In the context of narcotic drug epidemics, racist logics can shape policy deliberation and delimit uptake. While critical public health scholars have situated the U.S. opioid epidemic as demonstrative of such logics, in rhetoric the opioid epidemic has failed to register as an important deliberative context for representational contestation regarding race and racism. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ (1985) steering mediums (steurungsmedium) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory, this essay analyzes the U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and Purdue Pharma executive J. David Haddox’s testimony before Congress to show the extent to which racial hegemony saturates juridical engagements at the federal level. Where wide-scale opioid use is concerned, this analysis demonstrates that disparate policy outcomes are largely a reflection of structural and representational inequality along racial lines. This essay thus invites scholars of health and medical rhetoric to consider how processes of controversy and medicalization function to preserve racial hegemony.

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...

Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...

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.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

Instruction in cartographic or map literacy in technical communication courses can support pedagogies promoting social change. Students must develop an ability to read, understand, interpret, use, and critique maps in technical communication contexts. This article argues that attention to cartographic literacy can build on existing visual literacies to promote critical understanding of how to use and create maps that engage with issues related to social change. A description of a sample assignment is included to introduce cartographic literacy in undergraduate technical communication courses. Student map examples support the conclusion that students benefit from instruction in cartographic literacy and that cartographic literacy can be an important component of technical communication pedagogies that work toward social justice.

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 introduces the theoretical concept of “writing center space-time” and reports on an empirical study which finds that offering a diverse range of tutoring modes increases access to writing center resources. We encourage our fellow writing center practitioners to consider this proposed space-time framework to gain a more inclusive, more equitable, and ultimately more productive perspective on accommodating a diverse student body. Our project, at its core, is about access and equity, and we share details and outline data from our preliminary study in the hopes that other writing centers may be inspired to take up similar inquiries and expand tutoring services and modalities in other regions, locales, and institutional settings.

Writing Center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). This article begins to address the gap by sharing results from our ongoing examination of how to improve the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices at a small midwestern liberal arts university. This article showcases a heuristic we developed that will assist writing center administrators to navigate similar interrogation processes. Drawing from Romeo García (2017) we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. Our heuristic represents the recursive process of this interrogation. For each step in the process, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by presenting three of our key findings from this ongoing process: 1) the Writing Center community needs to more critically question the equity, and potential exploitativeness, of three-credit hour tutor education courses, particularly when these courses are a requirement of employment; 2) if we want to create an inclusive, equitable environment where students with non-majority identities can feel like they too belong, then we need to integrate DEIB into all aspects of our work; 3) our interrogation of the equity and inclusion of recruiting, hiring, and training practices needs to be an ongoing, recursive, learning process. In short, we hope this article will serve as a call to action for other writing center administrators to interrogate and improve the equity of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices, as well as act as a catalyst for much needed research in this area. Keywords : recruiting and hiring practices, recruiting, hiring, training, tutor training, tutor education, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, DEIB, diverse and equitable hiring practices, SWOT analysis Periods of change and transition present challenges, but they also present opportunities to question our commonplace practices. Like many writing centers in this post-COVID world, our writing center is in a period of change and transition. In addition to the obvious transitions of figuring out what our “new normal” looks like, we are also facing two significant administrative changes, both of which began in the 2021-2022 academic year. First, we welcomed a new Writing Center Director (Megan Connor) in August 2021. Second, partway through the Fall 2021 semester, we learned that our university is putting the English Department Master’s program on hiatus and will no longer be accepting new students into the program. Currently, the English Department graduate assistants (GAs) provide 50% of the writing center’s consulting hours. Because our university is no longer admitting students into the English Master’s program, the writing center will lose these GA consulting hours at the beginning of the Spring 2023 semester. To address this imminent and extreme staffing shortage, we knew that we needed to critically examine and rethink our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As we began this work, we quickly realized that our staff is disproportionately White and female. During the 2021-2022 academic year, our Writing Center staff consisted of 14 undergraduate consultants and eight GA consultants. Of our 22 staff members, 77.3% (17) identified as female and 90.9% (20) identified as White. For comparison (see Table 1), in the 2021-2022 academic year, only 47.7% of university students identified as female and 84.7% identified as White. Our center’s period of change and transition led to a kairotic moment to question the equity of our commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants. Our numbers told us that our staff lacked diverse representation. We knew, however, that simply approaching diversity as a numbers problem would not create an inclusive and equitable environment where students with non-majority identities could feel like they belonged (Del Russo et al., 2020; Haltiwanger Morrison & Nanton, 2019). As Romeo García (2017) explains, “Writing Centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (p. 32). In order to combat the equity issues within our recruiting, hiring, and training practices, we need to understand the tapestry of structures that is reproducing and generating systems of privilege. García (2017) argues that this process “begins with listening, both in the sense that Krista Ratcliffe (2005) discusses it—as a code for cross-cultural communication—and as I conceive of listening—as a form of actional and decolonial work” and calls on the writing center community to engage in transformative listening (p. 33). We echo Garcia’s call. Writing center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). In an effort to begin addressing this gap, we share our ongoing journey to critically examine and improve the equity of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As García (2017) suggests, we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. As we listened, we reflected, made action plans, listened some more, adjusted, and improved the action plans. Like García (2017), we call on writing center community members, particularly writing center administrators, to engage in a similar examination and rethinking of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices. To that end, we have developed a heuristic that others can use to help navigate through this process. For each step of the heuristic, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by sharing the lessons we’ve learned so far.

