ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

The data article is a digital genre that has emerged in response to new exigencies, namely, to make data more transparent and research processes more trustable and reproducible. Following White’s framework of intersubjective stance, this article draws upon statistical tools and collocational and discourse analyses to examine the linguistic resources deployed by authors to respond to both exigencies. The results show a high presence of dialogically contractive resources (above all, passive constructions and, only in one data article section, inanimate subjects) by which authors do not fully engage with dialogic alternatives (heteroglossic disengagement). Dialogically expansive resources (anticipatory it-subjects and we-pronouns) are extremely rare, corroborating that the authors’ stance is neither monoglossic (undialogized) nor heteroglossically engaged. Further, the discourse functions and ensuing pragmatic effects of the prevailing intersubjective stance resources, significantly different between and among the data article sections, including their associated abstracts, reveal the construal of very distinct dialogic spaces for writer-reader interaction within this article type. Such intra-generic variation may be explained by the social (and rhetorical) action that the genre fulfills, namely, to describe and highlight the value of the research data.

Editors' Introduction to 5.4.

This article offers readers 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 86th annual meeting of the Association for Business Communication held online. Assignment topics presented here include personal and professional development as well as oral communication and presentation skills. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, internet links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

This article considers how scientists and other researchers frame and integrate online patient registry data into their work. In the case of rare chronic conditions, online patient registry data extend the geographic boundaries that limit research involvement and make efficient use of limited federal funding for research. Through a rhetorical analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles, which I evaluate as artifacts, I show how a selection of them seek to recognize patients’ labor through traditional acknowledgements and provide tangible benefits to patient communities. At the same time, the proliferation of online patient registries and lack of publications suggests that patients’ labor is often overlooked and disregarded. This work reveals how online patient data registries change our understanding and approach to researching chronicity. I conclude by offering ethical considerations for rhetoricians who choose to use and publish data from these registries.

