While rich scholarship has delved into the lives, accomplishments, and struggles of writing centers, the closing, or “death” of writing centers has been largely underexplored. With a survey and a focus group, this study examines students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a satellite writing center on a regional campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university in the United States. This study revealed: 1) the student participants not only viewed the satellite writing center as an important resource but also a community, 2) they expressed sadness and disappointment toward the writing center closing, maintaining that the writing support should be offered to students, and 3) after the writing center was closed, some of them utilized various alternative writing support, while others did not. By inquiring into the death of a writing center, this study enriches and complicates the writing center grand narrative that McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on findings that revealed students’ writing-related help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, implications are offered to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Keywords : Writing center closing, satellite writing center, writing center storying, writing resourcefulness “It’s been a fun ride: Armstrong State University says farewell to the SWCA Annual Conference” “Writing center closes due to lack of funding” “The death of a ‘writing center’?” “Farewell,” “close,” “death,” … these words are sad, final, and carry a sense of despair. When such words are associated with writing centers, they tell sorrowful stories that dishearten us writing center professionals. As a scholar dedicated to writing center work and research, I have not only heard about such stories but also lived one myself. With my exciting experience of creating a writing center from scratch with my colleagues in China and directing it for three and a half ye ars, I found it all the more difficult to witness the death of a satellite writing center in a United States university during my first doctoral year as a graduate assistant. Having worked at this small satellite writing center as the assistant director for a semester, I still remember how I felt when I first stepped into the cozy, colorful room that we called “writing center” on that small regional campus, which is about 33 miles from the main campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university: I felt joy, excitement, and promise; I was ready to work closely with student writers, create new initiates, and make real changes within my anticipated two years there—the same kind of vitality and aspiration that I had when I created my writing center at a Chinese university four years ago. However, I did not have all that much time to compose my chapter in the story of this writing center—my chapter came to an abrupt end in the m iddle of the academic year. Without much of a warning, the decision to close the satellite writing center was passed down and all of a sudden, I found myself helping my director take down posters and students’ works from the wall, packing books and tutoring records with huge, black plastic bags, and giving stationery away to students. We finished it within a few hours, so quickly that I couldn’t help asking myself: so, this is it? That’s how we ended the life of a writing center after it had served the campus for more than a decade? Had it served its purposes? What about our students? What are they going to do when they need help with their writing? My head was spinning. I didn’t know. A winter break later, I start ed my new assignment working at the university writing center on the main campus, but those questions did not cease to bother me. In a quiet corner of my heart, I kept wondering about my closed satellite writing center and the students who I used to spend time with. I wanted to know, out of personal concern and curiosity, whether the disappearance of the writing center had any impact on the students and how they reacted to the loss of this long-existing campus resource; meanwhile, as a writing center scholar who found little literature on writing center closing, I wonder what knowledge we can gain by delving into the death of this small writing center to enrich our understanding of the lives of writing centers. To me, the life story of my writing center was finished without an ending. To tell its full story and to make meaning that might speak to many other writing centers’ (untold) stories, I conducted an empirical study to probe into my most pressing question: how did the students on the regional campus perceive and react to the closing of the satellite writing center? With a qualitative design that consisted of an online survey and a focus group discussion, I obtained input from the academic students who the satellite writing center had served, striving to draft the final chapter of this writing center’s life through students’ voices. As such, the significance of my study is two-fold: 1) by investigating how students felt about and coped with the closing of a satellite writing center, I examine the impact of the writing center closing through students’ voices, and 2) unlike the more prevalent research that has looked into the vigorous life of writing centers, I seek to tell another side of writing center stories through an iconoclastic inquiry into the death of a writing center, which can enrich and complicate the writing center grand narrative, one that Jackie Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on my findings that revealed students’ help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, I offer implications to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Amid scholarship that documents and theorizes the lives of writing centers, the “deaths” of writing centers are largely underexplored, and research that specifically examines writing center closing is rare. With the bulk of our scholarship focusing on the development and improvement of writing center praxis, we tend to perpetuate the writing center grand narrative, which depicts writing centers as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (McKinney, 2013, p. 3). However, if we honor this representation as if it were the solely true version of writing center story, we risk creating “a sort of collective tunnel vision” (McKinney, 2013, p. 5) that fails to capture the complexity and richness of writing center storying—writing centers do struggle, they get eliminated, and their closing is by no means inconsequential. Writing center closing deserves scholarly attention, because they are not only a phase of writing center life, but also a generative component of writing center storying. Thus, one promising research direction is to delve into how the closing of a writing center impacts the students it used to serve. As such, this study aims to contribute new insights to the writing center community through an investigation of students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a writing center. To do so, I review extant literature on writing closing as follows. Outside of traditional academic publication venues, brief reports of writing center closing have appeared on webpages, such as McDonald’s (2016) online article reporting on students’ and staff’s anger over the New Jersey City University’s plan to shut down their writing center, Spitzer-Hanks’ (2016) blog post about the shutdown of tutoring services at the University of British Columbia Writing Center, and Farley and Nealey’s (2017) report on the closing of the writing center at Savannah State University due to the lack of funding. However, all of these sources only report on the closings without in-depth discussion about their impact. On the other hand, writing center scholarship, especially empirical research, rarely investigates the reasons, processes, and repercussions of writing center closing, except for bits and pieces that scatter over literature. For example, in her study that examines how writing centers are positioned in the political-educational climate in the United States, Salem (2014) mentions in her method section that with a sample of nearly 400 accredited institutions, “a number of institutions included in the original sample ultimately had to be dropped from the analysis. Some had closed or lost accreditation, and others had stopped offering baccalaureate degrees” (p. 21). This statement reveals that some writing centers closed due to the closing of their housing institution, which is only one reason for writing center closing. Similarly, Essid (2018) states that the integration of writing centers to learning commons has appeared to be a means to re-structure academic entities, while Reese (2017) suggests that the merging of universities has led a university writing center to become a satellite institution. H owever, little research appears to delve into the disappearance, closing, and “deaths” of writing centers, which calls for thorough inquiries into the impact and consequences of writing center closing. An exception is Cirillo-McCarthy’s (2012) year-long comparative study of two writing centers through ethnographic and textographic methodologies: The University of Arizona Writing Center in the U.S. and London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center in the U.K. Cirillo-McCarthy (2012) discusses three crises that these two writing centers reacted to, including crisis of access, crisis of literacy, and crisis of funding. In particular, despite their director’s efforts of gaining support from international writing studies and writing center scholars through support letters, London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center was rendered in a reactive instead of proactive place and was finally eliminated due to the lack of funding. In contrast, although it was also faced with a funding cut, the University of Arizona’s Writing Center survived by reacting stra tegically, including finding a new home in a centralized student tutoring space and charging a nominal fee to all students. The struggles of these two writing centers portray a realistic picture of the various and mundane crises that writing centers face as well as the different fates of writing centers resulting from different reactions toward crises. In the case of the present study, the satellite writing center in question had also suffered from different crises prior to its closing: 1) it received little funding from the university (e.g., when activities such as a scavenger hunt was held at the satellite writing center, the director brought home-baked muffins rather than receiving financial support from the university), and 2) the drastic shrinkage of academic student enrolment on the regional campus—from several hundreds to around twenty five—called the necessity of the satellite writing center into questions and further threatened its already peripheral status, which all contributed to its final closing. In short, because the limited literature on writing center closing are either brief reports on closing or studies that approach the issue from the administrator’s perspective rather than the student’s perspective, our knowledge about writing center closing is limited to the reasons for closing and the fight against closing—which tends to end with the closure itself. Ther efore, by in vestigating the impact of writing center closing in a post-closure fashion and through students’ voices, the present study is the first of its kind. With a focus on how the students perceived and reacted to the closing of a satellite writing center, I aim to draw writing center scholars’ attention to and initiate much-needed conservations about writing center closing.