This article explores my experience as an emerging writing center director of color. I reflect on how I navigate the power and its influence on my new position as well as the different ways I had to learn and grapple with discussions of race, language, and writing. Using a composite counterstorytelling approach, I consider how these types of counterstories personalize conversations of race and power, particularly how writing centers, and those who occupy these spaces, are often complicit in upholding standardized English. Keywords : Writing Centers, counterstory, antiracism, language discrimination, social justice

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.

Multilingual learners whose dominant language is not English are often disadvantaged when their writing proficiency is judged against the Eurocentric standard English norm. Such deficiency models and deficit thinking devalue racially minoritized learners’ languages, leading to linguistic racism. A liberatory anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive writing pedagogy was implemented at the Center for Teaching and Learning at a major university in Ontario, Canada. Eleven learners were analyzed in this one-month study. A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the impact of the implemented pedagogy based on several data sources, including learners’ reflective journal entries, transactional posts, and instructor feedback. The study shows the benefits of the writing pedagogy in helping learners improve their writing skills, agency, autonomy, voice, and critical thinking skills, as well as empowering them for emancipation and transformation. The study also reinforces the importance of practitioners’ shift from the provision of prescriptive and remedial feedback to personalized, learner-centered support by regarding learners’ languages and cultures as resources. Furthermore, de-emphasizing grammar while prioritizing critical thinking contributes toward dismantling the dominant monolith norm of standard English. Internationalization, immigration, and massification have increased cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of learners in higher education. Learners are disadvantaged if their dominant languages are not English and if they are culturally unfamiliar with the knowledge system valued in higher education that privileges Eurocentric, White, middle-class habitus (Sinclair, 2018). These learners are oppressed by a system that values standard English; their low proficiency in English positions them at a cognitive, affective, and sociocultural distance that is far from the White racial habitus. The prevalent thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds views their challenges to be the result of endogenous deficits in the learners because of who they are when the learners enter higher education. The burden of supporting these learners has been borne by writing centers. This paper advocates that educators start to recognize that supporting our diverse learner body necessitates a collective awareness of how the pervasiveness of deficit thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds is intertwined with racism. This racism is “so deeply and invisibly enmeshed into thinking, interactions, systems, practices, and institutions, that disparities between Whites and people of colour are assumed part of a natural and inevitable order” (Anya, 2021, p. 1056). Acknowledging the seeming invisibility of the enmeshed racism in higher education, it is important to establish a risk-free, friendly, collaborative, cooperative, and inclusive space for racially minoritized learners to experience equal learning opportunities in higher education. This article advocates increasing writing center’s support with a proactive liberatory pedagogy that enables learners to expand their English linguistic repertoire. This latter support enables learners to develop competence and confidence in communicating ideas in the ways that allow them to be their authentic selves.  Hence, they are in better positions cognitively, affectively, and socioculturally to work on their assignments. This article presents how adding culturally responsive pedagogy as a nuanced overlay on the liberatory learner-driven and instructor-facilitated pedagogy supported learners with extremely low English language proficiency in developing their writing skills during a one-month timeframe.