Special Issue Editors' Introduction, Rhetoric of Chronicity

Modern thinkers long have been troubled by everyday talk. For example, one nineteenth-century Tory critic observes, “General small-talk” is any exchange “in mixed society, where men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, are all mingled together.” However available the occasion or obvious the topics, chatting is easy for the talented but awkward for the ungifted. On the other hand, “special, or professional small talk” is an exchange of words between persons of “the same mode of life, as between two apothecaries, two dissenters, two lawyers, two beggars, two reviewers, two butlers, two statements, two thieves, &c.&c.&c.; in short all conversations which are tinctured with the art, craft, mystery, occupation, or habits of the interlocutors” (Campbell et al. 1823). For those who can mingle, chat blossoms. For others, social occasions are always awkward, even dreaded. The traditional, elevated, polite arts of conversation were passing in the entrepreneurial, vernacular, and expert exchanges of urban living in the industrial, nationalizing nineteenth century. Newspapers headlined events, published speeches, and churned the talk of the town. Samuel McCormick’s excellent work beckons us to consider such things anew and attend: “The range of modernity’s chattering mind” (298).The Chattering Mind visits distinctions made between wasteful chatter and three sophisticated excurses. With care, he recounts “Kierkegaard’s existentialist critique of chatter, Heidegger’s phenomenological account of idle talk, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic treatment of empty speech” (297–98). These careful interpretations percolate the book’s informed call to reconsider the standing of subjectivities in an “algorithmic era, where small talk now doubles as a resource for bit data, and big data as the lynchpin of our digital selves” (295). Thus, McCormick constructs “a study of how the modern world became anxious” because “many of the cultural anxieties that piqued their interest continue to inform individual and collective life in the digital age” (299). Chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are concepts embedded, respectively, in Kierkegaard’s subjective objecting, Heidegger’s ontological rhetoric, and Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourses of analysis.“Every day talk” is set within the history leading from nineteenth-century modernity to twentieth-century mass society. The “everyday” initially appears “in person and in print, among ordinary citizens and educated elites, with varying degrees of deliberateness and unawareness” (2–3). The industrial revolution paralleled development of the “ordinary, habitual, and frequently recursive kind of communicating that occurs in private and public setting alike” (4). Unsettled by varieties of uninformed talk of their day, McCormick’s philosophers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan, are nervous about the circulations of the masses and so distressed about the “gossip, babble, mumbling, and nonsense” that appear “especially pervasive” (4). These writers, McCormick observes, found a “motivational ingredient that has since become endemic to life in the digital age” (5). Yet, in the end “chatter, idle talk, and empty speech were neither means-turned-ends like phatic communion nor means-to-ends like political talk but, instead means without end like nothing they had seen before” (5). Ongoing, talk for talk’s sake manifested the worthy value of keeping flows of subjectivity streaming.The Chattering Mind builds a position in three parts with the conclusion following on. Each reads a philosopher in the contexts of the production of his discourse. Philosophical arguments are attuned to the reader’s understanding of “a conceptual history” that works with philological inquiry, the exposition of analytical positions, and the questioning of alternative views of public and crowd. McCormick unspools the dramas expressed by each philosopher who was irritated yet inspired by the contretemps-with a barber, rivals, officials, and town folk.Part I on Kierkegaard presents a grating event in which the Either/Or thinker observed, critiqued, and rebutted snak (“chatter”). Kierkegaard’s subjective-turn was initially occasioned by a dispute in the Copenhagen Post, where the naming of his own article as “amusement” unsettled him enough to differentiate his considered claims from “noise, wind, babbling” and the like. McCormick moves adroitly to analyze a source mentioned in Kierkegaard’s repost: The Talkative Barber. The chatterbox yaks and clips; so, repetition, intimacy, and banality fuse. The comedy discloses absent subjectivity through its and-another-thing, partner-less conversing. Ludvig Holberg’s one-act comedy was written in the early 1720s about excessive, thoughtless running talk that turns against the speaker himself. Like the Barber’s wagging tongue and moving jaw, chatting goes on without (a means to an) end.Part II unites Heidegger’s early lectures on rhetoric to his later publications and position in Being and Time. Aletheia and pseudos are illustrated in a model where deception, dissimulation, and distraction are equated with Sophists (Gorgias) and social figures of the Braggart, Stooge, and Babbler. Truth or aletheia reaches into pure perception, disclosive knowledge, the thinking through of the Theorist, Philosopher, and Dialectician. Speech and counterspeech is the domain of the orator, a higher form of bios politikos.Part III initiates an intricate, detailed response to Lacan’s reading of “the dream of Irma’s injection,” an initial episode that constituted a launch platform for Freud’s groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. McCormick carefully explicates Lacan’s criticism of Freud and the latter’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. McCormick points to facts and associations unpursued by Lacan and advances the observation that “the resistive, egocentric practice of empty speech is, in fact, an opportunity structure for its opposite, a transformative mode of discourse he fittingly calls ‘full speech’ (parole pleine)” (8).The collapse of distinctions between (elite reading) publics and (peopled) crowds comprises a central decentering argument. Chattering complicates. Lacan works through Freud’s interpretations of Irma’s dream together with his own search for colleague confirmations of his analysis of her lingering illness. Otto’s dirty syringe appears, too. Lacan shows these episodes to be a split-collapse of Freud’s unified (narcissist) ego. Likewise, McCormick takes us to Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5:1–30) where a moving hand burns writing onto the wall. With no decipherable meaning to the king or guests, the writing becomes interpreted by Daniel the prophet, who is mocked and ridiculed; yet, the message comes to completion overnight, with