This article adds to previous literature on writing “wayfinding” by examining how a writer’s religious beliefs and commitments shape their rhetorical choices and influence their writing wayfinding. The 5-year longitudinal study we report here used discourse-based interviews to understand the experiences of student writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Examining texts our study participants wrote in and outside of college classrooms, our analysis highlights moments when they used emotion and affect as rhetorical strategies to accomplish instrumental and relational goals. We found that in these moments, participants’ commitments as Latter-day Saints and their related identities significantly affected their writing decisions and their sense of wayfinding, particularly as they navigated writing contexts outside of familiar academic settings. The article suggests that understanding the challenges and opportunities writers face in the intersections between their rhetorical choices and their commitments as members of an organized church can help writing teachers better support students' writing development.

“The Schooling of Gestural Listening” attends to how gestural listening—defined as all of listening’s embodied manifestations, such as nodding and nonverbal backchanneling—is used, shaped, and then evaluated by school. The author shows how gestural listening is first leveraged to help students gain literacy, then disciplined into overly-restrained embodied norms, eventually fusing with notions of classroom management and student attitude. To illustrate this trajectory, the article draws upon Nicolas Philibert’s 2002 film Être et Avoir and the work of early literacy figures Marie Clay and Megan Watkins. Throughout, the essay argues that gestural listening’s relegation to an amalgamated landscape of “good” or “correct” conduct in school inordinately affects neurodiverse students. The author investigates this phenomenon by highlighting the writing of two students with self-disclosed ADHD diagnoses, and by engaging with scholars of neurodiversity and disability such as Melanie Yergeau, Shannon Walters, and Thomas Brown. By reminding readers of gestural listening’s affordances in early literacy acquisition, and its subsequent flattening by the process of schooling, this article ultimately aims to render it visible to educators once again, especially to those working in secondary and college environments where listening’s rich gestural register is often delimited to narrow perceptions of “correct” conduct.

Agile methodologies often do not explicitly include the process of creating user documentation, consistent with the idea that documentation should be minimal to create efficient processes. While Agile provides several advantages for technical communicators, these processes also raise challenges that technical communicators creating user documentation need to address, including collaborating with development teams and evaluating the usability of user documentation. Building on existing research, this qualitative study aimed to understand both the advantages and challenges of Agile and illuminate how technical communicators and their colleagues address the challenges. We interviewed 14 practicing technical communicators and their colleagues over 3 months in the fall of 2022. Participants worked in six software development organizations across the United States, with one working in Europe. We analyzed results qualitatively to discern findings focused on three topics—general advantages and challenges of creating user documentation in Agile contexts, the dynamics of technical communicators interacting with Agile development teams, and the effects of Agile on assessing the usability of user documentation. We offer suggestions for practitioners and educators as they consider how Agile affects the creation of user documentation, leveraging the benefits of Agile, and addressing challenges in innovative ways as demonstrated by participants in this study. Future research will provide even richer perspectives.

Abstract This article argues that care — especially care grounded in Black feminist traditions — is not an affective supplement to teaching but rather the radical foundation of liberatory pedagogy. Amid rising attacks on critical education and the austerity logics of the neoliberal university, the authors theorize care as infrastructure, method, and resistance. Drawing from the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they offer a framework for care-centered teaching that foregrounds mutuality, trust, and collective accountability. Through vignettes, student reflections, and practices such as trauma-informed design, mutual aid, and collaborative assessment, the article demonstrates how care fosters relational transformation and deep intellectual engagement. It also interrogates the structural devaluation of care labor, particularly for women and faculty of color, and challenges dominant educational paradigms that equate rigor with detachment. As one student reflected, “You believed me when I said I needed more time, without asking for proof. That made me want to do the work even more.” Drawing from their institutional experiences, the authors position teaching as a form of organizing — an insurgent, relational practice that refuses extractive academic norms while building collective conditions for educational and institutional transformation.

