This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping… Continue reading Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-based Research by Libby Catchings

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices… Continue reading Writing for Advocacy: DREAMers, Agency, and Meaningful Community Engaged Writing (Course Profile) by Jeffrey Gross & Alison A. Lukowski

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class… Continue reading The Muted Group Video Project: Amplifying the Voices of Latinx Immigrant Students by Christine Martorana

Translingual scholarship emphasizes the temporal dimensions of language use, and frame language practices as emergent phenomena shaped by repertories of discursive activities sedimented through prior experience. This essay adapts Gee’s concept of lifeworld Discourse in order to theorize (1) how Discourse competencies are cultivated through the sedimentation of discourse practices over time, and (2) how actors occupy thresholds or dwell on borders while they draw on repertoires sedimented through prior experience in response to emergent rhetorical situations. I activate the lifeworld Discourse conceptual framework in an analytical approach that I call a Discourse genealogy in order to trace out the palimpsestic emergence and blending of Discursive competencies throughout labor and community organizer César Chávez’s life. The argument focuses on the archival record of Chávez’s literacy practices in order to understand his emergent lifeworld Discourses from birth in 1927 through the late 1950s, up to the point at which he began to organize the migrant farmworkers under the auspices of the Community Service Organization in Oxnard, California (1957-8). Using textual analysis of Chávez’s writings and oral history records, the following essay shows how one thread of Chávez’s lifeworld Discourse – responding to social injustice – binds together a number of Chávez’s varied Discursive repertoires. My central argument is that when we occupy thresholds that connect Discourses, our repertoires of practice may be blended with new practices to form emergent potentials for responding to rhetorical situations. The thread of repertoires sedimented throughout a lifetime bind together the various social Discourses we encounter and engage with in our public lives.

The bulk of literacy education historical narratives about Black Americans has been gentrified by mainstream Euro-American perspectives. This article considers the contributions of a Black-American-developed form of institutionalized community education to demonstrate the critical race theory voice-of-color thesis in college-level composition-literacies education. Through reviewing the curricular, pedagogical, and instructional practices of pre-college independent Black institutions, the author works to reclaim the unique rhetorical voice of this Afrocentric literacy education form and insert it into American literacy education histories. The article presents two established unique voice of color counter-stories grounded in truthfully representing and advancing Black American cultures to argue that central features of these Afrocentric literacy education programs can afford college composition programs race- and community-conscious writing education.

In the 1990s, “Murphy Brown” mothers—often unwed, older, white, and professional—could embrace their alliance with stigmatized single mothers or mark their difference from them, while simultaneously demonstrating their alignment with the dominant discourse of “family values.” Many opted for the latter, gathering under the label “Single Mothers by Choice” (SMC). Using an intersectional cultural rhetorical methodology, this article identifies the axioms of “family values” and demonstrates how they shaped SMC’s efforts to legitimize themselves through an analysis of Jane Mattes’s 1994 guidebook, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.

In 2014, members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus began contributing citations to a shared Google Document (GDoc) that suggested a relatively significant contribution of scholarship to the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies. Scholars of color have argued that rhetoric and composition scholarship fails to represent diversity in academic publications (Baca; Banks; Jones Royster; Pimentel; Ruíz). This study examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color.

Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers’ knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their interrelationships are often unclear. Furthermore, scholarship has tended to overlook the role of multiple languages in writers’ genre knowledge. In this article, we first trace the use of related terminology and demonstrate the need for theoretical clarity. We then propose a theoretical framework that articulates key layers of genre knowledge and their interrelations, presuming a multilingual writer. Finally, we share examples of how this proposed framework may be used in teaching and researching genre knowledge. Ultimately, we aim to contribute to ongoing theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical explorations and applications of knowing and learning genres.

ABSTRACT Written in late March 2020 in the early days of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, this essay represents a contingent reflection on the American pandemic response, mourning in anticipation of what would soon surely unfold. I argue that the State's long-standing sacrificial economies have in this moment culminated in a suicidal State. The term is Foucault's, appearing in a controversial lecture on biopolitics, Nazism, and “biological racism.” Despite Foucault's problematic treatment of racism, I suggest that some aspects of this discourse might nevertheless be apropos in our context. The U.S. pandemic response is racism's suicidal State legacy writ large: an extension and retooling of historically racist infrastructures deployed (once again, again) in racialized domains (as more recent reports evidence), but in this moment also across biosocial inequities and vulnerabilities marked by differential fungibilities other than race.