This article draws on data from 12 interviews with peer writing tutor alumni to demonstrate how their writing center training and experiences prepared them to work toward good (i.e., social justice or peace or rhetorical civility) in their post-graduation contexts. Recent scholarship in both writing center studies and writing studies calls for a redoubling of social justice efforts in our field (see Duffy, 2019 and Greenfield, 2020). This article asks how the field will recognize or know success in such efforts. Data from

The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.

This article illustrates how we incorporated discourse-based interviews (DBIs) into a mixed-methods research study informed by the heuristics of institutional ethnography (IE). As the first stage of a longitudinal study designed to understand what, where, and how writing means across our university, our research used DBIs in a writing center to uncover peer tutors’ tacit personal knowledge about writing. In tandem with IE methodology, DBIs enabled us to understand how conceptions of writing shape peer tutors’ written work and tutoring practice in relation and/or resistance to the programmatic goals of the center. The study demonstrates how the use of DBIs within IE projects facilitates dynamic exploration of the co-constitutive and socially constructed nature of tacit writing knowledge and institutionally coordinated work processes. Our research design and methodological considerations generate strategies and approaches for incorporating variations of DBIs into mixed-methods research.

Scholars in writing studies have positioned numerous critiques of the tacit myth of Standard English (*SE) and its use as an unquestioned communicative norm. While these critiques reflect the overlap of the field’s translingualism and anti-racist writing assessment movements, they also reveal an empirical need surrounding the writing instructors who must actually grapple with the *SE myth in their teaching and grading practices. Following Asao Inoue’s identification of the *SE myth as a slick eel that remains an assessment problem, I conducted a qualitative study using concept clarification interviews and discourse-based interviews (DBIs) at a large, diverse, four-year university in the U.S. to empirically confront the *SE myth and make the potentially tacit presence of *SE in instructors’ rubrics and grading practices explicit. Based on the results of these interviews, I advocate for a shift from seeing and critiquing *SE to performing Synergistic English Work (SEW) in the context of grading rubrics and assessment policies, making the absent presence of *SE visible, open to disruption, and more actively combatted.

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about tutors’ online information on writing center websites, scheduling systems, and social media. The study used surveys to investigate students’ responses to tutors’ online information and focus groups to investigate tutors’ rationale for the information they shared. While many researchers have studied how writing centers are presented online, little research considers how tutors are represented. The authors argue that such representation merits attention, as tutor profiles can affect students’ comfort with the writing center staff and their microdecisions about who to see and how to interact with them (Salem, 2016). The authors share advice for making decisions about how tutors are presented online and for using the process of creating meet the staff and similar pages to study and improve their centers.

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

Dr. Travis Webster’s monograph reports on qualitative research conducted into the working lives of 20 LGBTQIA-identifying writing center directors. From those interviews, Webster identifies three features of LGBTQIA writing center administrative labor: the unique capital with which their identities equip them, the activist labor that their identities call them to perform, and tensions between their labor and identities. He calls on writing center professionals and higher education administrators to become accomplices in the struggle against workplace injustices, moving beyond allyship that is all too often based in kind words rather than sustained action. The insights available in this book are valuable to anyone in higher education administration as they work to build more inclusive and welcoming spaces for LGBTQIA-identifying writing center professionals.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> More than 30 years ago, Harmon distinguished developmental research articles (RAs), which propose a solution to a problem, from experimental RAs, but the developmental format has received little attention. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Genre analysis of RAs has been largely restricted to articles following the standard experimental/Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRD) format, thereby excluding many developmental engineering articles. Recently, a textbook proposed Introduction, Process, Testing, Conclusion (IPTC) as a prototypical format for electrical engineering RAs, but this format has not yet been demonstrated from a corpus. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What is the macrostructure of electrical engineering RAs? 2. What are the characteristic features of each division of electrical engineering RAs? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Section headings, wordcount, and notable features were analyzed for 75 RAs from 15 electrical engineering journals and compared with both IPTC and Harmon's developmental structure. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Only one article, a case study, followed IMRD. Sixty-seven developmental RAs followed the IPTC format. These are distinguished by the second division (P), where the new solution is described, written in extended style, comprising several sections with headings specific to the research. A paragraph at the end of the Introduction describing the organization of the paper, the location of the theoretical framework and testing methods, and a ubiquitous Conclusion also differ from IMRD. Seven developmental RAs exhibited a hybrid format with the well-known IMRD section headings superimposed on an IPTC structure. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Most electrical engineering articles are developmental and follow IPTC format. This can inform future genre analysis research and has pedagogical implications for teaching engineering writing.

<roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></roman> Although a number of empirical studies have investigated communication challenges during recent years, we still need to discover the most critical challenges that face communication when agile development is geographically distributed. We also need to discover how successful geographically distributed agile development (GDAD) organizations deal with these challenges. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></roman> Most previous studies reported that the critical challenges facing GDAD communication can be categorized into five themes: differences in cultures, different time zones, different spoken languages, different personal skills, and the efficiency and effectiveness of communication tools used. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></roman> 1. What are the challenges of communication between GDAD teams? 2. How can the impact of GDAD communication challenges be mitigated? <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Methodology:</b></roman> Data were collected by interviewing 12 members of a three-team organization using distributed agile development. These teams are distributed over three countries; the main team located in Australia, the developers’ team located in China, and the testers’ team located in India. A thematic analysis technique was used to identify communication challenges and practices used to mitigate the effect of these challenges. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results:</b></roman> Our findings reveal that the five challenges are still critical to GDAD. Moreover, we report a new critical challenge of communication in GDAD, the insufficient documentation provided by distributed teams and members. In addition, we recommend several practices to mitigate the impact of these challenges. <roman xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusions:</b></roman> Communication among distributed agile development teams still faces several critical challenges, and the solutions to these challenges provided in recent years have not been sufficient. This fact prompts the need for more research on how the impact of these challenges can be lessened.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Smart glasses and other extended reality (XR) solutions provide new ways of utilizing technical documentation with hands-busy tasks in the field. Scaling up the use of XR solutions in industry has been difficult due to the manual authoring of content for each device and task. Therefore, authoring solutions and information design methods need to be developed to scale content automatically to different devices and applications. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Related work includes smart glasses and industrial maintenance work, categorization based on users' skill levels, and standardized guidelines in information design. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How should information content be designed and created to support use in smart glasses and other small-screen devices in addition to existing delivery channels? 2. How can the same information content be utilized to deliver relevant content to users based on their skill levels? 3. Are the users of technical instructions ready to accept smart glasses and XR as a delivery channel? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> We describe a study that focused on designing maintenance instructions for small screens. The information was authored in DITA XML format, and a smart glass application was used in user tests to evaluate the delivery and usability of the information. We used thinking aloud and participant observation as well as questionnaires to collect data. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and discussion:</b> The chosen information design methods successfully compressed technical information, and automatic filtering of content supported different use cases. Participants were enthusiastic about the use of smart glasses, and the instructions helped in performing tasks. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Information designed with the user-centered approach of minimalism works best with instructions on small screens, and filtering information using DITA XML elements is an efficient way to scale information for different user needs.

This study examined student perceptions of an online case study development experience where students wrote their own case studies about workplace communication processes and created accompanying pedagogical materials. Students then shared their cases in small groups and engaged in dialogue. Students from organizational communication classes at four universities completed preevaluations ( n = 77) and postevaluations ( n = 67), providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analyses suggested that students perceived that the experience enhanced their understanding of course materials, aided them in connecting course materials to the real world, and enabled them to reflect on their own and their classmates’ organizational experiences.

This paper reports on an exploratory multiple-case study conducted to examine 6 French as a foreign language (FFL) learners at a university in Costa Rica and their affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagements with teacher written corrective feedback (WCF). We collected data through students’ writings (drafts and revisions), semistructured interviews, and stimulated recall interviews. We used the students’ writings to examine students’ behavioral engagement, and we used the semistructured and stimulated recall interviews to determine how students engaged cognitively and affectively with WCF. Findings revealed that although most participants initially reported mixed feelings and, at times, negative emotions upon the receipt of WCF, they overcame such feelings and became more positively engaged with the teacher’s WCF. All participants were able to detect the teacher’s WCF intention. However, only half of them reported using certain cognitive or metacognitive strategies when processing feedback. Even if their behavioral engagement was relatively high overall, the students’ affective and cognitive engagement varied.

This study explores the attitudes and perceptions about online peer review of 18 Spanish learners enrolled in a third-year college Spanish writing course. Students participated in peer review training, wrote a personal narrative, and completed two online peer review sessions before submitting their final narrative. Using data from questionnaires, interviews, a peer review simulation task, and the first author’s journal, this qualitative study investigates students’ approaches to peer review and the different practices they employ when commenting on their peers’ drafts. Results show that even though students receive the same training, they interpret and enact that training differently. Students position themselves into specific feedback-giving stances: critical, sensitive, interpretive, and supportive. Two case studies show how two students’ particular stances as feedback givers (critical and sensitive, respectively) impact commenting practices and decision-making during the peer-review process. Based on these findings, recommendations for language teachers to enhance students’ awareness of themselves as feedback givers are drawn.

This study explores the viability of making in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. This article reports a pedagogical case study of making as a way to enact design thinking in the TPC classroom. By aligning the values in making and design thinking with TPC learning goals, this study discusses the opportunities in maker-based learning and proposes a set of heuristics for integrating making with TPC pedagogy.