I interviewed four current writing center tutors who self- identified as antiracist to answer the questions of: How do self-identified antiracist writing tutors at a university writing center define and practice antiracism? What factors limit these practices? After collection, I analyzed the data in three rounds, once inductively, and twice deductively, using a critical whiteness conceptual framework. Tutors suggested education on linguistic justice and code-switching, centering student voice, and disrupting power dynamics as key orientations in their self-identified antiracist practice. However, it was also found that tutors employed a White Educational Discourse throughout the interviews, often avoiding words and letting others off the hook, limiting the effectiveness of these orientations. Further, it was found that tutors often located antiracist practices in areas of the writing center ecosystem that were outside of their control, such as the purpose of the writing center. This study does not seek to criticize writing center tutors, but rather to provide insight into the effectiveness, opportunities, and limitations of antiracist praxis at writing centers. To conclude, I offer questions implicated in this study and directions for further research.

This program profile focuses on the collective work and beginning stages of moving a very large writing program from default orientations of predominantly white institutions (PWI) to practices responsive to Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) opportunities over a five-year period. Throughout this profile, I narrate how faculty of all ranks within the first-year composition program at the University of Central Florida worked together to turn the belief that all students’ language and literacy practices are worth sustaining and expanding into an action-oriented sociocultural literacy model. For other programs interested in or needing to undergo similar redressing, this profile offers a story of change that culminates in outcomes development, and that includes examples of our community’s collective actions to localize curricula towards students’ languages, literacies, and rhetorics. Specific emphasis of each phase of work (from 2017-2022) might be useful as programs embark on large-scale change; or the spirit of each movement might be more useful.

Much of the research in composition about Hispanic-serving institutions focuses on the tripartite of writing program administrators, faculty, and students and the complexities of multilingual learner pedagogies. This article draws on conversational interview methods and data to analyze the servingness of three Floridian HSIs through critical race theory’s interest convergence thesis. The interest convergence thesis advances that institutional efforts toward racial equality will persist only so far as those efforts also preserve the interests of racial dominance in social institutions. Guided by an institutional critique and racial methodological approach, this interest convergence analysis examines the impact of culturally White institutional ideologies on general education writing curriculum choices, professional development, and the ethnic-racial cultural composition of institutional governance. Interviews with WPAs from the three institutions detail how the institutional epistemologies of literacy affect their decisions and opportunities for Latinx-centric programmatic servingness at their HSIs.

Language expresses our values and identities, but in educational spaces, multidialectical and multilingual students’ voices are often silenced in favor of Standard English (Lockett, 2019). As writing tutors and future language arts educators, we have developed a research-based inclusive grammar curriculum and classroom-based resources to expand the conversation surrounding linguistic inclusion. Guided by the principle that all students should be offered the opportunity to learn the conventions of Standard English, we advocate for inclusive teaching of Standard English grammar in K–12 classrooms and writing centers (Godley et al, 2015). Using previous research on multilingual students, linguistic inclusivity, and dialectical diversity, we created a website for K–12 classroom teachers that provides easily accessible, developmentally appropriate resources to normalize the idea that there is no single way to correctly write or speak English. These resources better prepare K–12 students to utilize writing center services, as both writers and tutors, once they reach higher education. Our lesson plans, worksheets, resource guides, and supplemental materials are designed to provide teachers with resources to have a conversation with students about the power and complexity of language and to anticipate the values of writing center work to support every writer to confidently use their own voice.

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of current and former tutors, we added questions that addressed demographics, multilingualism, and worker conditions. We conducted a mixed methods case study and collected data via surveys and focus group interviews with tutor alumni before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2022). Our findings connect with many results of the original PWTARP and other responses about economic vulnerability and the emotional labor of tutoring. Also, our survey produced many useful findings about issues related to being a contingent worker, including economic pressures, emotional labor, and professional development.