finality. Divine irony appears at hand. Thus, the composing ego is decomposed either at a health episode or at a banquet. In each case existence is at once “numbered, weighed and divided” (231). The costs of the ever-coding, perplexing self are expensive. “Freud’s acephalic, unconscious self interrupts the rambling dialogue of his peers to deliver a cryptic text addressed to us” (237). Yet in his turn to colleague confirmation, he joins the crowd (two colleagues combined with “nemo” as polycephalic being). Thus begins the pivot toward individual as crowd and public. Lacan’s master interpretative formulation of “being towards death” is not received as unalloyed wisdom by McCormick. “Like Daniel—conveyor of godly visions, interpreter of kingly dreams, master of all conjurers, diviners, astrologers and wise men—Lacan presents himself as the exclusive interpreter of this cryptic text” (237). Indeed, Lacan’s paraphrastic play wakes us from the sleeping to daylight’s assortments of te deums.Together sections 1 through 3 provide a powerful conceptualization of thinking and talking that recalls how the grounds are set for the contemporary “individual” of self and other. Everyday talk is turned from a marginal concept to a central puzzle. “As [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan] saw it, ordinary language use was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (8). Everyday talk “poses the challenge of attunement itself” (9).The “First and Final Words” (section 3) moves the discussion of chatter beyond Lacan and into challenges of communication to actors in what has been named network society. Le Bon, Tarde, and LaTour are assembled, and McCormick objects to twentieth-century thinkers’ distinctions between the crowd and the public, for each fuses (through talk) with the other, and it is in conversation (however apparently unproductive) that the important work of communication and subjectivity reprise. Thus, he observes that “the network revolution of late-modernity, which has increasingly transformed small talk into big data” is “uniquely poised to embrace, advance, and even radicalize” techniques of communicative practices, understood as “techniques of self-cultivation” (11, 293). Networked individuals do revolutionize, even though waves of message-generating techniques promote, if not induce and trigger, messages that troll, swat, sh*tpost, frape, out, grief, and catfish classmates, friends, and strangers (Leader in Me 2019). Well-intentioned internet off-ramps are available to those who have mastered caveat emptor. McCormick’s recollection of modern thinkers, their contexts, concerns, and analytical argument show how reflective appreciation and criticism of everyday talk uncovers “individuating potential” for network society. He invests hope in youth resistance, even as young people show disturbing rates of anxiety and loneliness. Particularly with COVID-19, renewing virtual ties has become necessary to, rather than a supplement for, the accomplishment of the everyday.The Chattering Mind animates a “conceptual history” of human science that brings forth a “usable” and contingent present. In the conclusion, McCormick’s “mind” artfully nudges communication onto more complex, circumspect, and ambivalent nests of inquiry. To communicate is to share, he shows, but it is also to contaminate (285). “We see a transhistorical assemblage of communicative practices and cross-hatched identities that are at once individual and collective, rational and irrational, normative and pathological—and thus just as likely to thrive in reading publics comprised of educated elites as they are to flourish in revolutionary crowds made up of lay citizens. Such is the range of modernity’s chattering mind,” he writes (298).To be sure, the Anglo-American communication field is no stranger to the everyday. But, across the twentieth century, it preferred pragmatic theories, robust engineering, and means-ends accounting. Group discussion and vernacular address, interpersonal and organizational success furnish objects of inquiry for democratized, industrial, electronics society. The goal of increasing skills for success furnishes a mission for communication studies. Critical rhetorical theories, too, contribute by exposing inefficient prejudices and hardened traditions. Communication in this vein is a resource to be mined incessantly by centers confederating social sciences and humanities methods. Alternatively, the modern human sciences emphasize interdisciplinary work among many fields such as cognition, philosophy, history, and anthropology as well as biology, biochemistry, and folklore. Mass communication and mass society furnished objects of concern for European researchers brokering individual, national, and mass relations. McCormick’s idea of a “a new form of networked individualism” (294) asks that the field reimagine communication in forms wider than expressions with phatic meaning or strategic vectors of political power.In beautifully written and deeply thoughtful reconstructions, McCormick orchestrates the philosophy of communication into resonances with the conceptual play of the human sciences. He speaks to hearing with attention and “seeing the world around us—a way of seeing well-attuned to what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan all understood as the challenge of attunement itself” (9). And the resonance is important. As these thinkers “were all careful to insist, everyday talk is also the condition of possibility for alternate, more resolved ways of speaking, thinking, and being with others” (8). The modes of resistance and acts of transformation that McCormick discovers are powerful. But, coded “snake oil” and the spread of soothing “technobabble” conceal genuinely disturbing algorithmic carving, rendering and distribution of “fully traceable” communications. The networked “individual” seeks to “have” (a profile) rather than to “be” (a self), McCormick suggests (296). Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent releases of Meta (a.k.a Facebook) internal memos shows that communication scientists who work for a Black Box platform are entangled by “Flat-Earth” modeling that energizes a metrics-driven, message-commodity information society (Allyn 2021). Trace and transparency fail to link. Haugen points out that dissimilar entities are linked by profit-maximizing processes at the micro (anorexia promotion), meso (antidemocracy controls removed), and macro (genocide in Myanmar and Ethiopia) levels. The twenty-first-century “chattering mind” has its work cut out, AI notwithstanding. Sam McCormick’s inquiry on communication and its resonance with the human sciences offers an auspicious launch for inquiries into the entanglements of communication, subjectivity, and the Möbius geometries of data-fueled chat forms. We need to keep in mind that “everyday talk was the proving ground, not the killing field, of genuine subjectivity” (292–293).