AbstractSelf-publishing is a topic not typically discussed in the literature classroom, yet it can provide an opportunity to highlight voices and works from the margins, think critically about the publishing methods, and promote the study of the book as a cultural artifact. This article provides a case study on using special collections materials to teach undergraduates about self-published American literature. It includes suggestions about how to find and select materials, details about facilitating a discussion and a hands-on activity on the topic, and recommendations for adapting these ideas for other teaching contexts.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

Reviewed by: A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind by Sean Ross Meehan Nathan Crick Sean Ross Meehan, A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781640140233 Ralph Waldo Emerson is not a hero of metaphor but a metonymic poet. This is the central, provocative, and novel insight offered by Sean [End Page 468] Ross Meehan. One might miss this contribution looking only at the title or the outline of the book. A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind seems to promise a broad treatment of Emerson’s late writings, while the tripartite structure of the book describes three purposes: 1) a reconsideration of Emerson’s interest in rhetoric as “a broader, organizing principle of mind,” 2) a reconsideration of his engagement “with the ideas and pedagogy of the classical liberal arts college and curriculum,” and 3) a reconsideration of “Emerson’s influence on other writers and thinkers in the same period of transformation” (5). Meehan’s book delivers on these promises. We find extended treatments of Emerson’s influence on William James, Walt Whitman, and W. E. B. Dubois, as well as a case study in his differences with the reform agenda of Harvard president Charles W. Elliott as he redesigned the University in the model of disciplinary specialization. Each of these chapters correct what Meehan sees as an injustice done to Emerson, who “as a theorist of rhetoric’s older pedagogy of relation, is marginalized in the isolated departments of the university” (66). Through his book, Meehan seeks to enshrine Emerson as one of the founding figures of the American liberal arts tradition in order to make real a vision of the well-rounded student with training in rhetorical deliberation and eloquence. He pursues this goal with passion and thoroughness. It is his treatment of Emerson’s conception of metonymy, though, that I believe makes this book unique and groundbreaking. Yet Meehan does not make this discovery easy on the reader. The book promises a study of the “rhetoric of mind,” but it addresses the meaning of this phrase on one page with these two sentences: “There is a ‘rhetoric of mind’—so Emerson describes what he also called a ‘philosophy of mind’ in his essay ‘Intellect’—that serves as an organizing principle of this writer’s style of fluid thinking . . . This ‘rhetoric of mind’ informs and organizes the poetics that transgresses the conventional definitions of philosophic logic” (22). The actual substance of this “rhetoric of mind” remains elusive, but the following paragraph gives a clue: “Emerson argues that metonymy, the rhetorical figure of association by way of context and contiguity, provides the analogical foundation and purpose for all rhetoric, indeed for all writing and thinking” (22). For Meehan, metonymy “is not just a particular figure of speech or even a figure of thought, but a name for the very figuring of thought” (22). These assertions are bold enough to arouse interest but ambiguous enough to keep one reading. It takes Meehan almost half of the book to return to this subject in earnest. Although interim treatments of James and Whitman and Elliott are historically and philosophically relevant and insightful, their purpose is less to describe this metonymic rhetoric of mind and more to establish relationships of influence and to define ethical and pedagogical principles. By the time we reach Whitman in the third chapter, metonymy reappears in full. For Meehan as for Emerson, metonymy represents more than just a trope; even the phrase a “rhetoric of mind does not really do it justice. Metonymy has almost an existential connotation. For instance, when interpreting a passage in which Emerson discusses the relationship between [End Page 469] nature, the parts of the body, memory, and mind, Meehan writes: “Emerson uses ‘this metonomy’ in the passage to illustrate the way that thought, as an active part of nature, moves through the condensations (nebulae becoming blood) and contingencies of the mind’s relation to matter in the various forms of becoming in which it shares . . . The world is a rock, loam, chyle; it is body, blood, mind, action; it is...

This article presents an observational case study of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Resource Manager working with community members through a contested project. Using the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development, I examine ethos appeals the Resource Manager used to align Corps’s sustainability values with the community’s values. Transcribed interviews with community members reveal this alignment evolved through a coconstructed ethos negotiation process between the Resource Manager and the community. The article concludes with rhetorical and pedagogical insights gained from the case study that apply to conflict resolution in organizational communication.

This article is the first of a two-part thematic analysis of interviews reporting on the professional identity enactment of developmental literacy practitioners; we argue for intentional, explicit inclusion of developmental literacy disciplinary perspectives as essential for further expanding the two-year college English community of practice.

In response to increasing interest in Vygotskian sociocultural theory in second-language learning (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006; Swain, Kinnear, and Steinman, 2015) and the call for understanding language-learning processes in relation to contexts surrounding individuals (e.g., Polio and Williams, 2009; Ferris and Hedgcock, 2014), this study adopts a sociocultural approach – more specifically, an activity theory (Leont’ev, 1981) framework – to explore an undergraduate student’s approach to L2 writing in a preparatory writing course. Using a single case study design (Duff, 2014), I investigated how a student from China learned to write academic papers that met the academic norms in an English as a second language (ESL) writing class in an American university. Specifically, I analyzed how his writing activity aligned with his instructor’s proposed approach to a writing task. Through the analysis of course materials, the participant’s written work, observations, email communications, and interviews, I tracked how his agency (Bhowmik, 2016; Casanave, 2012; Lee, 2008; Saenkhum, 2016) as a writer developed over his first semester in the ESL program. Findings indicate that while the participant did not follow the operations assigned by the instructor, he acted strategically to accomplish selected parts of his writing assignments. His mediated actions were driven by his goals and motives that were understood from within his social and cultural environments, and interacted with each other in a dynamic and constructive manner. Overall, the study underscores the need for flexible approaches to writing instruction and the usefulness of employing activity theory as a framework in studying L2 writing processes.

Western mathematics functions as a technology of violence when it enlists computational algorithms to underwrite racial neoliberalism. Theorizing algorithmic abstraction as a racial neoliberal technique, this article dramatizes the concept’s methodological affordances through a case study of 23andMe, which deploys algorithmic abstraction to affectively secure and sell Whiteness.