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.

Flores’ key contribution to the field is to highlight the constitutive force of this figuration in sustaining racial national projects. She argues that the narratives characterizing Mexican migrants as temporary and cheap labor have constituted Mexicans as deportable, disposable, and racialized as illegal.

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?

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> News media play a critical role in communicating risks and shaping public perceptions of social issues. Covering a multilayered disaster that grew from a local story to a national one, the ways that news media at different levels construct the Flint water crisis have not been previously explored. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Despite the well-established role of journalism as a government watchdog, news media do not neutrally mirror every social event. Instead, news reporting, highly mediated by language, is filled with political interests, values, and attitudes. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How did local/regional and national newspapers construct the Flint water crisis? 2. Are there any similarities and/or differences in local/regional and national news construction of the Flint water crisis? 3. What are the practical implications for media coverage of risks, emergencies, or crises? 4. What are the methodological implications of this study for professional communication research? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study integrates corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to analyze 1858 news reports about the Flint water crisis published between 2014 and 2018. I use keywords as a core analytical technique to compare the local/regional and national news coverage. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> The results show that both local and national news reports overemphasized government activities while downplaying the unofficial voices of Flint residents and community activists. In addition, national newspapers were more likely than local newspapers to use racial cues in describing the Flint community and to associate the crisis with other social problems. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> This study suggests that news media should provide wide coverage of the affected community's efforts in risk/crisis communication rather than reproducing official messages. News representations should be cautious of strengthening stereotypes or forming negative conceptual associations of traditionally disenfranchised communities.

Abstract Antilynching activists in the United States have agitated to establish criminal civil rights violations for lynching for more than a century. Ida B. Wells, a renowned antilynching activist, tapped into and expanded upon existing transnational advocacy networks to mainstream antilynching rhetorics across borders in the late nineteenth century. This essay analyzes Wells's dispatches to the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean during her 1894 transatlantic antilynching tour. I argue that Wells provides an example of how rhetors can mainstream social justice issues through transnational advocacy networks by refuting and recirculating key arguments, which in turn amplifies them to exert pressure on potential change agents. As activists work to stem modern-day violence that persists with frightening similarities to the lynching violence of the 1890s, Wells's strategy of amplification provides further insight into transnational rhetorical movement and efforts to mainstream social justice issues across borders.

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.