Given the influx in people of African descent immigrating to the United States from diverse national, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, the demographics of the US Black community has shifted significantly over the last several decades. As a result of these changes, it is imperative that approaches to rhetorical studies, especially African-centered cultural rhetorics, remain inclusive and representative of diverse Black experiences in the United States and abroad. Toward this end, the authors propose a new disciplinary subfield called Global Black Rhetorics (GBR). GBR emphasizes engaging similarities and differences across Black experiences, positions of power, and privilege, which includes acknowledging, studying, and prioritizing the histories, languages, rhetorical traditions, and practices of continental Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Europeans, and other people of African descent across the African Diaspora. The authors introduce a four-themed framework for GBR that includes: assessing methods of education about global Black experiences, studying and teaching Black language diversity, teaching and citing contemporary rhetors and texts from Africa and African Diasporic contexts, and prioritizing healing as a communal goal for all Black people. The essay concludes with an introduction to the contributors of this special issue whose research advances the authors’ call for a globalized approach to Black Rhetorics.

Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, affect theory, and critical literacy, this article explores comics made by three eighth-grade students in response to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. Students’ comics were developed through participatory research alongside their classroom teacher, a research team, and teacher candidates from a local university. These three students, Stella, Maisie, and Naomi, reacted strongly to the content of Maus and the comics medium, and raised questions around identity, representation, and the legibility of their often-intense emotional responses. We trace their affective engagements to explore how comic-making allowed students to represent feelings that are often difficult to make visible in school spaces. Our analysis highlights how affective critical literacy orients teaching and research toward working-through rather than resolving complicated emotions, allowing educators to recognize unanswered questions as forms of critical engagement.

In response to growing neoliberal pressures and austerity measures, two-year English teacher-scholars have embraced Sullivan’s call to activism, but this work is made challenging as aspiring teacher-scholar-activists struggle to balance activism with the other heavy demands of their professional practice. After expanding teacher-scholar-activism as a theoretical framework, we explore activism through cross-case analysis of three developmental literacy professionals’ actions, mindsets, and training. We then provide a pragmatic how-to manual for aspiring teacher-scholar-activists.

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Editors' introduction to 5.1

This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

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

Abstract This article discusses how we have used undergraduate research (UR) to foster habits of mind associated with information literacy (IL). Our strategy is course based and involves students as potential contributors to the Graphic Narrative Database (GND), a digital work in progress. Presenting students with focused parameters for their research and with the prospect of an authentic audience for their writing, the assignment provides students with many opportunities to explore our complex information landscape as practitioners. Students deploy a wide array of strategies to gather and share information about a body of texts that are themselves richly multimodal.

Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students’ digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students’ use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a particular interest in their use of sound elements. Based on social semiotic theory of multimodality, the analysis shows how the students in a variety of ways used sound elements, together with other semiotic resources, to explore their interpretation of the poetic text. Sound elements in particular became a key resource in the interpretive work, giving the students the opportunity to elaborate on topical issues of interest and importance to them while reinforcing their social agency. The study demonstrates the relevance of sound elements in students’ digital composing and explorations of poetry. Furthermore, it reveals how the students showed a capacity as well as a willingness to act, to have influence, and to make substantiated claims for recognition regarding critical issues related to sexuality and society.

