This article’s author situates late 19th-century essays by Andrew Carnegie within the rhetorical history of business and professional communication (BPC). A close analysis of the essays reveals that Carnegie relied on rhetoric to shape his public image as a benevolent business leader during a period characterized by significant socioeconomic divisions in the United States. Three primary themes— wealth , labor , and democracy —emerge, which the author argues animated Carnegie’s reasoning and arguments throughout the essays. The author concludes by recommending greater attention to the rhetorical history of BPC in future research and teaching.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.

This article revisits the mid-century medical debate over the “treatment” of transsexualism in the U.S., summarily represented in the most cited essays on transsexualism at the time. The article leverages the stasis point of those medical debates—is transsexuality a product of the psyche or the soma?—as a singularly rich site for rhetorical inquiry arguing that this case demonstrates that stasis has both substance and a rhetorical form that determines the limits of what is accepted as a legitimate argument within any debate. The ultimate aim of this essay is twofold: one, to add to the rhetorical history of transsexuality with regard to medicalization and, two, to demonstrate how the decision of medical professionals to not allow sex-change surgery as a legitimate treatment to transsexual patients had much to do with the rhetorical association of site of malady/site of treatment and little to do with scientific evidence.

In this article, the author uses the rhetorical concept of techne, here understood as a repeated engagement involving mind and body, to understand eating disorder recovery. The article relies on posts from the subreddit r/fuckeatingdisorders and personal story to explain how the behaviors and mindsets described by the posts are considered techne, and how recovery itself is an exercise in learning and relearning. This learning and relearning, also seen as the development of techne, is connected to deeper ontological claims about what it means to live in a body and recover in said body.

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in the practice of political apologies. This does not, however, mean that apologizing for their past human rights violations is easy for states. Political apology involves a number of complexities that urge the apologizing political authority to make argumentative maneuvers to manage or mitigate the challenges inherent in this activity type. This paper aims to set out the institutional constraints of political apology and characterize it as an argumentative activity type (AAT) by employing the four pragma-dialectical parameters: the initial situation, procedural and material starting points, argumentative means, and possible outcome (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2002, 2005; van Eemeren 2010). In order to illustrate how the institutional preconditions and the characteristics of the activity type manifest themselves in an actual apology text, the paper presents an analysis of the 2022 apology delivered by the then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte for the Netherland’s role in slavery, focusing on his strategic maneuvers to justify the apology and increase its sincerity and sufficiency. The analysis of Rutte’s maneuvering with the topical potential, audience demand, and presentational devices reveals how he achieves a bold acknowledgement of wrongdoing, a clear and emphatic statement of apology, and indicates directions for recovery.

This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetoric and Desire in the History of Computing is a little book doing big things. Author Patricia Fancher presents a well-theorized recovery of both queer lives and the lives of women in the history of computing, something of great import to scholars in technical and professional communication (TPC). Fancher engages with queer theory, rhetoric, technical communication, historiography, archival studies, mathematics, computers, and engineering, resulting in a robust interdisciplinary work. At the center of the book is Alan Turing, a pioneering mathematician and gay man, but just as important are the people around him—his queer community and the women of the University of Manchester Computer Lab. Fancher uses queer and embodied techné to explore these communities and the writing that occurred within them. Through this, she presents a case that pushes back against popular narratives of Alan Turing as a solitary genius while also bringing forward the embodied human presence in computing and TPC.

Speechwriting is a recognized profession in politics and business, particularly in the English-speaking world where speeches are central to communication. Drawing on archival research into the Kennedy–Sorensen model of State of the Union writing and findings from the author’s survey on contemporary Speechwriting in British and American politics and business: a study of the practice, profession, and speechwriting ethics, this paper highlights how the close collaboration once exemplified by JFK and Ted Sorensen no longer reflects contemporary practice. Today speechwriters often lack access to leaders and policy deliberations, yet their communication expertise and media awareness remain vital to shaping and conveying policy.

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was at war with two seemingly different enemies: the first was Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The second enemy was the yellow fever virus which wreaked havoc on the physical and economic welfare of the U.S. In this essay, I conduct a rhetorical history about how the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever was memorialized as a triumph of U.S. medicine, and how medical-military topoi are deployed to describe “conquest” over the virus. I argue that the nonhuman mosquito vector enables retroactive discussion of victory over an invisible enemy, creating rhetorical space between the realities of U.S imperialism and medical violence. This rhetorical history has consequences for how medical-military topoi continue to influence ways that the U.S. uses border control in response to pandemics, particularly those with nonhuman vectors or origins.

Abstract In 1906, Eugene V. Debs published the most infamous editorial of his career, entitled “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” Addressing the murder charges against prominent Western Federation of Miners leadership, Debs mobilized threats and rhetorical violence to provoke attention to reportedly unjust legal practices. “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” remains something of a puzzling outlier in Debs's rhetorical canon. Despite his established legacy of peaceful protest and his preference for education toward gradual change, he announced a bold plan in the editorial for violent revolt and immediate upheaval. Through an analysis of “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” in context, I argue Debs invoked rhetorical violence in the service of ultimately peaceful outcomes, suggesting a theory of rhetorical violence geared toward nonviolent social change. This study contributes a recovery of the Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone murder controversy for rhetorical scholars, while providing an expanded theoretical understanding of rhetorical violence to explain Debs's puzzling but successful navigation of an uncharacteristic rhetorical strategy.

In Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, political theorist Heather Pool offers a theory of “political mourning” in which publics respond to a highly visible death (or deaths) in ways that challenge the existing meaning of citizenship and the nation's responsibilities towards disenfranchised groups. In the introduction, Pool states, “I define political mourning as an affective communal response to a loss that threatens (or is perceived to threaten) the historical narrative, present expression, or future possibility of the political community and/or the ideals that sustain that political community” (17). While political mourning could be associated with any identity group in the United States, Pool specifically examines the role of racial identity formation. In addition to centering racial identity in the political mourning concept, Pool narrows the focus of her work to the deaths of “everyday people” rather than public figures such as politicians or martyred activists.This book contributes to political theory by building upon past scholarship on mourning and trauma studies. In the introduction, Pool argues, “It is the central claim of this book that the deaths of everyday citizens, at particular moments and in the wake of a contingent process by which these deaths are made political, can move the living to political action” (10). Pool then delineates between three forms of “mourning” in chapter one, including “private mourning,” “public mourning,” and “political mourning” (14–21). The conception of “political mourning” draws from John Dewey's publics and the “barriers to creative democracy.” These barriers—“apathy”, “indirect effects”, “the problem of presentation,” and “development of judgment” (19)—provide the framework in the analysis chapters of Political Mourning. Pool states, “Considering Dewey's focus on mobilizing citizens out of apathy, widely visible losses that prompt discussions of responsibility can be seen as moments when publics are formed. In response to visible losses, citizens and political leaders often propose specific institutional reforms” (20). Additionally, Pool extends theories regarding death and politics, including works by Bonnie Honig, Judith Butler's “mortalist humanism” concept, and Simon Stow's book, American Mourning (21–22). The author traces the political process of “how mourning becomes political by examining several instances where death served as the justification for political calls for change” (33, original emphasis). In Pool's “processual theory of political mourning,” scholars should consider five aspects of a highly publicized death, including: “context”; “visibility”; “agents”; “responsibility”; and “political change” (7–8).The analysis chapters include the following four examples of political mourning in the United States: The Triangle Fire of 1911; the murder of Emmett Till; the September 11 attacks; and the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter two examines the political mourning surrounding the Triangle Fire, which involved the deaths of 146 young women and girls who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. This chapter critiques the ways in which white racial identity transformed, in part, due to the mourning process and memorials in honor of deceased workers who were mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants. Prior to the Triangle Fire, “white identity” was reserved almost exclusively for Anglo-Saxons (47). When workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory held a labor strike less than two years before the fire, although “non-white” workers received a lot of press coverage, their efforts to unionize failed. According to Pool, the political mourning following the fire motivated the public to support increased worker protections. Pool states, “Before the fire, the immigrant, not-quite-white striking workers were perceived by political elites as attacking American values and cherished ideals of self-sufficiency at the heart of American identity. . . . However, the power and the outpouring of public sympathy after the fire recast the now-dead workers as victims of politically enabled negligence and racialized exclusion” (49). Additionally, she claims that the dead workers’ “youth, femaleness, and ambiguous racial status” transformed them into sympathetic figures in the public's imagination (49). Although factory fires were common during this period, Pool argues that the earlier news coverage of the Triangle Factory workers’ strike created a “visibility” that made the public “predisposed to care about the workers in this factory” after the fire (56–57, original emphasis). Pool claims that the widespread mourning in New York City following the Triangle Fire, including a “March of Mourning” with nearly 400,000 marchers and onlookers, mobilized the public to care for “non-white” laborers (59) and adjusted the public's understanding of non-Anglo-Saxon “whiteness.” Pool claims, “Triangle was a moment when intra-white racial differences were muted, and one of many moments in the long process of reconceptualizing the threat to Americanness as originating not from hordes of immigrants but from blackness” (66). The public began to view the mostly Italian and Jewish victims of the Triangle Fire in New York as “innocent victims,” and their victimhood and status as working-class immigrants “laid the groundwork for a shift from hostile race relations toward friendly ethnic rivalries that helped pave the way to full citizenship for white workers within a racialized democracy” (67).Chapter three explores the political mourning surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. Pool provides a detailed overview of the scene of the murder in Mississippi, the funeral procession in Chicago, and the deep South location for the trial of Till's killers. In this chapter, Pool discusses the primary agent of this political mourning, Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Bradley (more commonly known as Mamie Till-Mobley). Pool argues that Till-Bradley's claim “I know the whole United States is mourning with me” was, in Pool's words, “a powerful rhetorical construction,” that extended a mother's private mourning of her son to a collective mourning for Americans of all races (80–81). Additionally, the author connects the death of Emmett Till and the subsequent failure of the Mississippi court to convict his two murders to sociopolitical contexts, including the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Pool claims that the unjust verdict of “not guilty” for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who later confessed to Till's murder) helped propel political change by getting Northern liberal whites to recognize the extreme harms of white supremacy. She states, “A politics of mourning over Till's death gave white American liberals—who had apparently come to accept the Jim Crow status quo—a clear instance to reflect on the calls of the nascent civil rights movement for racial justice and to see how the reality of Jim Crow violated aspirations to actual American democracy” (72–73). Similar to the author's finding in the chapter on the Triangle Fire, some white Americans became motivated to see a racialized community differently once a tragic death received widespread media coverage. This chapter of Political Mourning provides one of the most insightful applications of the political mourning concept that rhetorical critics could use with other civil rights case studies. As Pool states, “Without understanding the politics of mourning, it is difficult to make sense of why some deaths lead to political change while others do not” (90).In chapter four, Pool argues that the United States adopted a skewed version of political mourning following the September 11 terrorist attacks, what she terms “sovereign mourning.” In contrast to the other cases, the author claims that, following 9/11, the American government did not take any responsibility for the events that could have motivated the terrorists, including US military interventions and political intrusions in the Middle East. Furthermore, the news coverage of 9/11 focused on images of planes flying into the Twin Towers and burning images of the Pentagon rather than bodies of the deceased. In the analysis chapters on the Triangle Fire, Emmett Till, and Black Lives Matter, there are detailed descriptions of how images of the dead served pivotal roles in rallying the public toward political change. And finally, the majority of the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were white Americans, primarily upper-class white men in the financial industry. These victims were honored along with the New York City firefighters and police officers who responded to the attack on the Twin Towers. Meanwhile, the racialized groups of Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Arabs were constructed as an “Arab Muslim enemy” that could fill the country's need for an external target following the end of the Cold War (97–99). Pool, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers first-hand, provided a compelling description of the context preceding 9/11. This chapter departs in some ways from Pool's theorization of political mourning. It may have been beneficial for readers to learn more about how the patriotism following 9/11 helped draw white racial groups together, compared to other racial groups.Finally, chapter five centers the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the impact of Trayvon Martin's and Mike Brown's deaths. Pool states that while many social media users adopted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to push for political change regarding police brutality, the alternative #AllLivesMatter became a backlash against centering blackness. As the author argues, “If, as the data seem to indicate, those using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter are generally white and pro-law-enforcement, #AllLivesMatter seeks to equalize the risk of being a police officer with being a black citizen. . . . It also disregards the long history of law enforcement's purpose: to protect both property and whiteness” (139). It is important to note that both Martin and Brown were killed by individuals who were white-appearing and serving in roles to protect the state. Since Political Mourning was published in 2021 and completed in the spring of 2020, there are only brief mentions of George Floyd's death by strangulation. However, in the case of George Zimmerman (who killed Martin) and Officer Darren Wilson (who shot Brown during a traffic stop), neither of the killers were convicted of a crime. Chapter five instructively synthesizes past studies on the forms of dialogue that social media users engaged in with either hashtag. As the BLM movement is ongoing, Heather Pool's connection of the political mourning concept to this activism could help scholars studying other deaths that have been commemorated by BLM. Pool claims, “The public whose interests the state reflects and whose interactions become predictably ‘canalized’ is a white public, who has rejected both logical and emotive calls to recognize the humanity of blacks and other people of color in the United States. And yet blacks (and other excluded groups) regularly challenge the undemocratic institutional arrangements that define our white democracy” (143, original emphasis).Pool concludes by considering the outcomes of political mourning, whether it will “serve as a powerful resource to demand Deweyan democracy” or “lead the polity down dark roads of xenophobia and the denial of our own role in shaping the world” (153). These two possibilities are reflected in the four case studies. While “political mourning” could help scholars studying public memory, affect, rhetorical history, media theory, and publicity surrounding deaths and tragedies, the concept may be too broad, or stretched to its limits, aligning the aftermath of murders with the aftermath of terrorism and deadly fires.