This piece was originally delivered as the CCCC Chair’s Address at the 2025 CCCC Annual Convention in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 10, 2025. It has been lightly revised for a print format.

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Abstract This article considers how Jacques Derrida's theory of hospitality, applied within university literature classrooms, can help instructors meaningfully respond to competing student desires for flexibility and belonging. Derrida contends that ideals of “absolute” hospitality must be embodied in concrete and inevitably “conditional” ways. Arguing that the tension between absolute and conditional is one to embrace, the article considers how story-centered classrooms (specifically, general-education literature classes) allow teachers and students alike to move in and out of the roles of welcoming host and gracious guest. The article breaks down this pedagogical process into three overlapping stages, where class participants move from a traditional relationship where a teacher-host welcomes the student-guest, to experiences of readerly co-dwelling in which they collectively allow a story to host its disparate readers. The article argues that this pedagogical rethinking of traditional hospitality hierarchies gives students empowering strategies for welcoming diverse perspectives and inhabiting varied roles with confidence. These hospitality skills, in turn, allow them to practice and experience belonging.

Management practices are changing globally due to rapid workplace digitalization. The COVID-19 pandemic has created new demands for management and affected how information and communication technology and communication channels are used in everyday work. Despite the centrality of competent communication in the workplace, little is known about how managers can conduct technology-mediated communication appropriately and effectively. This article presents a problematizing review that develops and articulates a theoretical framework of managers’ technology-mediated communication competence (TMCC). The framework is based on business, management, and communication research that presents managerial TMCC as a critical process influencing individual, group, and organizational outcomes.

This study uses grounded theory to explore Korean professionals' experience with communication in Business English as a lingua franca (BELF). The author collected data for the study by conducting semistructured interviews with 12 Korean professionals, resulting in 120 concepts, 33 categories, and 14 main categories in the coding process. The findings highlight the significance of accommodation, which affects the success of BELF communication and serves as a major action for resolving problems. The study emphasizes that BELF dynamics should be understood as a multifaceted and interactive process in which various factors are intricately interconnected, giving rise to fluid and complex BELF phenomena.

This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.

While researchers have explored the relationship between writing self-regulation and writing self-efficacy in student performance on academic writing tasks, less research has been conducted on the mediating effect of autonomous motivation on self-regulation and self-efficiency. In this study, researchers surveyed 445 elementary school students in China using the Writing Self-Regulation Strategies Scale, the Writing Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Autonomous Writing Motivation Scale. Researchers then compared the results of student responses to the scale items with scores on three written compositions. The results show that (1) writing self-regulation strategy positively predicts writing scores; (2) writing self-regulation strategies not only directly impact students’ writing scores, but also affect students’ performances indirectly through the mediation of writing self-efficacy; and (3) autonomous writing motivation modulates the first half of the “writing self-regulation strategy → writing self-efficacy → writing scores” path. Compared to students with low autonomous writing motivation, the writing self-regulation strategies of students with high autonomous writing motivation are more effective in enhancing their writing self-efficacy.

This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

ABSTRACT What pattern of mind is revealed by the increasingly common turn of phrase “I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed”? Three thinkers who though very influential elsewhere have little cache in contemporary ethical theory—Richard Rorty, Peter Sloterdijk, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—suggest that what they call (respectively) knowingness, cynicism, and paranoid interpretation are endemic to our times. Building on their work, this article argues that knowing confirmation that the (terrible) way things are trending is what we expected all along has a deleterious effect on moral judgment. A knowing lack of surprise, which positions the speaker as savvy, weakens the judgment that follows. If what happened was expected, then the sense that something else could have happened is undercut. Against this mindset, the article synthesizes Rorty’s emphasis on hope with Sedgwick’s on affect, discussing political hope as a virtue with a significant affective dimension to be fostered.