Focusing on the rich biographies of five influential figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Paul Stob's Intellectual Populism argues for renewed attention to a distinctive kind of populist rhetoric. In times of widespread corruption and social upheaval that he argues parallel our own, Stob identifies the “Great Agnostic” lecturer Robert Ingersoll, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, philosopher Thomas Davidson, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington, and writer, speaker, and activist Zitkála-Šá as salient examples of a “mode of inquiry” focused on connecting ordinary people around anti-establishment sentiments with intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, appeals (xv). Stob shows how each of these figures used their available means of persuasion to claim a voice among unfriendly and unlikely audiences. This, he argues, could be an approach for contemporary academics as we advocate for higher education in an age when our work is dismissed as, at best, irrelevant due to the Internet and new technologies and, at worst, the destructive and out-of-touch machinations of liberal elitism.Intellectual populism, Stob claims, is a means by which “populism and intellectualism can work together to enhance our knowledge of the world” (xv). While populism is often characterized as anti-intellectual, Stob argues that there are parameters in populist thought, taken up by intellectuals in the past, that have been constructive to democratic processes and engaged diverse audiences, inspiring them to think critically about how together they might change the established order. It is this coming together as a “new intellectual movement” that Stob hopes to enliven with a populist model of education incorporating broad notions of teaching and learning among those currently excluded from, or hostile to, higher education (227). However, it is important to note that it is the “fight,” not the “complete victory,” of the intellectual populist figure that Stob wants to highlight (208). As the concept itself elicits, intellectual populist rhetorical strategies engage a certain degree of irony and impossibility in their undertaking.As a case in point, Robert Ingersoll, the first figure profiled in the book, uses perspective by incongruity to call into question religious authorities and affirm agnostic beliefs. Described as a speaker able to make even the police sent to arrest him for blasphemy laugh and praise him, Ingersoll ultimately affirms religious ideals by turning them on their head. This is what Stob characterizes as the core of intellectual populism, “criticizing the established order to strengthen that which the order is trying to serve” (16). Even as Ingersoll attacks religion, the crowds that he drew found that he “enlivened religious inquiry. He brought religious questions into the marketplace of ideas, which strengthened religion by showing what was real in it” (34). Ingersoll appealed widely to audiences that shared various religious beliefs and would agree with him that their own renewal of these values was worthy of investigation. At the same time, Stob points out that “Ingersoll battled a religious establishment that not only survived the assault of free-thought advocates but also created a fundamentalist power structure that continues to this day,” thus showing how even the most successful rhetorical strategies are constrained by situation (208). However, Stob suggests, this could still be an adept strategy for academics: by affirming critiques that the university is out of touch with “the people,” academics could join critics in order to energize a “new intellectual movement” that would ultimately forward the mission of higher learning by broadening its reach, not overthrowing its aims (227).The next figure analyzed in Intellectual Populism is Mary Baker Eddy, the controversial founder of Christian Science. At its height, Christian Science lectures brought together large audiences of converts, interested listeners, and a wide swath of critics. Eddy's lecturers made the case to the public that Christian Science works because it is a science wherein personal experiences of healing prove that believers do not need medicine or the church. However, to Stob's surprise, Christian Science orators did not provide evidence of healing in their lectures, creating a void to be filled with ordinary people's personal testimonies. Stob asserts that this method of unsound syllogistic reasoning instead sought to empower listeners to reclaim their own agency and expertise, previously the domain of experts in religious and medical fields. Stob characterizes this on one hand as a dangerous rhetorical strategy, “duping lecture-goers into believing that Christian Science could accomplish something it never could accomplish” (73). By framing an individual listener's personal experience as “unimpeachably scientific” it makes personal truth “truer, fuller, more absolute than any deductive proof, any rationalist logic . . . any counter argument,” thus denigrating scientific evidence that would allow one to question or change those beliefs (71). This intellectual populist argument strategy therefore either fails with “listeners with an ear for scientific argumentation” (68) or makes receptive individuals resistant to scientific evidence based in logic and expertise that could “enhance our knowledge of the world” to shape a more democratic society (xv). This critique finds renewed importance in our current era of anti-vax movements that draw upon similar argument structures. However, instead of tossing out Eddy's arguments wholesale, Stob constructively points out that the vast power of religious inquiry continues to serve as touchstone of American public discourse. Instead of dismissing religion and personal experience as antithetical to intellectual thought, Stob suggests we think of these are “potent symbolic resources” to start, instead of stop, public conversations about science and expertise (226).The next figure Stob focuses on is Thomas Davidson, a savant Scottish philosopher who spent most of his life building intellectual communities for refined society. However, in his later years, Davidson created the Breadwinner's College, a “People's University” where he taught philosophy to Jewish factory workers from the Lower Eastside of New York City. Davidson initially undertook a series of public lectures in the neighborhood, where he framed philosophical inquiry as a form of labor that factory workers were apt to pursue. This “fell on deaf