This low-stakes assignment invites students in an online corequisite first-year writing course to explore the archives of a local historic African American newspaper as an alternative to more conventional research-based writing tasks. This course is taught at a large public community college with a predominantly white student population in Louisville, Kentucky. For this activity, students first are introduced to the concept of archives through a reading and a video. Next, they are invited to freely explore the digitized newspaper archive, choose one article that captures their interest to read in full and sharing a short summary of it along with a reflection on their experience of navigating the digital archive on a discussion board. Finally, each student is asked to respond to at least two classmates, looking for harmonies and tensions between their and their classmates’ summarized articles and experiences in the archive. The local focus of this assignment encourages students to see research as personal and quite literally close to home, while the focus on reflection and response encourages students to work collaboratively to overcome challenges when navigating difficult digital sources. In an online writing classroom, which can often be an isolating and unfamiliar space, particularly for the historically underserved populations most likely to be in a developmental writing course, this assignment encourages students to embrace their roles as researchers in community with other researchers.

This article examines how Aristotelian rhetorical principles— ethos, pathos, and logos—can help manage social media outrage in complaint handling by translating them into defensive and accommodative response strategies commonly used in service recovery. Two online experiments evaluated four strategies for their effects on complainants’ moods: (a) blame-shifting; (b) promising action; (c) apologizing; and (d) a combination of empathy, apology, and promise. The results showed that accommodative strategies were more effective than defensive ones, with the combination of empathy, apology, and promise as the most effective. The findings suggest incorporating rhetorical training in business communication to enhance response efficacy.

[Introduction] "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. [...] Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency." - Rebecca Solnit In 2018, Cheryl Glenn wrote, "The work of feminist rhetorical historiography is far from done; in fact, it has just begun-and it is anchored in hope." Following Glenn, we explore hope in this cluster as a methodological imperative in the archives. Informed by theorists Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Rebecca Solnit, and Cornel West, the writers in this Cluster Conversation envision hope as a radical orientation toward building new worlds and a willingness to do the work to make those worlds possible. Following the models of Jacqueline Jones Royster, Charles Morris, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and others, we see archives and archival methods as a particularly valuable part of doing such work. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in Decolonizing Methodologies, "To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things" (36). Archives and archival methods are vital to creating such alternative histories and knowledges.

Megan Behrend is a lecturer at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where she teaches writing and literature in the Sweetland Center for Writing and the Department of English Language and Literature. Her writing on the multilingual literary culture of medieval England has appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Her scholarship and teaching thematize linguistic politics and diversity, translation, and adaptation across historical locations.Thomas Blake is associate professor of English and director of gender studies at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he teaches courses on medieval literature, gender studies, and fantasy. He is currently a principal investigator on the college's Pathways to a Just Society Mellon grant. He coteaches faculty learning groups on issues like gender identity and sexuality, and on strategies for teaching controversial topics and systemic thinking.Gina Brandolino is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She teaches and writes about medieval and early English literature, working class literature, comics, and horror.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her teaching and scholarship engage with medieval literature, disability studies, comics studies, and the history of the English language.Natalie Grinnell is Reeves Family Professor in the Humanities at Wofford College. Her areas of research include Middle English and Old French romance. Dr. Grinnell is currently president of the Southeastern Medieval Association, a section editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages, and a member of the editorial board of the New Queer Medievalisms series by Medieval Institute Publications.Sonja Mayrhofer is an associate professor of instruction at the University of Iowa, where she has taught English, rhetoric, and business communication.Laura Morreale is a medievalist and independent scholar who lives in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian historiography, medieval French-language writing outside of France, and digital medieval studies. She is the cofounder and coeditor of Middle Ages for Educators, based at Princeton University.Courtney E. Rydel received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. She is now an associate professor of English at Washington College, a small liberal arts college in Chestertown, Maryland, where she has the delight of learning alongside her students every day.Rachel Linn Shields is a PhD candidate in English literature at Saint Louis University. Her dissertation project explores transhistorical medieval eco-poetics through juxtapositions of Middle English poetry and modern fiction. She is also working on a book-length collection of translations of medieval poems and has published sections of this project, including “False Fiends: Middle English Lyric Poems in Translation” (Subtropics) and “John's Knot” (Poetry).Kisha G. Tracy is professor of English studies and chair of the General Education Program at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. She specializes in teaching early British and world literatures and in researching medieval disability, especially mental health. Tracy's recent publications are Why Study the Middle Ages? (2022) and two open access textbooks for the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens project.