Editors' introduction to volume 4, issue 2.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How can we address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in our business and technical communication service courses? 2. How can we help prepare future engineers, technical professionals, and managers to create more inclusive and equitable workplaces?. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> The social justice literature in technical and professional communication (TPC) has focused on a variety of areas, including research methods, user experience, and expanding what can and should be identified as TPC. Emerging research has turned toward pedagogy as an interventional strategy for educating on issues of racial justice and inclusion. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> This teaching case presents the transformation of a TPC service course to specifically address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In response to the racial injustice documented during the summer of 2020, I developed a sequence of assignments that asked students to research and apply DEI initiatives. The assignment was to research and write a short report on DEI approaches in the workplace, followed by a larger team-based project in which students worked with the local city council to enact possible DEI initiatives in the broader community. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> The case was studied through the author's experience and the analysis of data obtained from surveys with class participants and other instructors who incorporated the assignments in their courses. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Students were able to learn more about how to address bias, inclusion, and social justice in a business environment, but also demonstrated some implicit resistance to direct attention to racial injustice. The case study humanizes and brings home issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for students who might otherwise consider them only in the abstract.

In MemoriamJerry Murphy (1923–2021) Don Paul Abbott James Jerome “Jerry” Murphy died on Christmas Eve, 2021, at the age of 98. His death marked the end of a very long and a very productive life. As readers of this journal will know, Jerry exercised a remarkable influence over the history of rhetoric and those of us who study it. This influence was a result, in part, of an impressive record of publication extending over a remarkable 60 years. Jerry wrote about Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, composition and argumentation, pedagogy and bibliography, and more. Fortunately for us, his scholarly works remain readily available to us in libraries and data bases. His scholarship speaks for itself and so it is Jerry himself that I want to speak about. I first met Jerry sometime in the late 1970s. It was a meeting that would change the trajectory of my professional life. He had taken an interest in my work, encouraging me to pursue certain avenues and to forgo others. Fortunately, I had the good sense to follow his advice. I soon learned that I was by no means unique—Jerry regularly mentored young scholars in the United States and beyond. And his support often meant more than simply encouragement. Those whose work he found promising would frequently be included in his various projects: anthologies, conferences, symposia and more. For Jerry was an impresario, an organizer, and a promoter of rhetorical scholarship in ways that benefitted many individual careers and the development of the field itself. He was, after all, one of the six founders of this society and the founding editor of this journal. And, when he perceived there [End Page 109] were too few publishers of historical scholarship, Jerry simply founded his own publishing house, Hermagoras Press. My association with Jerry became closer when, because of him, I was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Davis in 1982. I remain grateful for his confidence in me to this day. My initial appointment was in the Department of Rhetoric which, of course, Jerry had established in 1965. Having him as a colleague was rather like having my own personal consultant. I would regularly go to Jerry with questions about the project I was working on at the time and he would invariably know the answer or know how to find the answer. Thus, I was distressed when he decided to retire in 1991. But I needn’t have worried because, while he may have left the University, he didn’t really retire. Indeed, after his official retirement he continued to be remarkably productive, writing or editing six books. Happily, he remained alert and intellectually engaged until just a few days before his death. His final publication, The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, which he co-edited, arrived exactly one week before he died. He feared he would die before he saw this, his last publication, and so he was delighted to be able to hold it in his hands. Jerry was, then, in every sense, a gentleman and a scholar. In particular, he was a profoundly kind man who was extremely reluctant to express a negative opinion about anyone. His inherent kindness was apparent in the many scholars he aided and encouraged, but it was also evident in his extensive and varied efforts as an editor. He was careful to avoid harsh criticism of others’ material even when he regarded it as deficient. Rather, he always attempted to bring out the best in the work of others by gentle prodding and careful questioning. As a result of Jerry’s fundamental humanity, the number of people around the world who regarded him as a friend and advisor is really quite extraordinary. Jerry Murphy was my friend and colleague for over 40 years. And while I still find it difficult to believe he is gone, I take solace in remembering that he led a very long—and very good—life. [End Page 110] Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis Copyright © 2022 International Society for the History of Rhetoric

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

This article offers readers 12 teaching innovations introduced at the Association for Business Communication’s 86th annual meeting held online in October 2021. This My Favorite Assignment 22nd edition introduces readers to classroom-ready ideas in analysis, critical thinking, and business writing. Assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, internet links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