A tick-borne illness has spread throughout the eastern United States, causing victims to develop a spontaneous allergic reaction to eating red meat. This condition’s etiology intersects with notable recent cases of porcine xenotransplantation: the insertion of organs from genetically altered pigs into human hosts. The antagonist in these scenarios is the sugar alpha-gal, which is naturally present in most mammals although not humans. This article draws from Bruno Latour’s depiction of modernity as an engine that produces contradictory hybrids to examine the capitalist ethic impelling cultural engagements with alpha-gal, in which the bodies of pigs and humans are cyclically conflated and differentiated as medical and edible commodities—both forms of sustenance. The consumption of these resources has a Gothic cast, which provides insight into their strange appeal, affect, and implications. This kind of quotidian Gothic invisibly pervades contemporary life, becoming palpable only through novelty, as transient examples emerge and dissipate while eliciting little sustained consternation. 

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters, before and after extensive developmental education reform, the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

Abstract This article discusses and situates various grading practices — such as labor-based grading and specification grading — and their applications within a community college setting. Through two community college instructor voices with two disparate and continuing grading journeys, this article reflects on how these grading practices affect community college students in unforeseen and unjust ways, and ultimately argues that instructors should offer grading choices in order to serve the complex lives and needs of community college students.

Abstract This article focuses on student perceptions of their experiences in an ungraded classroom that uses engagement-based grading contracts (EBGCs). The assessment ecology is described in detail, and then the author shares student reflections on their experiences with EBGCs, which were collected in the form of an end-of-semester memo assignment. Comprehensively, students find EBGC use to be a positive and worthwhile assessment experience. While there is a learning curve involved, students appreciate the real-life approach to both labor and engagement on writing tasks, the amount of agency and choice built into the contract, and the ecology's incorporation of extensive written feedback in lieu of scores or points. Another key takeaway is its positive impact on student affect — especially in instances of students self-disclosing diagnoses of anxiety. Student-reported challenges to EBGC use are also discussed, including their own wrestling with ideas about past experiences with traditional grading, personal levels of motivation, and accountability. Overall, an engagement-based grading contract approach appears to be a pleasurable and accessible assessment option for teachers looking to pursue an ungraded approach in their writing classrooms.

Abstract Much of the conversation about ungrading has thus far focused on its impacts in the classroom, improving student learning and addressing ongoing inequities. Yet addressing the administrative structures necessary to sustain ungrading is equally important, especially considering the labor conditions of contingent, minoritized, or otherwise vulnerable faculty. This article proposes hostile/hospitable programmatic architectures as a framework for understanding how institutional ecologies may be configured in ways that undermine or support the use of equitable assessment practices. Where hostile programmatic architecture neglects the risk vulnerable faculty take on in using a new assessment practice, a hospitable programmatic architecture, deliberately attentive to faculty labor conditions and institutional locatedness, relies on supportive, cross-hierarchical relationships and ample material and affective resources to open institutional spaces for the effective use of ungrading. The article closes with a brief heuristic for writing program administrators and other departmental/university leaders interested in assessing the hospitality of their own program.

This study describes the pathways by which prospective users of a website for natural hazard communication experienced agency as user-centered design (UCD) participants. Formative interviews with residents, community managers, and outreach professionals revealed two pathways for agency during the design process—by directly influencing design changes and by indirectly affecting developers’ understanding of user needs—and previewed users’ potential agency during real-world use. Findings reveal how agential opportunities were constrained by UCD structure and choices of the development team. The authors discuss how supporting user agency during UCD can improve design and support buy-in for humanistic methods in interdisciplinary research teams.

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

Abstract This essay uses affect theory to argue that Greta Thunberg's gestures, rather than the representational content of her speeches, innervates intense responses of admiration and contempt. In this essay, we depict these gestures, which includes Thunberg's school strike, speeches, and her refusal to fly, as shaming gestures. We then illustrate how Thunberg negotiates the rhetorical limits established by the affective dynamics of shame. Specifically, shaming demands rhetoric that is at once preeminently social but also individualizing or particularizing, since shame entails criticizing an individual for violation of a social norm or expectation. Shaming explains both the widespread identification and contagion Thunberg produces, as well as the heated contempt of detractors—both of which are common responses to shame. We conclude by discussing the limits and potentiality of shame, as well as gestures more generally, contending gestures become essential for social movements in a digital media ecology.