This article contributes to the writing center scholarship in three ways. First, it revisits and further develops the discussion on course-embedded writing support programs; in particular, it builds on Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen’s “recursive reflection about course-embedded tutoring” and responds to Mary Tetreault et al.’s call for utilizing archival research as a resource for tutor education. Second, it takes a unique approach to tutor education by exploring how embedded tutors for first-year composition classes develop their expertise outside of the formal training sessions. Third, it applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning that has not been previously utilized to investigate the diverse experiences embedded tutors undergo as they acquire and refine their tutoring skills. The qualitative data for this case study were obtained from the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring’s reflective journal as well as session logs and reflections completed by course-embedded peer tutors for composition courses at a four-year Northeastern institution over the period of four semesters. The analysis of the data reveals the rhizomatic character of embedded tutors’ learning, where elements of the learning processes are interconnected and ever-expanding (Deleuze and Guattari; Grellier). The discussion includes a set of questions designed to encourage tutors to reflect on their learning processes. Writing center administrators can use these questions to gather data on how tutors develop their skills within their specific contexts.

This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion by Richard Benjamin Crosby speaks to multiple areas within rhetorical studies, particularly for researchers interested in U.S. religion and politics, spatial rhetorics, presidential rhetoric, and kairos as a multilayered concept.Crosby is Professor of English at Brigham Young University and has published extensively on race, politics, and religion. American Kairos fits well within his previous work analyzing Mormon, presidential, priestly, prophetic, and civil religious discourse. As he mentions in the preface, some of the archival research for this book took place during his doctoral studies at the University of Washington.Rather than a straightforward rhetorical history or close reading of the cathedral, American Kairos analyzes several rhetorical dimensions of the building's relationship to civil religion in the United States. The book's attention is thus split between two theses. As Crosby states early on, “The main argument of this book is that American Civil Religion, the implicit system of values, ideals, rituals, traditions, and symbols that lend shape and meaning to our citizenship, has never been properly imagined, and that, as a consequence, the nation's past is haunted by ghosts that presently grow louder and more violent” (xii). This set of claims sits alongside what this reader takes to be the overarching rhetorical claim of the book, which appears in the introductory chapter: “The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul—also variously named the Cathedral at Washington, Washington Cathedral, Washington National Cathedral, or the National Cathedral—is one the of the great, unknown rhetorical triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship” (6). The two lines of argument surface in each chapter in some form, although they do not fully overlap.American Kairos is structured in an unorthodox manner. It is comprised of eight chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion, and split into two main sections. The first section explores the history and idea of the cathedral as it was conceptualized by prominent figures in its development, including Pierre L'Enfant, Henry Yates Satterlee, Francis B. Syre, and Mariann Edgar Budde. The second section examines the cathedral's “public space,” that is, its most well-known speeches and symbolic artifacts. This section begins with a close reading analysis of the cathedral's symbolism and spatial rhetorics by drawing on the theologically driven architectural vision of Philip Hubert Frohman, who served as the cathedral's principal architect from 1921 to 1972. It then moves into three chapters dedicated to major speeches delivered at the cathedral. The first analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s final Sunday sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” given five days before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. The next contrasts the speeches of George H. W. Bush, who dedicated the cathedral in 1990, and George W. Bush, who offered pulpit remarks for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Closing the trilogy is a chapter dedicated to the 2014 address of Cameron Partridge, an openly transgender Episcopal chaplain, and the 2018 interring of Matthew Shepard's remains within the cathedral, each highlighting the institution's role in promoting LGBTQ+ causes.Drawing liberally from the chapter on Dr. King, Crosby links various elements of the National Cathedral's rhetorical life to the concept of kairos. Building on James L. Kinneavy's theological work, Crosby defines kairos as “not just a moment; it is . . . an opening into what is truly real” (23). For Crosby, American kairos comprises “a sacred space wherein citizens could be moved by their experience of the country's heroes, deeds, and ideals, a space wherein citizenship becomes a holy practice” (23). One of the limitations of this book is that it does not offer precise definitions for these constituent terms—holy, religion, sacred, etc.—and thus does not fully articulate what separates “civil religion” from “religion” proper. By drawing on a wider and more critical literature on the intersection of faith, politics, religion, and society via the work of thinkers like Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, David Bentley Hart, Kyle Harper, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Neuhaus, Charles Taylor, or Joseph Massad, the book's claims regarding kairos and the cathedral might have delineated those concepts more sharply. Regardless, Crosby robustly identifies fractures and inconsistencies within American civil religion and shows how those divisions manifested within the cathedral's rhetorical career, concluding the book with a call for the United States “to imagine itself at the helm of something unique . . . by throwing out all notions that we are a nation with a distinct religious or ethnic past. From there, we will find that we remain as rich as ever in the raw materials of civil-religious potential” (233).Along the way, the book makes several notable academic contributions. First, it provides a first-rate close reading of the National Cathedral itself. Chapter Five, which synthesizes scholarship on spatial rhetorics with Frohman's “fourth dimension” approach to ecclesial architecture that prioritizes “an experience in which the worshipper loses all sense of time and space and becomes co-present with God,” is a major contribution of the book (144). It offers a useful guide for scholars who seek to understand the sacred as it intersects the rhetoric of space and place. Second, the first section of the book offers a fascinating history of the National Cathedral as a rhetorical site, perhaps providing a roadmap for future scholarship that seeks to perform a similar diachronic rhetorical analysis of a specific monument, building, or public space. Third, Crosby's meditations on kairos, particularly in the preface and introduction, offer an insightful and interdisciplinary take on an oft invoked and potentially ambiguous rhetorical concept. Additionally, the book does a good job of situating its criticism of the chosen rhetorical artifacts within their articulatory and civil religious contexts by referencing the cathedral archives and other primary sources. American Kairos is, if nothing else, a work of patient and extensive research that models the best practices of public address scholarship.That said, the book has several areas where it could be stronger. First, the overall structure confused this reader. Perhaps because of its patient composition, the chapter sequencing can jump across historical eras and arguments, making important throughlines between chapters difficult to identify beyond general themes. While beginning with L'Enfant's dream of a national church makes sense chronologically, the result is that the book begins with a detailed, contested history of a rhetorical institution across multiple chapters without fully establishing from the start the rhetorical dimensions of that institution. One of the casualties of this organizational design is that a sustained rhetorical analysis of the National Cathedral's relationship to other spaces in the District of Columbia as they exist today is not provided. This absence seems all the more striking given Chapter Three's focus on anti-Catholic attitudes among nineteenth century Protestants. This chapter could have been expanded by discussing the proximity of the National Cathedral to a major center of Catholic life in the United States—Maryland and northeast Washington D.C.—epitomized by the Catholic University of America (established 1887), which boasts its own cathedral on a rival hill a mere five miles away (The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, consecrated in 1920). That this information is left out seems like a missed opportunity.Second, the wide-ranging organizational structure leads to an attenuated sense of context at times across the book. For example, Chapter Four's discussion of Mariann Edgar Budde, the cathedral bishop since 2011, references several controversies related to President Donald Trump along with McCarthyism, xenophobia, immigration, and standards of civic dignity over the span of three pages. Chapter Three does not reference any anti-Catholic invective from Protestant pulpits prior to the nineteenth century or any of the significant criticisms of liberalism, democracy, and the United States offered by the Vatican during this era. Chapter One describes L'Enfant's vision of a “Great Church for National Purposes” that would be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination, but equally open to all” (48–49). Crosby returns to this description in later chapters, even asking, “Was L'Enfant's church supposed to be Christian?” (122). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough explanation of what a non-Christian church would look like and what would differentiate it from another kind of religious gathering. As these brief examples illustrate, while the book ably analyzes the rhetorical figures it selects, it sometimes struggles to capture key elements and the full complexity of the broader context, which may in part reflect the book's ambitious scope.Finally, a main contention of American Kairos is the polemic assertion that “we have never had a coherent civil religion” (230). Likening the National Cathedral's attempt to embody American civil religion to “a charioteer holding the reigns of wrangling horses” (143), Crosby laments the cathedral's serpentine history and mishmash of iconography as “brilliant but unsettling and perhaps nonsensical” (163). Crosby proposes a view of the National Cathedral as an embodiment of a new civil religion: I imagine his [L'Enfant's] church as a place of ritual and memorial, yes, but also a great center of civic education where students and citizens come to study, debate, and celebrate the rights, responsibilities, and implications of their citizenship, including the responsibility to atone for past sins. To this end, such a church might also host schools and libraries, symposia and debates, artists and scholars in residence, and of course great speeches and civil-religious sermons (229).To this reader, this description sounds a lot like a university—an educational institution with many departments that is focused much more on here than the hereafter—and less like a church, mosque, temple, or synagogue. An alternative reading of the “incoherence” of American civil religion as embodied within the life of the Washington National Cathedral might find that its contradictions reflect democracy, in all its messiness, itself. In that sense, it would be difficult to find a building that more perfectly encapsulates the full range of the American experiment than the National Cathedral in northwest Washington D.C.In conclusion, American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion is an insightful book that deserves to be on the shelf of any serious scholar of political rhetoric, civil religion, and religious discourse in the United States. It merits a readership that, like the cathedral itself, seeks to chart a path forward in divisive times.