ears” and angered the workers, who argued that there was nowhere for them to study in their tenement houses, and thus the idea for the Breadwinner's College was formed (106). Davidson envisioned it as the first in a branch of many spaces where workers could gather and engage in Socratic exchange on curriculum that would give those without educational opportunities a “‘bird's-eye view of the scene and course of human evolution’” (109). Stob states that “Davidson's fundamental contribution to intellectual populism was his reconfiguration of speech and space—his grasp of the way words and ideas relate to the geography in which they emerge and through which they move” (118). However, “the irony was that Davidson wrote [much of this intellectual populist mission] . . . from Glenmore [his retreat center in the Adirondacks] . . . [where] Davidson's intellectual populism came from a position physically removed from the community he worked to empower” (117). This irony, Stob concludes, demonstrates that “Empowering the people needed to happen in the spaces that defined their lives;” Davidson in many ways failed to do this (118).In contrast, Stob's chapter on Booker T. Washington illustrates how he successfully provided educational opportunities for poor African Americans in the rural South. In his career as a public lecturer and educator, Washington argued that work itself was a rhetorical process that “communicated, influenced, and persuaded as effectively as words” (121). Washington used various success stories of Black Americans to show how dignified labor “did the suasory work that words and pages tried to do, and it was far more successful than any oration could be” (144). Stob describes this as ironic considering that Washington delivered this message through the medium of oratory and made a career of such words and arguments. However, Stob spends much of the chapter analyzing Washington's many accomplishments as the first President of the Tuskegee Institute, exemplifying through alumni letters how Washington's legacy was to “elevat[e] . . . labor to an intellectual practice” and help students “use their labor to control their lives” (160). While largely an appreciative read of Washington's legacy, Stob also points to ironies within Washington's approach which schooled students in “the politics of respectability . . . [that] emphasized moral reform and reconfiguration of self” and may have “eschewed the demand for structural change” needed by African Americans (150). Both the Davidson and Washington models for populist education support Stob's argument that spaces of higher learning must adapt to the communities they seek to reach by being more reflexive about modes and spaces of engagement. Furthermore, as Stob argues in the conclusion of the book, both rhetors exemplify the importance of education as a “maker's movement,” where students are the co-creators of ideas and communities. Instead of simply transmitting specialized knowledge, we must rethink how higher education might contribute to “putting people in a position to think and inquire for themselves” (223).The final figure featured in Intellectual Populism is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous American writer, speaker and activist. The least documented of the figures, Stob characterizes the limited archive of Zitkála-Šá’s speeches as strategically ironic, working to secure what influence she could within the constraints of a white man's world. Zitkála-Šá was critiqued in her time for accommodating or even affirming white stereotypes of Indigenous communities. Throughout her career she wore stereotypical costumes, opted not to correct inaccurate assumptions about her identity, and espoused the overwrought metaphor of the “national teepee” as a unifying vision for the pan-Indian movement. However, Stob notes that these strategies helped Zitkála-Šá in gaining legitimacy for the pan-Indian movement and attention from various white and Indigenous American audiences that had previously dismissed her vision for civil rights. Through an appreciative read of her rhetorical strategies, Stob beautifully captures how Zitkála-Šá’s “performances invited other American Indians to identify their grievances with hers to join her in a strong, broad coalition that could secure Native lives in the twentieth century” (166). Distinguishing Zitkála-Šá’s work from a wider constellation of her Indigenous contemporaries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the ways that disenfranchised people's intellectual movements can upend the status quo. In her speeches, Zitkála-Šá repurposed white stereotypes about Indigenous Americans through Americanisms such as “God, freedom, peace, and equality” that she showed were more astutely demonstrated by the first Americans—Indigenous Americans—than by white settlers (188). While just one example of Zitkála-Šá’s rhetorical brilliance, this final chapter distills the numerous ways that intellectual populist rhetoric can encompass “the people” far beyond the narrow confides of “the people” often evoked in populist rhetoric in the United States today.Overall, Stob illuminates five different historic figures who, through intellectual populist rhetorical strategies, made compelling critiques of powerful establishments to divided audiences in their time. While looking to achieve different goals, Stob convincingly argues that it is unfair to measure these rhetors’ contributions only by their unrealized visions to change the establishments they attacked. Stob instead contours these complex characters as sometimes flawed, sometimes successful, rhetorical actors whose work forms a broad lineage of American thinkers who attempted to give “ordinary individuals a sense of agency in the pursuit of knowledge” (229). This, Stob argues, “can make a difference, even if it doesn't change the world” (229). Intellectual Populism concludes with a set of lessons intended for academics to enliven debate around the state of higher learning institutions. At the top of Stob's list of lessons is a call for academics to build broader coalitions with communities in “physical spaces” and “face-to-face assemblages,” urging us not to “stay isolated on the carefully manicured lawns of college campuses” (222). Stob's words, ironically published mere weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, continue to serve as an important reminder to all of us, and our institutions, that our siloed intellectual communities must continue to adapt, diversify, and expand in order to serve the many and not just the few.