This text explores our work as Women of Color (WoC) nurturing spaces and practices in response to the mirages of support, the inadequacy of resources, and the tepid responses to systemic oppression within the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of our university, a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) in the Midwest. Via reflective vignettes, we discuss developing a community art collaboration as a counterspace, defined by various scholars as “social spaces … which offer support and enhance feelings of belonging” (Ong, Smith, and Ko 2018, 207) for minoritized students. Throughout this text, we discuss the potential of art-based projects shaped by an anti-racist praxis as resistance to the “check-the-box” institutional diversity efforts, and as transformative spaces to imagine alternative academic futures for Women of Color staff, faculty, and students.

This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.

Serving as the introduction to TETYC’s special issue on disability in two-year college English, this article centers disability as a necessary consideration for two-year colleges’ mission of open access. Drawing on the work of disability justice activists, advocates, and disability scholars, this introduction frames the work of the special issue’s contributors by tracing the ableist obstacles faced by disabled people in two-year college English and how these ableist structures overlap and intersect with other marginalized identities, thus creating a nesting doll of ableism.

Abstract This essay analyzes arguments regarding race and U.S. felon disenfranchisement laws. In response to the denial of the vote to 6.1 million Americans in 2016, voting rights advocacy has helped spur a range of liberalizing reforms in states across the country. The essay attributes such policy victories to activists’ success in redefining felon disenfranchisement as a racial justice rather than criminal justice issue. It argues, however, that U.S. public discourse still does not reflect a clear or coherent understanding of how and why race matters in the context of felon disenfranchisement. Through a rhetorical frame analysis of media coverage in four newspapers over a twenty-year period, the essay identifies and evaluates the three most common racial frames, arguing that each adheres to prevailing logics of racial liberalism. While this adherence lends the frames some degree of persuasive power, this essay argues that it also causes dominant publics to misunderstand the racial character of felon disenfranchisement. The essay concludes that more substantial reform hinges on the ability of activists to transform public meanings to reflect their preferred understanding of the causes and consequences of racial inequality.