This article reports findings from interviews with twenty college instructors who have facilitated multimodal advocacy projects, identifying their affective significance through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of instructor responses, we present the implications of multimodal engagement and what it means for doing social advocacy pedagogies with the community.

This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

PDF version Abstract This study examines strategies for emphasizing collaborative writing in a community engagement project. Doing so can enrich students’ experiences with ethical community engagement. Successful collaborative writing provides students with competencies—rhetorical knowledge, confidence, understanding of transfer, and appreciation for diverse perspectives—that are key building blocks in supporting students as they deepen their engagement… Continue reading The Group Project’s Potential: Emphasizing Collaborative Writing with Community Engagement

PDF version Abstract COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx/a/o communities as people face interlocking global pandemics: “COVID-19, economic recession, global warming, and structural racism” (Solorzano, 2021, xvi). While popular discussions have focused on how these systemic inequities have resulted in learning loss, we have found the focus on school-based learning loss also obscures experiential knowledge students… Continue reading Beyond Learning Loss: Testimonios of a Pandemic Education/Más Allá de la Pérdida: Testimonios de Una Educación Pandémica

Abstract Greta Thunberg became a beacon of hope for many in the face of climate change. While journalists and social scientists attempt to know her influence through quantification popularized as the “Greta Effect,” we understand Thunberg through rhetorical fragments that compose a broader structure of feelings in the public—what we call the “Greta Affect.” Moving from effect to affect, we look to how Thunberg as a “leader of our time” inspires rhetorical leadership grounded in appeals of innocence. Through a rhetorical analysis of a popular mode of response to Thunberg's speeches, the meme, we investigate how comparisons of Thunberg to another popular culture figure, Lisa Simpson, invite a wider manner of engagement tied to a figure of the girl as publics converge around different investments in youth appeals to innocence.

This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

Modifying inclusive creative workshop models for FYW classrooms empowers student engagement and persistence and allows instructors with creative practices to effectively draw on their expertise to guide students’ writing of persuasive argumentative prose.

Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

Abstract In this article, the author presents a theoretically oriented framework for teaching poetry that accounts for the role of affect. The author calls this framework reading for affective uncertainty, meaning an approach to affect and meaning that recognizes affects associated with the reading event as integral parts of the reading without expecting meaning to be inherent to texts and simply in need of interpretation, which is often a focus in teaching. Central to this framework are the notion of a poem as an object and Sara Ahmed's argument in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), that objects do not cause emotions, but emotions are produced in circulation with objects. As concrete examples, the author discusses Evelyn Reilly's Echolocation (2018) and Wendy Trevino's Cruel Fiction (2018), two recent poetry books that consider relations between the human and the nonhuman and the notions of race and borders, respectively. These works generate uncertainty as to how to relate to others and thus serve as examples of the way in which reading for affective uncertainty works in acknowledging that poems can be viewed as ordinary objects that participate in generating emotion.

AbstractWriting is both affective and ecological. Consequently, effective writing instructors need a deep understanding of writing's affective and ecological aspects, making composition one of the most complex and challenging areas of pedagogical endeavor. This claim is especially true in institutions whose product-oriented epistemologies make writing potentially traumatizing for many student writers. To assist writing teachers in meeting student writers’ needs, this article draws on a diverse body of research to explain writing affect, its role in ecological processes of composition within early collegiate humanities curricula, the relation of writing affect to writers’ identities, and the impact collegiate corporatization may have on composition instruction. Subsequently, this article describes approaches for making writing pedagogy more process oriented, trauma informed, and equity centered.