There are two boundary concepts utilized in technical and professional communication (TPC) scholarship: boundary work and, to a lesser degree, boundary objects. Boundary work functions to demarcate, incorporate, and expel particular ideas, groups, and practices from a field or profession. Boundary objects enhance the capacity of ideas, practices, and theories to translate across different groups. Together, these concepts are useful to TPC scholars interested in moments of controversy. In this essay, I explore the dialectical relationship between these two concepts and apply the resulting synthesis to a contemporary case study, the use of fecal microbiota transplants. I argue that the human microbiome functions as a boundary object and opens space within medicine’s own boundary work for the inclusion of fecal microbiota transplants. Together, the dialectical concepts of boundary work and boundary object create a new kind of analytic that allows TPC scholars to map boundary transformations, recognize moments for intervention, and create strategies for collaboration.

Deploying a grounded theory approach, this case study examines 9 years of a nonrenewable energy company’s responses to a voluntary environmental disclosure questionnaire to discover how industrial discourse about climate change is used by industry writers. Through using the rhetorical strategies of emotions, affect, and mythic narrative within theory, balancing norm, and dominion frames, the company communicates climate change does not impact their secure economic future due to their proactive approach toward regulatory compliance with technological innovation and attentive internal and external policy oversight.

In environmental communication, audience engagement is an essential prerequisite for achieving persuasive aims. This article responds to recent interest in visual storytelling and emotionalization – purposeful display and elicitation of emotions – as engagement techniques. A case study of the 2020 Global Biodiversity Festival – part online science festival, part fundraising event – provides evidence of how these techniques are employed in environmental communication for biodiversity conservation. Informed by scholarship on affect, emotion, visual rhetoric, and environmental communication, the case study analysis shows how visual representations of nature, mediated experiences of nature, and accompanying narration orient festival audiences toward specific ways of seeing and feeling that foreground emotional commitments and draw audiences into potentially transformative encounters. The visual rhetoric and affective dimensions of the festival’s website, virtual fi eld trips, and multimodal presentations focus attention, create moments of connection, and call audiences to action. The case study analysis also reveals how the festival, planned in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, treats this crisis as a kairotic moment for encouraging awareness, care, and pro-environmental behaviors.