In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.

Abstract The rhetoric of any academic discipline can involve epistemic distortions and blind spots, including a tendency to obscure systemic racism. The doctrine of political realism from the discipline of International Relations is an influential example. Realism relies on several rhetorical devices, including a structural distinction between rhetoric and reality, a modality of abstraction, and the trope of anarchy/hierarchy. These provide both a compelling theoretical framework and a discursive program that obscures race and racism. Realist discourse operates further through several dimensions of rhetorical salience that are modulated by changes in context. Foreground, background, ambient, and ontic salience provide multiple registers for inscribing realism. Realism's lack of reflexivity in disciplinary, governmental, and public arenas adds to its power and its defects. Exposing the rhetorical constitution of realism and its architecture of non-knowing raises challenges not only for realism but also for rhetoric. These include avoiding the inscription of realism and racism within rhetorical inquiry and avoiding epistemic hubris in the self-definition of rhetoric as a discipline.

This essay defines “benevolent gaslighting”: a technology of whiteness in which racisms are repurposed as benevolent misunderstandings. In reading disciplinary trends and cultural examples, we show how it (re)centers whiteness and prompts BIPOC to question their histories, memories, and realities by situating racial trauma as “progressive” teaching moments.

In this article, we call for translingual praxis—an antiracist and decolonial pedagogy that interrogates, with students, language ideologies and their political histories. Amplifying the voices of scholars of color, we provide a rationale for and illustrate four strategies for delinking our language work from the legacies of racism and colonization.

This is the print version of the chair’s address delivered at the virtual 2022 CCCC Annual Convention.

This paper seeks to offer a constructive critique of the idea that in order to align US writing instruction with the learning needs of a globalized, linguistically diverse population, writing studies should challenge the notion that the English language needs to play a central role in college composition courses. I point out rhetorical and pedagogical fallacies in a language rights discourse that warns against “ceding rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies” (Flowers 33) by affirming writing studies’ commitment to ensuring access to English while promoting linguistic diversity within writing instruction. I then discuss a translingual writing program I started at a Hispanic Serving Institution that links ESL and Spanish writing courses within a learning community. I discuss how the implementation of this program relied on finding a common ground with “English only” ideology and show how this program disrupted “unilateral monolingualism” (Horner and Trimbur 595), in spite of the fact that it foregrounded the need to facilitate English academic literacy acquisition.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years, yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article, I feature one such teacher, Raniya, who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews, this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments, particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on notion of “vernacular insurrections,” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice, and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based, decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist, and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices, which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field, the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices, we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

This article introduces “superdiversity,” a concept from migration studies, as a framework for TPC practitioners and scholars defining migrant multilingual audiences. In contrast to intercultural understandings of audience, superdiversity better accounts for cultural complexity in diverse environments. The article uses an extended example to demonstrate how superdiversity operates as an intersectional and social justice-oriented praxis. The example of a nonprofit organization’s intake process illustrates how superdiversity helps this organization better define and understand its clients.

In this article, I argue that local disasters are a global concern and that various transnational assemblages emerge during a disaster that support the suffering communities and help in addressing the issues of social justice in post-disaster situations. The transnational assemblages that emerge on social media create innovative practices (via non-western and decolonial ways) of creating communities across the world via crisis communication and distributed work to address social injustices during the disaster.

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.

This article rethinks digital access and community literacy by sharing aspects of intentional engagement informed by social justice frameworks to establish community partnerships that empower communities both local and global with digital literacy. The article explores access, privileges, and positionalities that the author strategically utilizes to support the communities within her current locality and in her hometown Nepal. By showcasing multiple intentional and equitable partnerships informed via social justice frameworks, the article argues that we require a transnational context to redefine digital literacy and our students need to understand these contexts better given the demands of the current workplace.

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.

