in this education should and these a subject to market and to this concept of freedom may the of its American have proven and and against large that our to the by modern freedom is a of democratic the once and In a diverse democracy the and of of In the United States, a and of those citizens may still check the conservative populist The for such are narrow and and their through constraints at from voting and through the dogged of the and the power of the Electoral Their will about in the the of and that rhetorical scholars in their from public and composition through and In that this is the sort of for which rhetorical is The is but the by the maintenance of democracy in to those the of democracy its death. books a call to

Part of the RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric, this volume brings together the insights of a diverse group of rhetorical scholars exploring the rhetorical dimensions of mathematics. There is no single perspective or approach on display as the reader is presented with studies of the rhetoric of mathematics as well as the use of rhetoric in mathematics and the rhetorical nature of mathematical language. These three prongs structure Edward Schiappa's foundational paper that explicitly informs the work of several contributors to the volume. In addition to these essentially theoretical explorations, the volume is rounded out by prescient applications that reinforce the topicality and importance of the subject matter. But any full review of the collection must begin with Schiappa's analyses.To the casual reader, no subjects could be more disconnected than rhetoric and mathematics. The language of demonstration and proofs measures an attitude of mind that values the apodictic and axiomatic while marginalizing, if not ignoring, the efforts of rhetoric. Chaim Perelman drew attention to this divide in his critique of the Cartesian ideal that detached the self-evident from the human sphere, wherein questions arise that mathematicians would consider foreign to their discipline.1 To consider numbers themselves as a source of evidence is part of what is at stake when mathematics is exposed as a human activity. Schiappa takes what Perelman abandoned and claims it as rhetorical territory. “In What Ways Shall We Describe Mathematics as Rhetorical?” answers the question in fertile ways (as subsequent papers show). The rhetorical turn of recent decades involves the rhetorical nature of mathematics on different fronts: “(1) the rhetoric of mathematics, understood as the persuasive argumentative use of mathematics; (2) rhetoric in mathematics, understood as the argumentative modes of persuasion found in written proofs and arguments throughout the history of mathematics; and (3) mathematical language as rhetorical, a sociolinguistic approach to the language of mathematics,” an approach supported by recent writings of Thomas Kuhn (33). In the first case, mathematics serves as evidence in an argument, increasing the persuasiveness of a claim. The second case refers to the argumentative and stylistic modes of persuasion found in proofs, a feature of the history of mathematics. The final case finds its motivation in the work of rhetoricians like Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke,2 for whom all symbol use is rhetorical including that of mathematics. Mathematics is a language like others and with its own reasoning patterns operating in the discourse community of mathematicians. Schiappa illustrates each of these rhetorical aspects of mathematics with examples and bolsters their importance with argument, including a detailed discussion of the work of Kuhn. This, before taking a particularly interesting turn into ethnomathematics and the differences in how mathematics is conceived and used across cultures.Four of the papers in the collection make explicit reference to Schiappa's account and draw part of their stimulus from his distinctions; and the other analyses can be read through the lens of one or more of his distinctions, whether the papers are historical in nature or deal with contemporary questions. In the opening paper, and beyond their Introduction, the book's editors, James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, open some of the relevant discussions by exploring relationships between rhetoric and mathematics. They reinforce their belief that the volume offers a timely and coordinated effort to explore the intersections of these two fields. In Schiappa's distinctions they find the appropriate routes into the subject matter. They trace the historical division between the fields, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, whose system of argument offered little overlap between rhetoric and mathematics, through to the uneven attention directed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (not so much, although the authors’ reading of quasi-logical arguments suggests something) and Burke (quite a bit, with the explicit inclusion of mathematics as a symbolic means of communication). This reinforces the importance of rhetoric in mathematics, and much of Wynn and Reyes’ closing analyses confirm this.Two papers pursue the themes of the volume into the field of economics. Catherine Chaput and Crystal Broch Colombini explore the persuasive role of mathematics at work in the metaphor of the invisible hand. And G. Mitchell Reyes provides a detailed investigation of the 2008 financial crisis through a case study of the mathematical formula known as the Li Gaussian copula. As Reyes writes: “Unraveling this copula reveals the constitutive rhetorical force of mathematical discourse—its capacity to invent, accelerate, and concentrate economic networks” (83). The story is long and far too complex to be detailed here. But the study rewards the reader with an understanding of just how traditional rhetorical modalities (like analogy and argument) connect to the rhetorical modalities of numeracy (like abstraction and commensurability) to generate something new (114).Likewise, Chaput and Colombini draw from the traditions of rhetoric in exploring the metaphor of the invisible hand. Their concept of particular focus is energeia, the power or force that activates potential. One of the theses of the analysis is that “the metaphor of the invisible hand regulates the energetic force of economic arguments” (62), and they track the metaphor accordingly, from the work of Adam Smith to that of John Maynard Keynes, where mathematics gains a more central place in economic discussion, and on to Milton Friedman's “positivist mathematical economics” (66). Through these and further