As the bicentennial of the momentous 1824 election approaches, Andrew Jackson is as relevant as ever. Jackson's shadow looms large over contemporary discussions regarding populism, democracy, and America's history of racism and colonization. Moreover, interest in Jackson has grown thanks to President Trump's efforts to frame Jackson as a precursor to his own brand of nationalist populism. A variety of analysts, from historian Mark Cheathem in The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson to Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade in Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, have recently revisited the Jacksonian period both to enrich our understanding of that unique historical moment and to offer insights about present day affairs. Amos Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership is a welcome addition to the conversation that provides valuable perspective about Jackson's presidency and the rhetorical nature of presidential authority in general.Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal aims to “give voice to the seventh president” by creating “an account of major addresses’ development, the reasoning and constraints behind them, and ultimately, their impact on the polity” (1–2). The book represents the most comprehensive rhetorical examination of Jackson's public remarks to date. Kiewe not only provides a window into the inner machinations of Jackson's administration and the painstaking process of crafting a public address; he challenges existing understandings of the presidency as an institution. Although Jeffrey Tulis, in The Rhetorical Presidency, argued that the presidency became a seat of popular (rather than constitutional) leadership in the twentieth century, Kiewe persuasively demonstrates that Jackson may have in fact been “the first rhetorical president,” arguing that Jackson's public addresses changed the trajectory of his administration and fundamentally altered the presidency itself (243).Kiewe accomplishes this through in-depth rhetorical histories of Jackson's public addresses. In chapter 1, Kiewe argues that Jackson's 1824 campaign was innovative; Jackson debuted a novel campaign strategy of “writing letters to private individuals for public distribution” (16) and inaugurated a “new era” of party politics featuring populist appeals (36). In chapters 2 through 9, Kiewe conducts case studies of Jackson's inaugural addresses, his first annual message to Congress, his rhetoric regarding the Nullification Crisis and Indian removal policies, and his rhetoric supporting his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. Kiewe also devotes attention to addresses of seemingly “minor importance,” such as the Maysville road bill veto, which involved a proposal to improve a sixty-mile stretch of road in Kentucky and foreshadowed the pro-Union rhetoric that would define Jackson's response to the Nullification Crisis (77).Chapter 10 takes a step back from Jackson's rhetoric to analyze public images of Jackson. Kiewe, using a visual rhetoric approach, argues that Jackson's popular leadership was reinforced by his supporters’ construction of Jackson as a military hero and populist icon through political cartoons and other portraits. This chapter is a detour from the book's main line of argument, but a welcome one that provides enlightening context about how audiences of the time understood Jackson's leadership. In chapter 11, Kiewe analyzes Jackson's farewell address and credits him with further developing the farewell address as a unique genre of presidential rhetoric.Through these case studies, Kiewe develops several insights about Jackson and his rhetoric. First, Kiewe challenges portrayals of Jackson as “brute, rough, savage, and backward” by documenting his rhetorical skill, strategic acumen, and principled devotion to the Union (4). Second, Kiewe sheds light on the “cumulative effort” that underpinned Jackson's rhetorical presidency (68). Jackson's most famous addresses often underwent several stages of drafting. Jackson would create a first draft that would undergo subsequent vetting and revision from his inner circle, such as Andrew Jackson Donelson, Amos Kendall, Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, James Hamilton, Roger Taney, and others. Kiewe describes Jackson's initial drafts as containing partisan and “forceful language” (75), whereas the revised final forms are “moderate relative to his initial points” (90, 248). These detailed accounts of the administration's speechwriting colorfully illustrate Jackson's behind-the-scenes struggle to balance popular leadership with adherence to the norms of his office. Third, Jackson is revealed to be a rhetorical president cognizant of the extra-constitutional powers of his office, who frequently “appealed directly” to the public and “used his rhetoric as a political tool . . . for governing purposes” (243).Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal provides a granular look at a crucial chapter of American history, using a rhetorical perspective that highlights how presidential authority is in part constructed through discourse. Given the book's nineteenth-century subject matter, Kiewe's meticulous account of Jackson's governance and speechwriting process is impressive. Nonetheless, Kiewe's characterizations of Jackson are occasionally questionable. At several points, he describes Jackson as a “progressive” (164, 178), an interpretation that is hard to sustain in light of Jackson's vigorous opposition to policies that would utilize government on behalf of national development and his plainly regressive attitudes and actions towards Indigenous peoples and the abolitionist cause. Kiewe's choice to analyze Jackson in the context of his times bolsters the book's primary strength; it allows for a thorough account of the dynamics and constraints of the era and how Jackson responded to them. However, some readers may be frustrated by Kiewe's hesitance to more forthrightly acknowledge Jackson's complicity with genocide and chattel slavery or to criticize the exclusionary definition of “the people” imagined by Jackson's populist rhetoric. For instance, Kiewe's recognition of Jackson's condescending, paternalistic attitude towards Indigenous peoples in chapter 6 may have been strengthened by conversing more extensively with texts such as Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children that explain the colonialist attitudes that underpinned Jackson's paternalism.As a book that sits “at the intersection of history, politics, and rhetoric,” Kiewe's Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal will prove useful to a variety of readers (1). Historians and scholars interested in the nineteenth-century United States may find this rhetorical study of Jackson a complement to other accounts of the era, as the book's special attention to the development of Jackson's addresses and their impact on the public is relatively unique. Scholars of the presidency may appreciate the book's intervention into the debate about the extent to which the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century affair or a phenomenon that can be traced back into the nineteenth century. Rhetorical scholars should appreciate the central place that Kiewe assigns rhetoric in the process of governance, even in an era where communication mediums were considerably more limited in reach and scope than today. Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal suggests that scholars should pay attention to how rhetoric can strengthen or weaken institutions such as the presidency, and how presidents influence and are influenced by evolving modes of mass communication. Above all, Kiewe's book highlights the need for scholars to conduct rigorous rhetorical analyses of other nineteenth-century rhetorical presidents, to enrich understanding of the era and to illustrate how rhetorical choices made centuries ago exert influence on the present-day institution of the presidency.