AbstractWriting assessment and social justice rely largely on success-trajectory narratives, which sideline productive failure as a means of resisting normative futurity-based modes of education and policy. This essay offers an alternative perspective on failure in writing assessment and social justice by illustrating how relying on rhetoric as a hope and means for positive change can undermine aims of social justice and a critical education. By examining the queer (non)possibilities for assessment and acceptance without dependence on constant improvement and success, instructors may find more inclusive ways of thinking about the value of rhetoric's role in a generative acceptance of difference.

This study analyzes the visualization of census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to 1925. I examine how visual strategies were used to construct an American identity by contrasting the “native” population with the “other”—new immigrants and African Americans, which were visualized as undesirable counterparts. By defining the “other,” the Atlases created a pan ethnic identity of the “native white” population, established a racial hierarchy, and hardened the division between old and new immigrants. The study develops a rhetorical framework for understanding how data design is used to marginalize racially and ethnically minority groups.

Most U.S. colleges and universities expect students to improve their writing ability by taking first-year composition (FYC) courses. In such courses, non-native English (L2) writers with diverse language backgrounds study alongside their native English (L1) speaking peers. However, it is not clear how different these populations are in terms of their language development over time, leaving questions unanswered about whether L2 writers develop more or less than L1 writers in an FYC curriculum. To investigate, we compared 75 L1 and L2 students’ written accuracy, fluency, and lexical and syntactic complexity over the semester of an FYC course. Data showed that L2 students had significantly higher rates of language error and less fluent and lexically complex writing compared to L1 writers. Moreover, L2 student writing became less grammatically accurate over 14 weeks despite showing greater fluency and syntactic complexity. These results suggest a need for plurilingual pedagogies in FYC that embrace diversity and inclusion while also providing L2 writers with instruction on socially powerful and dominant linguistic forms.

This short article offers examples of how rhetoricians of health and medicine (RHM) can employ user experience (UX) design principles and practices to enhance student learning in courses that focus on scientific, health, and/or medical communication. More specifically, we propose a participatory health communication pedagogy that can help RHM educators leverage UX principles to meaningfully incorporate students’ experiences into the classroom as both content creators and content users. We argue that by framing students as both creators and users, RHM educators can enact classroom practices and approaches that more fully account for diversity and inclusivity, a process that better accounts for “racism and other forms of injustice [that] permeate health and medicine” (Scott, Melonçon & Molloy, 2020, p.vii). Drawing from two RHM courses as case studies, we demonstrate how a participatory health communication pedagogy can help educators become innovative, UX practitioners who center students’ learning experiences as they design content for health and medical contexts.

This essay explores changes to an upper-division writing course Writing for Health Professionals in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the events that propelled Black Lives Matter into the media spotlight. Although instructors were required to move courses online with little time to prepare, I describe my efforts to incorporate the topics surrounding the pandemic and racial inequality into the course curriculum. The course consists of a medical ethics unit and a professional dossier; I found that both units became richer and more helpful to students by incorporating the context and kairotic moment in readings, class discussions, weekly forum posts, and major assignment options.

Background: This article reports on survey-based research of technical and professional communication (TPC) teachers and administrators, illustrating how these participants implement social justice and intercultural communication pedagogies in service learning (SL). Literature review: We situate this research in relation to existing scholarship about SL in TPC, SL and social justice, and SL as it intersects with intercultural communication. Research question: How do technical and professional communication teachers and administrators across the US infuse their SL pedagogies with social justice and intercultural communication theories in practice? Research methodology: Using purposive sampling, we surveyed 55 TPC teachers and administrators about their experiences with and attitudes toward social justice and intercultural communication in SL. Results/discussion: We identify what courses are reported as sites of SL projects as well as participants’ self-reported perceptions about social justice in SL. In addition, we outline four themes related to the application of social justice and intercultural communication theories to SL: activities, constraints, points of resistance, and goals and outcomes. Conclusion: We conclude with recommendations for TPC administrators and programs, and by briefly discussing implications for TPC practitioners and future directions for research.

This article describes the importance of pedagogies of access for equity in literacy classrooms, especially for first-generation students, who are more likely to bring what sociologists call strategies of deference that have been shaped by differences in class culture. A threshold concepts approach can bring transparency to the values of college-level core literacy skills to help interrogate and address those differences.