analyses, the paper successfully supports the argument that capitalism's force (energeia) emerges in part from the historical developments of the mathematization of the invisible hand.The last paper of Part 2, by Andrew C. Jones and Nathan Crick, weaves together the mathematical reasoning of Charles Sanders Peirce and the detective fiction of Edgar Allen Poe, specifically the Dupin trilogy that includes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The discussion identifies similarities between Poe's forensic analyst and Peirce's mathematician, offering a further case of rhetoric in mathematics. Like Burke in the earlier paper, Peirce is a thinker who understands rhetoric as the effective communication of signs—although I would not want to be taken as suggesting similarities between Burke and Peirce beyond this—and this would apply to all signs, including the mathematical. Poe's detective Dupin further illustrates Peirce's method of abduction, and Jones and Crick take us through the steps involved, from hypothesis to confirmation (while also using the wrong turn of the real case behind “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” to show how abductive reasoning can fail).Part 3, on mathematical argument and rhetorical invention, begins with Joseph Little's adoption of Schiappa's taxonomy for his study of the Saturnian account of atomic spectra, the most technical paper in the collection. That said, the historical case study of Hantaro Nagaoka underlying the discussion is quite accessible. The investigation of atomic spectra begins with a puzzle involving different appearances under different conditions. Little addresses responses to this by looking at rhetoric in Nagaok's mathematics, specifically his use of an analogy between the behaviour of material in Saturn's rings and that of atoms in what is known as the Zeeman effect. Little then analyzes the rhetoric of Nagaoka's mathematics, showing that “a mathematical equation can function indexically, symbolically, and qualitatively in a given case without taking on a computational role (164). Finally, he completes the Schiappian analysis with an account of Nagaoka's mathematical language as rhetorical in the debate that ensued between Nagaoka and the mathematical physicist G.A. Schott.Jeanne Fahnestock's paper, “The New Mathematical Arts of Argument: Naturalists Images and Geometric Diagrams,” completes Part 3. The study takes its place among Fahnestock's meticulously wrought accounts of rhetorical thinking in the history of science.3 She plunges the reader immediately into a discussion of the depiction of scallops in Martin Lister's publications of 1695. Illustrated with original drawings from the account, the rhetorical importance of image reproduction combined with geometrical ways of seeing diagrammatically is shown to underlie arguing in sixteenth century natural philosophy to an extent “that is difficult to appreciate from a twenty-first century perspective that separates the mathematical and the verbal” (174). Fahnestock believes these features underlie arguing because, unlike today, grounding all disciplines (including mathematics) was dialectic in the form of a general art of argumentation. The dialectic in question is Philip Melanchthon's Erotemata dialectics, a work which Fahnestock has just translated into English (Fahnestock 2021). This is a dialectic in which mathematics plays a detailed role, and the paper proceeds to provide a history of this work that blends naturally into a deeper history of the argumentative use of diagrams. Her conclusions point to how, through geometrically controlled images. mathematical ways of viewing the natural world issued in today's “mathematically constructed world” (204).The final two essays comprise Part 4, and both deal with the role of mathematics in education. James Wynn's “Accommodating Young Women” explores some of the gender biases in the way mathematics is taught but more specifically provides a lengthy case study of the rhetorical devices used by TV star and math scholar Danica McKellar to turn middle school girls to the study of mathematics through her book Math Doesn't Suck. This involves an interesting application of epideictic rhetoric to a contemporary subject of concern, and the strategies used are both traditional and innovative. Essentially, McKellar strives to modify the image of mathematics, and Wynn's study of her attempts is both fascinating and instructive.The final paper in the collection, Michael Dreher's “Turning Principles of Action into Practice,” studies the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) rhetoric in reforming mathematics education. Two of Schiappa's categories come into play here: rhetoric of mathematics and in mathematics. Built on a historical account of philosophies of mathematics education, and incorporating several pertinent anecdotes, Dreher reveals the successes and failures of the NCTM's persuasive attempts to counter the idea that mathematical ability is inherent in only few and instead promote wide success in students’ mathematical achievement. It is a challenge that continues, and Dreher makes clear the difficulties still to be faced.This is, in sum, an eclectic set of papers gathered around a few common agreements and unified by a deep conviction of the importance of challenging any vestiges of the traditional belief that rhetoric and mathematics occupy different, even competing, spheres. The stand-out paper, testified to by the importance accorded it by many of the other studies in the book, is Schiappa's. One could say that it is worth the price of the book, but that would be unfair to the many other fine pieces of scholarship collected here.The observant reader will also have noted that much of the forgoing discussion refers to rhetoric and mathematics, while the title of the volume speaks of arguing. In fact, the attention to argumentation is pervasive, and this book takes its place among a recent appreciation of the role of mathematics in argumentation,4 while answering the kinds of dismissive critiques we once witnessed from skeptics like Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,5 who attempted to maintain the rhetoric/mathematics gap by suggesting that those who crossed it (at least from one direction) were unknowledgeable interlopers. It was one of Schiappa's opening insights that “If we replace the word “rhetoric” with “argument” . . . we find considerable recent interest in “mathematical argumentation” as a social and pedagogical practice” (43). And, as I have noted, this is repeatedly corroborated in this highly recommended book.