This article connects the author’s practice, Fulkerson’s “map” of composition studies, and insights from critical race studies, specifically whiteness studies, to argue that even though many or even most community-based writing courses fit into a critical/cultural studies-type philosophy, such an orientation is limited. The article argues for “community-engaged procedural rhetorical,” in which students would learn… Continue reading Between Civility and Conflict: Toward a Community Engaged Procedural Rhetoric by Hannah Ashley

This article traces the development of a sophomore composition service-learning course, using data gathered from a formal qualitative study as well as subsequent teacher reflection. Course redesign has been guided by the need to balance the initial emphasis on and measurement of academic outcomes with exploration of the ethics of service. The author shares her… Continue reading Ethics and Expectations: Developing a Workable Balance Between Academic Goals and Ethical Behavior by Catherine Gabor

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action.… Continue reading Genre Analysis and the Community Writing Course by Thomas Deans

Meaningful change through service learning can only occur If service learning ladder, build “embedded” relationships with community organizations. The paradox is that the more engaged the relationship, the more intense the issues of race, class and power. Institutional racism tempts white activists to assume they know what Is best for a community. If they give… Continue reading The Art of Knowing Your Place: White Service Learning Students and Urban Community Organizations by Steve Zimmer

In the past fifteen years, American colleges and universities have embraced service-learning with active enthusiasm. Campus Compact, the national service learning organization of university presidents, began in 1985 with three members; today, it has almost 700 member campuses where students annually engage in an estimated 22 million hours of service activities linked to their academic… Continue reading “Welcome to Reflections” by Nora Bacon & Barbara Sherr Roswell

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

Abstract During the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Will Rogers described the party’s deliberation on Saturday as “the day when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced of any day in the world’s history.” The Democrats had been debating over whether to officially condemn the Ku Klux Klan in the party platform. William Jennings Bryan ended his own address offering white supremacist support with an all-too-common appeal for the party to simply “return to Jesus” rather than condemn white supremacy. Among the flurry of religious rhetoric that week, one voice surprised the delegates. Just before Bryan, one son of a Confederate officer and former mayor of the Klan stronghold, Athens, Georgia, spoke. He looked small. His voice cracked. But when he spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK, Madison Square Garden erupted with both hisses and cheers. That day Andrew Cobb Erwin gave us a model of how to resist within a politically charged religious climate.

In recent years, decoloniality has emerged as a topic of critical inquiry across Latinx writing studies. This article examines the politics and stakes of this scholarship and argues that Latinx writing has reached an impasse in its project to theorize alternatives to Western epistemologies of writing. Drawing from deconstruction and subaltern studies, we propose to think Latinx writing at its “absolute limit.”

I weave stories on my relationships with the land, ancestral knowledge, and my experiences in doing research to theorize a relational scholarly practice. I invite readers to contemplate and grapple with me on what land-based knowledges, Indigenous intellect, and relationality can offer rhetoric and composition studies.

This article underscores the importance of examining community-based writing in practice. It traces the evolution of an “International Connections” service-learning project from a well-intentioned add-on to a thoughtful and critical component of a writing course. Distilling best practices from recent service-learning literature, the article concludes with a call for 1) integration of the service-learning project… Continue reading Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning Guiding: Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses by Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy

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The turn to Latin American rhetoric has broadly been galvanized by the need for a politics of difference. Critics have drawn from Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality to mobilize epistemological alternatives to Western forms of knowledge production and to critique the representations of alterity in the Western rhetorical tradition, posing variations of a common question: how to proceed from merely tolerating difference in the Western paradigm of rhetoric to actually theorizing rhetoric from the locus of non-Western (that is, non-logocentric) space? In this essay, we analyze the aporia dredged up by Latinamericanist theories of decoloniality as a prism through which to renew and rethink the terms and conditions of comparativist inquiry. We conclude by setting to work on preparing the non-nostalgic grounds for an alterity yet to arrive under the heading of the X.

AbstractIn his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, President Obama responded to postracial claims in the United States and to criticism that he had not done enough for black Americans by drawing on grace as the vehicle for collective salvation and his own agency on civil rights. Eulogizing Pinckney as a man of faith and grace, Obama affırmed the black church’s dual focus on religious faith and collective civil rights action as exemplary of American civil religion and treated Dylann Roof’s heinous act as both emanating from the sin of slavery and embodying prevenient grace that had led the nation to acceptance of justifying grace and the need for sanctifying action as he discussed the Confederate flag, systemic racism, and gun violence. In encouraging the ongoing work of collective sanctifıcation, Obama employed code-switching, particularly in his delivery, which served to heighten and reinforce his powerful message.

ABSTRACT This essay explores how a physiological notion of affect, one predicated on the transsubstantial circulation of micro-materiality, provides useful connectivity among old and new materialisms. First, it explores nascent theories of energetic matter in Marxism as potential sites for new materialist extensions. Second, it proposes affect as a theoretical shorthand for the circulating flows of matter central to the physiological production, orientation, and materialization of bodily capacities, including the ability to reinvent political economic habituation from the perspective of difference. Third, it illustrates the contributions of a Marxist new materialism through a brief discussion of contemporary race politics.

ABSTRACTThis essay throws genealogical light upon contemporary theoretical practice by charting the relatively short history of rhetorical theory as a consequential sign in Anglophone discourse. It advances a historical sociology of knowledge inflected by feminist and postcolonial studies to trace the invention, institutionalization, and changing meanings of rhetorical theory from the late nineteenth century to the present. In the process, it illuminates three structuring patterns: (1) the valorization of European civilization that accompanied U.S. settler colonialism and its manifestation in universities where rhetorical theory materially grounded itself; (2) the gendered production of knowledge within academic institutions, particularly through the masculinization of the postwar university and its shaping of communities of inquiry invested in rhetorical theory; and (3) the power of relevance as a metonym for intellectual, political, and educational initiatives that, beginning in the late 1960s, enlarged rhetorical theory's community of inquiry and range of meanings.