As theorists and critics, we should welcome books that call us to question the ideas and ideals that motivate our scholarship and, more specifically, the way we employ foundational concepts in the study of rhetoric and philosophy. Ralph Cintron's Democracy as Fetish is one such book. Cintron takes on one of the field's most important grounding concepts—democracy—and asks that we think it anew. The goal is not to abandon or abolish democracy but rather to consider its premises and rethink the assumption that we (and everyone else) know what it means.Cintron is an ideal docent for this rethinking, and in his care readers are guided through a consideration of what democracy means and how it might mean otherwise. Cintron asks readers to sit with questions, consider multiple perspectives, and question the stakes of righteousness that the idea of democracy so often elicits. The moment when you feel yourself full of passionate, tenacious conviction of knowing something or being right might be exactly the moment of deception that necessitates consideration of what else, and who your rightness has othered or abandoned. As Cintron explains to readers, the work that this book suggests is to “continue to do what you are doing…. But cultivate that tragic awareness that you are deceiving yourselves. Unravel your own final claims, including the fantasies about the Other that you use to buttress your own claims. Dare to feel a certain emptying out of conviction” (34). As I read this during autumn 2020, with so much self-righteous indignation circulating around about doing things right and being on the right side of things, I couldn't help but feel a pull toward the questioning and “radical egalitarianism between friend and enemy” that Cintron suggests (34). But I am getting ahead of myself in my task of synthesizing and assessing this book; I am offering the what without considering the why. I will end back at this starting place of what Cintron's ideas offer readers, but before I get there I want to lay out what I see as the main reasons that rhetoric scholars and practitioners should take time to read this monograph and dialogue with Cintron. I focus on Cintron's eclectic approach to method and what the monograph argues about democracy as a god concept before concluding with a consideration of how this monograph instructs living and being in this world.As Cintron is known in rhetorical studies for his early contributions to conversations about rhetoric and ethnography in Angel's Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, it should come as no surprise that Democracy as Fetish also spotlights ethnographic insights. This monograph, however, is not bound or beholden to the field. Cintron intermingles field observations from Chicago and Kosovo with theory and moments of “self-parody” (33). Cintron treats all of these elements as equal “texts” that are “species of poetics insofar as all texts are hypotheses about the world attempting to overcome the hypothetical” (33). This rowdy approach to method is what Cintron himself calls a form of poetics. As he suggests, “Poetics is simply a term describing how words miss their marks and slide toward metaphor only to rise up and try again. So, for me at least, the deployment of multiple textual strategies produces a ‘thickened poetics.’ One strategy succeeds and fails, only to be compensated by the next one” (33). This method of putting field observations, theoretical elaborations, and personal reflections together and in conversation is, at times, unruly. It assumes the reader has done a particular kind (and amount) of background reading so that the reader is ready to jump in where Cintron starts. The discussion twists and turns at will. Cintron provides context for why he moves where he moves, and even so readers might find themselves at moments lost or unprepared for the conversation. That, I believe, is part of the point of the poetics-as-methodology framework. It allows the reader to come in and out, to read literally in one paragraph and metaphorically in the next. As Cintron admits, this approach might simultaneously succeed and fail, and if it does, that is also the point. We must do more to allow multiplicities to exist together, even opposites such as success and failure. This method is not one I would recommend my graduate students first starting out to emulate. In fact, I am not sure if most rhetorical scholars I know could pull something like this off. But Cintron does so with humility, grace, and humor, and in his doing, he offers readers a vital and timely opportunity to think otherwise about a concept and idea that has taken on almost naturalized status in our field.It is no small task to rethink liberal democracy, much less so in a sociopolitical moment when there is so much talk about the health of democracies around the world. I read Democracy as Fetish twice in two different, yet connected, democratic contexts. The first was in spring 2018 in Mexico City, Mexico, in a political context considered by many a young and forming democracy. The second was in Madison, Wisconsin, in fall 2020 while the world awaited news of the latest U.S. presidential elections. And though the United States is discussed as a long-established democracy, I witnessed many of the same struggles to territorialize democracy, or put democracy into practice, during that period as I did while I considered Mexico's democratic project. During both reads, I couldn't help but consider what was happening around me, and how the ideal of democracy circulated and was lifted up as the aspirational answer to all the real, messy problems on the ground when democracy was put into practice. In some ways, both places became additional fieldwork sites informing how I made sense of and interacted with Cintron's problematizing. Reflecting back, I think this is one of the major methodological contributions of framing this project as a poetic. This approach is less about telling readers how something is and more about creating space for readers inside the text, inviting readers to contribute their own field observations, theoretical meanderings, reflections, and contrary considerations so that the text is dialogic and polyvocal. Democracy as Fetish gives readers hospitality, positioning them as guests who are invited to create meaning alongside the author. While different from his last methodological contribution to the field, Cintron's current innovation to the practice of rhetorical inquiry should also be seriously engaged and applauded.The purpose of this text is to consider—by way of invitation—what democracy is supposed to mean and do as a rhetoric. Part of the challenge in this task is engaging the “god like” status democracy has achieved as a term. One the one hand, it is “a kind of emotional promise” for many people. On the other hand, democracy is “territorialized,” or put into practice in real-life settings as a political structure that seeks to actualize or manifest that emotional promise. The tension between the promise and the territorialization is what Cintron's work calls us to question—namely that the implementation of the promise on the ground always already forecloses the possibility that the promise can ever be achieved since democracy is fetishized (the emotional promise) in territorialized democratic systems. This fetishization is not something we can necessarily get outside of, but rather is a product of the system of instituting democracy. As Cintron writes, “The fetish and fetishization are productive of who we are, and we cannot remove their threads, for they belong to the fabric of our most precious actions and truths. Without them, we do not know ourselves” (8). Distinguishing the idea and ideals of democracy from its instantiation in practice is the first significant contribution that Cintron's thinking makes to rhetorical studies of democracy. The distinction calls critics and theorists of democracy to take care in explicating what iteration they are employing as they go about their work. It calls us to modify the noun “democracy,” by specifying whether we are talking about the idea of democracy or its territorialized manifestation in time and place. Such a shift would move us out of talk of democracy as something assumed to exist and into a discussion of the institutedness of democracy's presence.I believe this is what Cintron is getting at when he discusses the managerial nature of instituting liberal democracies, which he suggests is true of all sorts of democracies, and “socialisms, communisms, and even fascisms and anarchisms” as well (179). In order to make liberal democracies appear as naturalized fact it takes the “exquisite management” and institution of their “potentiality,” not only once, but as a constant, recurring process (175). The fact of its management makes it hard to see liberal democracies as anything but already evident and there. The difference between the fetishized idea of democracy as a “container containing millions of desires” and its territorialized, always-less-than-perfect instantiation disappears from view in the performative institution of it. As Cintron writes, “If it is true that democracy is a kind of container containing millions of desires, then democracy will remain forever a potentiality generating excessive hopes and excessive frustration. Ultimately, my position is rather blunt: fetishization signals a longing to live inside what we do not have. That is, democracy seems to be split between its deterritorialized versions—which exist as abstract, fetishized ideologies—and its territorialized versions, which are the only ones that can be experienced” (9). Instead of getting caught up in the fetishized promise of democracy as the thing that exists on the ground, we must do a better job of separating the ideals of deterritorialized democracy (all of the hopes and wishes that we put on democracy) from what democracy looks like when it is territorialized on the ground. Making this distinction helps scholars pay attention to the Others and exclusions upon which our democratic homes are premised. For example, to say that democracy is about belonging and equal political participation of those who belong in a bounded nation-state territory raises the question of where the lines of belonging and participation are drawn when this ideal is put into practice (chapter 3). Furthermore, to suggest that political participation should be available to all in a democracy raises the question of whose voices are privileged and prioritized when democracy is put into practice (chapter 4). As Cintron illustrates, no matter what side of the political spectrum one's beliefs fall on, othering and exclusion practices happen to delimit the possibility that all those ideals we put on and into democracy can ever be achieved.Cintron explains that we can see these othering and exclusionary practices of territorialized democracy when we pay attention to what he describes as the ratios that prop up democracy's performative presence. Ratios, or ways of measuring how much of one thing there is in relation to another thing, signal relationality between elements or units. Cintron suggests that “liberal democracy is in ratio or proportional relation to oligarchy” (24). Drawing on Aristotle, he suggests that ceding the power of representation into the hands of elected officials demonstrates the “mixed” nature of democratic political systems. It may be called democracy, but the inability to fully represent ourselves in territorialized versions of liberal democracies necessitates that we cede our representation to others. The very act of electing a representative is oligarchic in that elections are mechanisms of “filtering out who can and cannot be elected to office” (52). Of course, the people represented do not always follow the whims of the oligarchic leaders, but what we can say is that we understand territorialized democracies better when we pay attention to the oligarchy that exists in relation to democratic impulses. And not as a matter of some exceptional error, some failure, but as part and parcel to what democracy looks like on the ground.Toward illustrating the importance of recognizing the ratios inherent in political ideals and structures, Cintron narrows in on the ratio between vertical accumulation and horizontal distribution that is ever present in territorialized democratic structures. As he explains, this ratio summarizes the bind that many in-practice democracies face. He illustrates this overarching ratio in the tension between the citizen and noncitizen (chapter 3) and the fusion of humans with things such that political subjectivity is unitized through property ownership (chapter 4) in democratic societies. In these chapters we learn about the messiness of managing territorialized democracies. Struggles for justice produce attending injustices. Wins in bids on the freedom front necessarily arrive with certain constraints or limits on other fronts. “Inclusivity has never been inclusive; it has always also been exclusive” (100). There is no master route out of the mess; no ultimate, ethical position (or political structure for that matter) that will get us out of the bind.This reminder, I believe, is a major contribution of Democracy as Fetish. It can guide contemporary thinking about how democracies territorialize. Rather than turning toward polarization and opposition, or landing on the side of what democracy is and should do, this book asks us to consider the ideals that we are fetishizing, to what and to whom those fetishizations are related, and what would happen to those others were our ideals to actualize. The book calls readers to recognize that “politics cannot bring salvation into being but instead territorializes it into something less” and hence “the tragedy only deepens” (184). In recognizing the “comic absurdity” of all of our trying to get it right, Cintron invites readers to question what it is we think we know about right and better political living in this world. And once we have identified those fetishized ideals, he asks us to think again. As he suggests to readers at the outset, the point is not to stop doing what we are doing in order to bring about our ideas of a more just world; if this book accomplishes its goal, we readers will feel called to sit longer and slower in the uncomfortable space between our visions and those of others. We will consider what and whom our fetishized ideals make other. Once we can see this othering, we will hopefully meet these others and their ideas with more generous, compassionate consideration. This is the work of recognizing democracy's fetish.