This article presents a case study of an online class in technical and professional communication pedagogy (the teaching of technical and professional writing) that uses digital video technology for discussions. Because students in the class share their experiences using the video technology, the study uses a collaborative autoethnography framework to learn if the digital technology, Flipgrid, would enhance students’ experiences with discussions in an online class compared to their experiences with discussions on traditional discussion boards. Providing such exposure to a new technology tool can help students gain the confidence that is necessary for learning new technologies in the workplace. When the technology did not provide the hoped-for results after a few weeks, the class stopped using it, returning to the traditional discussion board in the learning management system, which can be more effective when teachers participate and organize students into small groups. Reflecting on what happened, students in the class collaborated on this article to share their experiences.

This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of rhetoric and its further fulfillment through biosemiotics and pragmatist-inflected physiological feminisms. It situates itself in an era when rhetoric is undergoing conceptual change, with the social constructivism that guided much thinking since the 1970s supplanted in part by a family of postconstructivisms. In conversation with new materialist, affective, and biological strands of rhetorical theory, the article maps questions and risks involved in developing newer conceptions of rhetoric not limited to discourse, symbolic action, and exclusively human capacities. It argues that Peircean thinking provides resources for nonreductive understandings of how rhetoric emerges from life itself and is pluralistically mediated through the forming conditions and multimodal consequences that materially give it meaning. Contemporary biosemiotics and physiologically oriented feminisms like Teresa de Lauretis’s then move the promise of Peircean rhetoric closer to reality.

Abstract This article forwards the concept of affective inertia to understand how caucasity, or emboldened whiteness, motivates rhetorical (in)action. Specifically looking at the viral case of “BBQ Becky,” I argue the historic momentum of both settler colonialism and anti-Blackness propel contemporary performances of emboldened white femininity. The videoed interactions between Jennifer Schulte (Becky) and Michelle Dione Snider (videographer) illustrate how scenarios of property afford white cisgender women particular roles of constrained privilege when in public spaces. Turning to the dynamics of white feminine caucasity, I position Snider's performance of “race traitor” as one equal and opposite to Schulte's “damsel in distress,” thus interrupting Schulte's inertia. Of importance is how the women perform to divergent ends while being capacitated by the same affective inertia.

This essay applies Wood’s process model of emotional memory synchronization to better understand how public memory of the Battle of Culloden, an integral event in Scottish history, is created through two exhibits at the Culloden Visitor Centre. These exhibits create a shared experience by engaging audiences through immersive exhibits that utilize sensory elements. This use of immersive, sensory-laden, and emotion-provoking exhibits may be useful in the creation of public memory of historical events that did not happen within living memory.

Abstract Must we avoid the subjective and the personal when we stick to the text as close readers? By examining a moment of affective disruption in an advanced seminar, this autoethnographic account suggests that students should engage with their feelings as they develop meaningful readings of cultural texts.

Abstract The appearance of a spider in the classroom can disrupt the flow of teaching, often prompting strong reactions that unsettle classroom norms. Minor classroom disruptions like this might not seem worth theorizing, but this essay reframes such disruptions as rich sites for understanding the role of affect in humanities pedagogy. Ultimately arguing against killing a spider in the classroom, this essay theorizes the moment of disruption as an opportunity to model humanistic attention to both human and nonhuman actors in the classroom space.

This study investigated the extent to which lexical repetition in English passages developed in a content management system appeared to affect reading comprehension. Participants were 65 graduate students at a Midwestern public university, all of whom were native English readers. Instruments were two passages adjusted to maximize or minimize internal lexical repetition. Readers rated repetitive texts as significantly more cohesive than nonrepetitive texts, although repetition did not significantly affect the accuracy of task-based responses. Participants named lexical cues that had been repeated but also named nonrepeated, memorable cues, suggesting possible future research into managed content, lexical memorableness, and reader comprehension.