How does America feel? We could ask introspectively—how does it feel to identify with, think about, and generally be proximate to America—or haptically—how does this imperialistic nation-state feel when it impacts different bodies? In American Magnitude, Christa Olson answers both versions of the question: she parses affects associated with American pretenses towards grandeur and reflects on the material consequences of America's inflated public feelings. The book deserves attention from anyone whose work encompasses affective publics, visual rhetorics, borders/borderlands, and the practices and legacies of American colonialism.Olson contends that, between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, “US Americans looking from the United States into the ‘other’ Americas to the south created, sustained, and circulated the United States as America through appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence” (6). Each of her chapters takes up a case study in the causes and consequences of the United States’ hegemony in relation to its neighbors. As her focus ranges across visual media from lithographs to animated films, she charts how public feelings accumulate, circulate in personal and national stories, and reinforce the self-importance of American self-representation. She also keeps an eye on the fragility of American self-aggrandizement and its failure to get non-U.S. audiences to take it seriously. The book not only carefully analyzes claims to national significance in rhetorical practice but also models how to write about hegemonic rhetorical patterns while decentering those pattern's own claims of importance.The introduction starts with Olson's “central assumptions”: that “American scenes” teach U.S. audiences the “contours and responsibilities of being American,” and that “becoming American . . . required looking not only within but also beyond US borders” (6). She develops those assumptions with three key terms: hemisphere, magnitude, and feeling. Describing her work as not strictly decolonial in practice, but as an investigation of how colonizing power functions, she focuses on “the history and consequence” (12) of U.S. habits of viewing the hemisphere as space to be controlled for gain. Magnitude names the rhetorical engine behind those habits and thus is the conceptual heart of the book. Magnitude, she argues, inheres in a variety of rhetorical practices for establishing importance and so appears in different guises across historical contexts. After defining its “close links to the sublime” (13), she rounds out the introduction by reminding readers that magnitude “rushes through a seeing-feeling body” (19). Locating magnitude in sensoria leads her to the final keyword, feeling. Magnitude's “normative common sense” is not an intangible idea but the lived reality in publics “formed through intensity of feeling and a need to monitor bodily borders both literal and symbolic” (23). Feeling, to Olson, constitutes publicness as such, as it keeps vivid the visceral qualities of what it is like to be in public. Magnitude, we might say, is not just a way of viewing, but a way of life.Chapter one offers both an origin story of hemispheric magnitude in American history and an innovative contribution to theories of visual circulation and public feeling. In it, Olson stories a wealth of archival material left behind by U.S. Americans trying to make sense of the Mexican-American war. She surveys the letters and lithographs through which the “war's implications—its aims, its triumphs, its costs—were before their eyes” (31). She theorizes “accumulation” to explicate why that archival material mattered, defining accumulation as “circulation's necessary counterpart,” involving “the buildup of material over time” regarding ideas and arguments, the slow gathering of “the stuff that sticks around and creates significance” (43). Accumulation innovates within extant disciplinary vocabularies of circulation and affect in that it allows Olson to discern affect mattering in moments when it moves too slowly to influence individual rhetorical encounters. Accumulation also lets her take a unique perspective on grandeur, describing it not as a single strike of sublime intensity but something that can gather too slowly to be noticed. American magnitude, she argues, did not occur overnight to Americans visualizing the Mexican-American war; it sedimented over time and across thousands of letters and ephemera of visual and material culture, and, like a mountain range, grew up gradually. Addressing why Americans accepted hemispheric hegemony as a dominant frame for viewing their place in the world, Olson claims that they acquiesced “to the precise shape of the nation as inevitable, as destined, and as exceptional” (65) largely by virtue of learning to take that shape for granted.The next chapter tells six stories about Frederic Church, the painter whose landscapes colored how Americans imagined “their” hemisphere. Trying to “defamiliarize the presumption of whiteness and [U.S.] Americanness that suffuses Church's paintings,” Olson tells “story and counterstory” (70) in a chapter that could have focused only on visual rhetorics. Expanding readers’ perspective on nostalgic paintings, the stories she tells contextualize, undercut, and complicate “the American stories” (71) and the landscapes of Church's that told them, that treat hemispheric hegemony as received fact. The chapter thus highlights the incongruity between magnitude's fictional “true American [white, Northern, masculine]” (81) and the character of the painter whose journeys south “left him gasping, itching, sweating, and shivering” (89). We get a picture of Church hiding his travails in tropical climates behind a more palatable painting of “placidity and tranquility” (87) that other white men could fantasize about conquering. Olson summarizes that “painting, in this retrospective, is colonization by another name” (99).Chapter three focuses on an irony of American magnitude: in an effort to be bigger than the rest of the world, American magnitude cannot recognize epistemologies other than its own, so it relies on tropes of “discovery, invention, and revelation” (105) to frame other cultures’ materials as spectacles for American eyes. Machu Picchu is the