Although international/English as an Additional Language (EAL) doctoral students bring unique academic, professional, cultural, and linguistic strengths to the university setting, for many students, requirements to produce scholarly writing in English is a source of stress. This case study examined how a writing feedback group supported the language socialization of four international/EAL doctoral students into scholarly writing through a qualitative research design framed in participatory action research. Three primary themes emerged from the data: (a) the writing feedback group became a social, collegial, and supportive space contributing to international/EAL doctoral students’ evolving development and persistence as doctoral students and scholarly writers; (b) participation in ongoing feedback loops as both an author and a reader provided students opportunities to advance in their writing skills and mature in their persistence; and (c) feedback loops facilitated appreciation for the scholarly writing process. Findings highlight the need for institutes of higher education to diversify international/EAL students’ doctoral experiences.

Background: Communication is critical to engineering work, and despite its emphasis within engineering education, it is still noted as a gap in new engineers' preparedness for work. Literature review: Prior research points to communication gaps among new engineers. Few studies have extensively examined transitions between academic and professional engineering contexts. Work remains for understanding how new engineers transfer communication skills. Research questions: 1. In what ways do new engineers transfer communication practices from school to work? 2. What challenges do new engineers experience in moving from communication as practiced at school to communication as practiced at work? Research methodology: This study presents a thematic analysis of data from weekly reflections and regular semistructured interviews conducted during new engineers' first year of work. Results and conclusions: Despite relying heavily on academic experiences involving both documenting and presenting technical work, new engineers report experiencing communication-related challenges. While further attention to communication activities can be given within engineering curricula, the complexity and situated nature of communication in the workplace cannot be fully replicated in the classroom. As new engineers move between school and work, they experience challenges adapting to a new environment including communication activities embedded within unique sociocultural contexts. While the classroom cannot fully replicate these professional settings and all of their nuances, students can be made more fully aware of the embedded nature of communication activities. Moreover, engineering educators can simulate aspects of the workplace in capstone courses, and companies can provide guidance to help mentor new engineers through the inevitable context gaps.

Background: Communication is fundamental to the success of engineered systems, enabling interactions between the system's stakeholders. Systems engineering, an integrative discipline on which the contributions of many disciplines are evaluated against each other, may particularly benefit from research in communication methods. Specifically, storytelling may be beneficial to engineers because it enables sense-making. Research into storytelling is conducted to identify storytelling metrics that could be useful in engineering communication, specifically engineering case studies. Literature review: Although storytelling has been identified in past research as possibly useful to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and software requirement writing, a rigorous study of the use of storytelling elements in systems engineering communication has not been performed. Research question: How are storytelling elements currently being applied in engineering case studies? Research methodology: Twelve interdisciplinary metrics from storytelling, content analysis, and engineering are identified from the literature and used to characterize a collection of 48 NASA case studies. The values of the metrics for each case study are determined and analyzed using statistical and content analyses. Results and discussion: Analysis of the 12 metrics indicates that the case study design region with a historical backstory structure, climactic plot structure, and early points of attack is most frequently used by designers. Conclusions: The analysis indicates that certain storytelling elements applied in engineering case studies are used more frequently. Further work is needed to leverage the metrics as design variables in engineering case study writing.

Because few studies of disciplinary business writing have examined whether language features play a role in instructor assessment of student writing, this study explored the relationship between student language use and instructor essay scores. Undergraduate business students wrote a case study critique as part of their final exam, and their critiques were evaluated by their instructors for theory integration and essay structure. Student language use was analyzed in terms of error rate, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and phrasal complexity. Whereas lexical sophistication positively predicted instructor scores, error rate was a negative predictor of their assessment of business student writing.

This quilt documents sexual violence migrant women experience and demonstrates Quilting as Method, a feminist, qualitative research method. The author argues that tactile approaches to research can deepen understandings of shallowly understood experiences.

Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

The discourse of literary analysis is dynamic and ideological, shifting as writers navigate conventions and practices to meet their rhetorical purposes in particular contexts. While scholars have engaged ideological analyses of students learning to write literary analysis essays in university contexts, few studies have documented student writers’ experiences of disciplinary enculturation in secondary English language arts classrooms. In this case study, we address this absence by using the concept of stance to examine how the identity of one student—Katarina—informed her interactions with the discourse of literary analysis as it was understood and instantiated by her teacher. In our analysis of essay drafts, field notes, artifacts, and interview transcripts, we found that the convergence of Katarina’s identity as a creative and emotional person and writer with the possibilities for selfhood afforded to her in this context contributed to her stance toward the discourse. We examine points of tension across two of Katarina’s essays that illuminate her ideological struggles as she navigated the discourse of her classroom. Our findings point to the utility of stance as a conceptual tool for researchers and educators to take a critical perspective on students’ writing processes in the context of the ideologically laden, authoritative demands of secondary classrooms.