Bilateral mentorships in rhetoric and composition can persist beyond formalized, institutional arrangements in ways that continue to (re)shape lives in the profession. Mediated discourse theory provides a lens through which to describe practices of enduring mentorships in terms of ways they might advance cross-gender and cross-generational understanding.

Drawing on interviews with ten female-identifying graduate students, this article theorizes a norm of recognition and argues that recognition, conceptualized as a masculine-coded good, circulates away from female graduate students toward faculty and from faculty back to male graduate students. Female graduate students instead experience misogyny, understood as a punishment for straying from patriarchal gender roles in which they are required to be givers.

This article interrogates the complexities of immigration encountered by international scholars working in higher education. Drawing on life history and lived experience, the article examines issues of marginalization, inequality, and discrimination. It draws from Black Feminist Care ethics to channel ideas for how to build resilience in the face of unrelenting restrictive policies that shape the daily lives of international scholars in the academy and jeopardizes their ability to succeed.

In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors and students, we used a lesson study methodology in which a team of teacher-researchers collaboratively designed, observed, analyzed, and revised a sequence of lessons. We provide the larger context for our lesson study project, the lesson study structure including preparatory material for students, trauma-informed teaching strategies, and reflections on the lesson. To effect meaningful change and learning, we needed to have difficult conversations with students; this required us to acknowledge the presence of trauma in the classroom and then work to support the students who have experienced trauma. Finally, we offer a reflective critique of our experience as a heuristic for instructors to use as they implement and reflect on trauma-informed pedagogy in their own classes. Content Notice: The content of this article references rape and refers to violence against women in a way that relates to, but does not directly reference, transgender and non-binary individuals. We acknowledge, respect, and honor the many varied ways in which individuals respond to traumatic content. If you would like to speak with someone for support, please consider using the RAINN National Sexual Assault Crisis Hotline by calling their anonymous toll-free hotline (1-800-656-HOPE (4673)) or using the confidential online chat: https://hotline.rainn.org/online