chapter's case in point for such rhetorical operations of “revealing discovery” (136). It follows Hiram Bingham, a mercenary adventurer dressed as a scientist, as he “went looking for greatness” to project to American viewers and “primed his methods to ensure he found it” (114). The chapter highlights not only how rhetorics of grand discovery “make the things that they bring to light” (137), but also how magnitude ignores entire epistemologies in framing the world as the measure of Americans’ greatness. Olson ends the chapter dwelling on the “opacity” of Bingham's “refusal to be held accountable by or to his Peruvian counterparts” (136), which Olson calls innate to rhetorics of grand discovery as such: “revelation, by necessity, hides” the “other possible understandings” (137–138) of what is being “revealed” as a discovery.The fourth chapter further develops the theme of magnitude's opacity, here from the perspective of people “looking askance” (171) at nationalistic paternalism. Olson investigates the Walt Disney Company's filmmaking work for the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a unit meant to sell America's image to people in Latin America through pseudo-educational films that, in truth, barely passed as bad propaganda: “a bad gift,” in Olson's words, “presented as charity” (142). Comparing the U.S. American intent behind, and reception of, Disney films to the films’ reception in Latin America, Olson emphasizes magnitude's fragility. International audiences always viewed the tropes of “normative white, settler vision” with justified derision, in the process “pulling [American magnitude] off-course and making use of it slantwise” (178). This kind of humbling claim—that adherents to American magnitude who presumed their point of view to be “the unquestioned center of America” were “imagining things” (145)—winds down Olson's content chapters with a detailed example of how American magnitude has often failed to spur any usable rhetorical invention at all, let alone to compel actually existing hemispheric audiences to take it seriously.The concluding fifth chapter offers advice about how to resist magnitude's claims. Olson advocates a turn to “post-magnitude rhetorical history, theory, and criticism,” a disciplinary future where rhetoricians have learned “to sit with limitedness” (188). Identifying magnitude's impetus towards grandeur with the American academy's need for scholarship to be big, important, and, yes, grand, Olson refuses sweeping statements about what rhetoric beyond nationalistic magnitudes must be and instead offers advice about where such rhetorics would start. Specifically, she councils us to “be partial . . . keep a messy slate . . . do the hard work of connection [and] care” (188–193). It's a fitting way to conclude. The book models how to deal with authorial positionality in the face of an archive of harm. Olson weaves different modes of narrative, sometimes traditionally foregrounding a historical event explicated by the expert author, and at other times writing transparently about her access to, and affective response in the face of, various archives of magnitude. The book rewards close readings that pay attention to when it speaks in first-person and when it speaks as an authorial expert. Which, again, means that the conclusion is fitting: if we take Olson's call for post-magnitude rhetoric seriously, there was no serious way to end this book in the authoritative, as opposed to self-reflective, voice.One question lingers for this reviewer: Does Olson give magnitude too much credit? She seems to treat magnitude like a problem inherent in claims about significance as such, and not a problem specific to U.S. American nationalism. Olson would probably, if asked, dissociate magnitude from other forms for signifying importance, significance, and/or worth, and stress that magnitude is a particularly American place from which to evaluate something. But there are moments in the text where the distinction does not appear, and she considers magnitude like an unavoidable status quo, or even a feature of any claim about significance by default. I wonder if saying we need to be “post” magnitude gives too much credence to American magnitude's own aspirations toward perfection. Put another way: non-magnitudinous rhetorics only look limited and partial from magnitude's own point of view. Do we, by calling for new disciplinary paradigms to get beyond magnitude, accidentally reify its impact and, in the process, hide how some scholars, writers, and activists all along have been beyond magnitude—and have, in fact, never had the luxury of taking magnitude seriously?Olson has written an attentive and meaningful book, a clinic in the writing of palpable history. American Magnitude accounts for how magnitude matters materially, in bodies and maps, in felt distance and implied relation. It steadily innovates in approach to common theoretical concerns—circulation, sublimity, and so on—helping our discipline continue to shift focus from the sudden effects of rhetorical genius to the gradual accretion of norms, values, and forms. It is one of several recent landmark books in rhetorical studies (think of Emerson Cram's Violent Inheritance or Catalina M. de Onís's Energy Islands) that reject sweeping conclusions in favor of much more locally focused and self-reflective answers to problems of baffling scope and duration. It therefore communicates a sense of the fragility of magnitude: the light touch of the conclusion resonates with a fact Olson demonstrates from the introduction, namely that all visions of grandeur contain the conditions of their own diminution. In its scope and balance, it is clearly a book, like her research subject, that sedimented over time, accruing layers, eroding jagged edges, building gradually. The care with which Olson balances theoretical nuance, detailed case studies, methodological rigor, and self-reflection evokes the steady grace of the landscapes her book's subjects inhabit. The highest compliment we could pay it is to imagine all the ecosystems of research beyond magnitude—critical of U.S. American hegemony, attentive to flows of movement and immobility across and between borders, breathing in various formal and informal archives—to which it will surely contribute.