ABSTRACT This article explores the roots of (African American) rhetorical theory through an examination of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Rhetorical theory in this case is a forcible call for antislavery unity between races that at the same time rejects notions of the body as a racial essence. This essay attempts to make Douglass's rhetorical theory clear so that we can better understand how the key term functions today.

"Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education." Rhetoric Review, 39(1), pp. 118–119

This article examines how three African American girls, ages 10 to 18, used journaling and interviews to better understand science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as part of their literate identities. Drawing on prior work about literate identities, the authors introduce the concept of literate intersectional identities, which describes how participants’ diverse histories, literacies, and identities traverse categories, communities, genres, and modes of meaning within the context of a STEAM workshop. The authors employed open and thematic coding to analyze the girls’ journal entries in an effort to answer a question: In what ways do African American girls’ journal writings and interviews about STEM reflect and influence their literate identities in a digital app coding workshop? Findings reveal how their writings about race, access, and the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM helped them make sense of their self-assurance, self-awareness, and agency as girls of color interested in STEM careers.

Public discussion of “the authoritarian personality” returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s—followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal combination of forces since then.

In this article, we argue that HBCU composition faculty members impact the composition field through our innovative and unorthodox tactics that we label cross-boundary discourse, discursive homeplacing, and safe harboring. Our goal is to show that HBCUs are unique sites of inquiry and poised to be at the forefront of conversations about race and writing because of our institutional contexts and the student populations with whom we work each day.

&#8220;In this Spanish-English film set in the near future, a high-tech border wall seals off the US from México. Mexicanos no longer enter the US to work and instead use virtual labor technologies to perform services from afar, which serves as a techno-futuristic play on the twentieth century bracero program.&#8221;

Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers Latino/a immigration from the 1700s to the mid- 1900s. This paper will trace the early history of Latino/a&hellip; Continue reading Our Southern ‘Roots’ in New Orleans: Early Latino/a Immigration and Its Relevance to a Post-Katrina World by Cristina Kirklighter

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE&#8217;s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE&#8217;s Richard Meade Award for Research&hellip; Continue reading Interview: Victor Villanueva, Washington State University by Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Rachael Shapiro

This collaboratively written essay explores and advocates for the rich potential of community -university educational activist partnerships for praxis-oriented learning that enrich the lives of all by unleashing the collective power of students, teachers, and community members. Offering four perspectives from such a collaboration in Minnesota, a place that has been a magnet for national&hellip; Continue reading A Dream Deferred? Building Activists for Educational Justice, Access, and Equity by Alondra Kiawitl Espejel et. al.

The erosion of Indigenous food systems as part of European and Euroamerican colonization has resulted in a parallel erosion of Indigenous health, lands, and cultural knowledge. In rural southeastern North Carolina, residents of Robeson County are primarily Lumbee Indians who have been impacted by economic, ecological, and health concerns resulting from colonialism’s historical legacy, even&hellip; Continue reading More ‘Native’ To Place’: Nurturing Sustainability Traditions through American Indian Studies Service Learning by Jane Haladay

This essay theorizes a pedagogy of responsibility as an alternative to place-based and critical pedagogies that offers to ground students in deep ethical obligation. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I suggest that place may function as a trace of the Other that reminds the self of her responsibility. By analyzing a case study of a place-based&hellip; Continue reading Sustainability, Place, and Rhetoric: A Case Study of a Levinsian Pedagogy of Responsibility by Sarah Hart Micke

In the moment of transition between summer and fall, the events in Charlottesville called into question the United States’ commitment to equality, equal rights, and racial justice. It is a question that has been asked before, of course, by individuals, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Angela Davis, as well as organizations, such as&hellip; Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Steve Parks &#038; Jessica Pauszek

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

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic&hellip; Continue reading Views of Girls, Views of Change: The Role of Theory in Helping Us Understand Gender Literacy and Gender Equity by Gwen Gorzelsky, Frances J Ranney, &#038; Hillary Anne Ward

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The&hellip; Continue reading Nomadic Thinking and Vagabond Research: Identifying and Exploring Ecological Literacies by Anne-Marie Hall

In Scalawag: A White Southerners Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism, Dr. Edward Peeples traces his personal journey from being compliant with the status quo of racial codes to becoming a fighter for social justice. His journey was never an easy one, but his experiences remind us of two important principles: we must remember&hellip; Continue reading Review: Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism by Candace Epps-Robertson

Dr. Edward H. Peeples’ career as an activist and academic spans some forty years and reads like a how-to on combining scholarship and activism. Just as amazing as his career was the journey to it. Growing up in the south entrenched in Jim Crow, one might assume that Peeples would have continued down the path&hellip; Continue reading Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?’ An Interview with Dr. Edward Peeples by Candace Epps-Robertson

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