Student agency is an important construct for all students, especially those marginalized because of their linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency, we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection, agentive resistance of imposed identities, and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement, the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination, we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.

This study’s findings suggest that question-based pedagogy has the potential to address a gap in the research on feedback and response while also transforming the labor of feedback, benefiting student writers, and mitigating common feedback concerns for both students and instructors.

This article introduces “rhetorical body work” as a framework for understanding professional embodiment in health provider education and technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. Using the case study of clinical nursing simulations and drawing on sociological theory, I provide a detailed analysis of three components of rhetorical body work as they manifest in three simulation scenarios: physical, emotional, and discursive. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the embodied teaching of TPC.

As the need for more attention to leadership in the STEM professions has become apparent, it has also become clear that much remains unknown about this subject. To explore how communication scholars might contribute to these scholarly conversations, the interview results presented in this article reveal some of the ways in which effective communication might enable STEM professionals to achieve leadership orientations identified in previous research.

This article examines how nineteenth-century participants in technical and professional communication (TPC) used rhetorical techniques of ridicule to critique audiences’ assumptions and advocate for expanded educational opportunities. Encouraging laughter ostensibly about college mathematics, Vassar students drew on their knowledge of rhetoric and higher education to disrupt audience expectations regarding the gendered identities of mathematician and college student. Using a case study, this article broadly urges the development of the role of humor as a technique in TPC.

Institutional ethnography, a research methodology originally developed in sociology by Dorothy Smith, has entered writing studies with Michelle LaFrance’s Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Pra...

Exploring literacy practices of home cooks, this article analyzes how cookbooks are remixed by users (with writings, clippings and other ephemera added to the text throughout its use).The practice of remixing the text with further editing by its user/audience illustrates the multilayered literacies at work in establishing authorship within the domestic space.The article builds its argument around one remixed cookbook as a case study, describing the remix-literate practices of the user, as the woman who used this cookbook remixed the text and genre to fit her needs and interests.This literacy practice is argued as a remix, which results in a transformation of the text itself and of the authority of the user.Both the original authorship (the act of compiling recipes from the church community) and the remixed authorship (the added ephemera and handwritten editing done by the user of this particular copy) are analyzed in tandem.

This case study demonstrates how a community-based literacy program, HELP, took up Black literate traditions, endarkened transnational feminism, and anticolonial practices to construct emancipatory literacy experiences for Haitian and Haitian American middle schoolers in Miami, Florida. Overall, the institutional practices of HELP worked to destigmatize the discourses of Haiti, center Black Haitian women's stories, and develop spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, this article discusses the "COVID-19 scramble" and its ability to detract from building socially just futures for Black transnational students. Lastly, the article ends with questions for consideration when confronting the cyclical violence of white supremacy in literacy programs.

Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in nature. Using our own institution and our work with local Indigenous community members as a case study, we argue that students and faculty can employ community-engaged, public-facing, digital composing projects to effectively challenge entrenched institutional interests that may elide or even misrepresent difficult histories in public memory works. Such projects are a nimble and accessible means of creating counter-narratives to intervene in public memory discourses. Additionally, by engaging in public discourses, such work helps promote meaningful student rhetorical learning in courses across disciplines.

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education.As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents.I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education.Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

Beyond growing and selling food, women farmers perform literacy work to establish and maintain legitimacy. As part of a larger interview-based dataset, this article analyzes the literacy practices that one woman farmer, Lauren, undertakes in relation to her legitimacy as a farmer. Informed by literacy studies research and feminist rhetoric scholarship, as well as interdisciplinary studies on women in agriculture, the analysis here illustrates how Lauren performs specific literacy practices. Audiences' gendered expectations necessitate such practices, which Lauren performs in order to be understood as a farmer in a masculine, patriarchal landscape shaped by her family, customers, and broader farming community. These literacy practices include crafting an image visually, interacting intentionally through verbal conversations, adapting to audience assumptions, and taking on community leadership roles.

Abstract Graduate students must learn to read as professionals who move their reading work into spoken and written discourse. This study borrows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's description of transcontextualizing moves to examine how graduate students use social annotation to develop as readers. Specifically, the study examines graduate reading practices through think-aloud protocols and archived annotations of three readers enrolled in a doctoral literacy seminar. Findings suggest that graduate readers may benefit from opportunities to reflect on how the technologies of annotation contribute to the transcontextualization of their reading across time and space.

This study details a method for mHealth app development and user experience design (UX) evaluation, which generates a comprehensive list of stakeholder-users, acknowledges UX barriers, advocates multiple methods, and argues that developers should address the UX needs of each stakeholder-user in a complex health-care system. A case study of a research project on an mHealth app for women who are considering prevention of or treatment for osteoporosis assists to elaborate and define the method. To find any measure of success, a fully functional app for older users should be integrated into the entire health-care system.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

Taking a cognitive lexical semantics perspective, the article introduces the concept of conceptual silencing as a rhetorical tool. Understood as a process of conceptual dissolution of meaning to offer a more coarse-grained sense of an expression, conceptual silencing is demonstrated to have a potential rhetorical value in that it allows for more opaque reproduction of ideology. From a cognitive linguistic standpoint, the process of conceptual silencing hinges upon a polysemous nature of a lexical item and boils down to triggering a given sense of a given lexical item in a given context. To illustrate the workings of conceptual silencing, the article reports on a case study of the lexical item Europe in the Guardian press discourse. It is demonstrated that the ultimate effect of conceptual silencing is silencing the ‘European Union’ senses under the guise of the lexical item Europe.