Abstract Bayard Rustin influenced the trajectory of Black political rhetoric in the post-civil rights era. In this essay, I offer a rhetorical recovery of this neglected figure, focusing on the centrality of his emphasis on coalitional politics to the Black freedom struggle while noting that his stress on economics as the basis for coalition building shaped a rhetorical strategy tradition that I call “the rhetoric of race-neutral coalitional politics.” I also examine the legacy of this rhetorical strategy, against the backdrop of the Obama era, arguing that it silences dissent, de-emphasizes the policy priorities of Black communities, and reinforces the white gaze in Black political rhetoric and thought. I conclude that success in the Black freedom struggle depends on the community's ability to develop rhetorical strategies that position it as an equal partner in political coalitions rather than a captive participant.

When we think of the civil rights movement, imagery of the mass meeting almost immediately comes to mind. We imagine the immense crowds at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, where more than a quarter million people assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Reflecting on the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., we might also think of the religious and liturgical quality that marked these mass meetings. Yet, despite their influence and importance, the use of religious genres at civil rights mass meetings remains an often-overlooked aspect of the movement. Elizabeth Ellis Miller's Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting provides a rhetorical history of the mass meeting by examining how these meetings drew upon ritual liturgies to facilitate collective political action. Miller's primary argument throughout the book is that the mass meeting drew upon the genres of prayer, song, and testimony to provide attendees rhetorical scaffolding for political participation. The book shifts attention from the speakers and speeches of the mass meeting, about which there exists a wealth of scholarship, to the constituent members of the mass meeting themselves: ordinary Black Americans. The book offers an important theoretical contribution by moving scholarly attention beyond the bounds of normative deliberation toward the rhetorical role of religious practices. As a result, the book will not only interest those who study public and religious rhetoric but also those interested in affect and deliberation.In the first of six chapters, Miller lays out the rhetorical concept of “liturgy of change” and grounds it in genre theory to facilitate her goal of examining how the mass meeting transformed “audience members in seats to activists” (106). The next three chapters include analyses of three genres that typified the mass meeting: song, prayer, and testimony. Miller draws on archival research to reconstruct the mass meeting, including notes and schedules, first-person accounts, and interviews. The chapter progression of the book is designed to reflect the order in which liturgies would be performed in the Black church. The fifth chapter explores the rhetorical significance of the liturgies by examining the frequent presence of counter protestors at mass meetings. This complication of the rhetorical situation highlights the mass meeting as a “watched, visible space,” specifically how activists responded with a radical pacifism made possible through liturgical enactment (130). The concluding chapter turns to the contemporary use and limits of liturgy as activism.Chapter two, “Sounding Civic Identity: Freedom Song Invention at the Mass Meeting,” attends to activist song as an example of genre invention and, at the same time, the rhetorical potential of sound “as a constitutive resource” (50). Freedom songs required the leader to engage in “selection, adaption, and performance” (50). Miller explains how these songs articulated a collective identity often in the very spaces where this identity was denied (50). Thus, songs like “Woke Up this Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom” and “This Little Light of Mine” demonstrate the constitutive potential of sound for configuring collective identities and establishing an activist ethos of radical pacifism. In chapter three, Miller turns to “activist prayer,” arguing that it contained a “paradox of peace and the unruly” (79). Miller argues that, while prayer remains an overlooked genre of the movement due to it being “not obviously activist” (77), collective prayer had an important rhetorical function that allowed activists to simultaneously “display peace” and engage in protest in public and segregated spaces (77). Here, Miller examines both directed and pedagogic prayers, with the former defined as prayer led by a speaker and the latter as the collective teaching of activist prayers. Thus, through “genre, gesture, and theology” (79), participants collectively “crafted [a] reverent resistant identity and posture” and, in doing so, “constituted themselves as a peaceful group insistent on change” (78). Drawing on Jonathan Alexander and Susan Jarratt's notion of “unruly genres,” Miller defines prayer as “unruly” because it “violated racialized norms regarding what spaces Black bodies should inhabit” and “unsettled religious norms for where prayer should occur” (79).The fourth chapter explores the use of testimony at the mass meeting. Drawing on the scholarship of Geneva Smitherman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Rhea Estelle Lathan, Miller suggests that testimony provided participants a flexible genre with which to “testify” to their lived experience of racism and to “take the first steps into collective participation and rhetorical performance” (101). The overarching claim of the book, that the mass meeting enabled rhetorical participation and moved attendees toward democratic ends, is most clearly illustrated in this chapter. Miller explains how the “fuzzy” liturgical genre of testimony was “both sacred and free-form,” which allowed participants to articulate their experiences, connecting their individual stories to a collective account of racial justice (102). The fifth chapter contextualizes how the three genres were situated within the broader landscape of radical pacifism. Examining the “external engagement dimension” of the civil rights mass meeting, Miller argues that “faithful genres” were used as rhetorical strategies to respond at mass meetings to the disruptive presence of counter protestors. The genres from the previous three chapters—prayer, song, and testimony—were used to respond kairotically before audiences that included segregationists and law enforcement (146).The final chapter, “Faith, Racial Justice, and Rhetorical Activism in the Twenty-First Century,” turns to the contemporary “limits of liturgy” for activism. Miller distinguishes between Black Lives Matter and the civil rights movement, paying specific attention to three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement. Miller argues that comparing the two movements serves to “deepen our appreciation of the intellectual and sociopolitical vision of BLM, while also pointing toward the limits of liturgy as an animating concept in the movement for Black freedom” (151). The three paradoxes that marked the civil rights movement are as follows. First, the mass meeting, while ostensibly egalitarian, was still beholden to a “gendered vision of freedom and citizenship” and “circumscribed the participation of women along with queer young activists” (151). Second, leaders of the era acted in ways that were antithetical to the Christian morals and values of the movement, particularly when it came to sexual ethics. Third, the movement was plagued by a frequent misalignment of the movement's leaders’ vision and the issues affecting ordinary Black people. Miller notes how BLM, founded by three queer Black women, has responded to these issues in its adoption of a restorative justice framework and attention to a range of social justice issues, including exploitative capitalism and criminal justice reform (156). In the final few pages of the book, Miller outlines recent examples of liturgy as activism to challenge the “decline narrative” of religious activism in rhetorical studies. Specific examples here include Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, a book that borrows from Black church liturgies and orders of service for its structure, as well as President Barack Obama's eulogy following the mass shooting at Emmanuel Baptist Church, which concluded with the hymn “Amazing Grace.”This concluding chapter seems at odds with the argument that Miller makes in the rest of the book. While the book explores liturgy as collective action through ordinary Black participants, the concluding chapter turns to organizational critique, comparing the leadership and ethos of BLM with that of the civil rights movement. This disjunction between the rhetorical affordances of collective action and a concluding chapter that focuses instead on leaders and organizational structure detracts from Miller's primary argument as I understood it: that the rhetorical power of a radical pacifism was made actionable through the collective enactment of “liturgies of change.” The concluding chapter not only seems inconsistent with the book's argument but potentially overlooks interesting theoretical questions and tensions, such as the relationship between genre and affect within the mass meeting and the broad implications of liturgy and radical pacifism for rhetorical theory. And while Miller attempts to confront the “decline narrative” of religious activism, her examples largely focus on speakers and leaders rather than collective action. Earlier in the book, Miller illustrates how liturgy has unique rhetorical capacities—to reconcile contradictions, to embody radical pacifism in the face of hostility, and to do constitutive work in forming collective identities. Exploring how such genres and practices could be adapted for the present might not only shed light on liturgy's continued rhetorical potential for activism but also open lines of inquiry consistent with the book's premise.The primary contribution of Liturgy of Change is its attention to religious genres as activist rhetorical strategies. Miller calls attention to the mass meeting as a constitutive event, one that was embodied and relied on the affective potential of these genres and their attendant practices: gesture, movement, song, prayer, and testimony. By providing participants with genres of rhetorical participation familiar to the Black church, the mass meeting moved those assembled to political action. Miller's attention to the rhetoricity of religious liturgies and the mass meeting as a constitutive space joins a growing body of scholarship that examines nondiscursive rhetorics that has long been overlooked in favor of the ostensibly rational and explicitly discursive. From a methodological perspective, Miller's book is useful in demonstrating, through its archival research and reconstruction of events, how this kind of scholarship might be done. Liturgy of Change thus succeeds in offering new theoretical trajectories and objects for rhetorical inquiry while providing a methodological approach for studying them. And, as the book encourages us to consider, increased attention to the relationship between religious rhetorics and social movements might indicate new paths for rhetorical engagement, working toward a more just future through genres and practices that show “moral vision, creativity, perseverance, and urgency” (162).

This article offers a narrative account of how we, graduate assistants at a private, Vincentian university writing center, confronted and addressed sexual harassment within our space. Beginning in the spring semester of 2022, we saw an increasing number of sexual harassment incidents in our writing center. Desperately searching for more effective practices to protect our consultants and clients alike from these experiences, we drew inspiration from Kovalik et al.’s (2021) concept of a community contract, developing a contract tailored to the specific needs and dynamics of our writing center environment. By recounting our experiences, this article highlights the challenges faced by the consultants we mentor when dealing with harassment in their workplace, as well as how we balance policy and agency when looking for a solution. There is little literature currently on sexual harassment in writing center scholarship, so it is our hope that our experiences will inspire future research as well as fill some existing gaps in the academic landscape. We conclude this essay by reflecting on the outcomes of our initiatives and the lessons learned in the process. We hope that this framework will prove valuable to other writing centers currently dealing with similar problems, and that by implementing a community contract, writing centers may preemptively avoid such situations. Keywords : student misconduct, sexual harassment, community contract, writing center policy We quickly learn as writing center consultants that one unanticipated comment can throw off an entire session with a student, no matter how well the session had been going before. This becomes even truer when it comes to unwarranted sexual advances, observations about one’s identity, or illicit, uncomfortable conversation topics. This was true for Maya, [1] a senior writing consultant at our center. The session began as most do, exchanging pleasantries, ensuring that the student-client is comfortable, and determining how the next 45 minutes will be best spent. It was not until a few minutes into the session that her client, a white, male peer, derailed the focus of the session with one comment: “Hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl.” In this moment Maya, taken aback, must take stock of her positionality, the student-client’s positionality, what is at risk, and her own emotions, and then determine how to move forward. Does she address the inappropriate nature of this comment? Does she smile and brush off the affirmation of colorism, moving the session forward? Does she find a graduate assistant or another leader in the writing center and escalate the matter higher? In mere seconds, Maya must navigate an unfair and unjust situation with the means available to her. Though there may be resources available and support surrounding her, at this moment it is very easy for her to feel alone, targeted, unsafe, and unsure. Unfortunately, situations like these are not uncommon. The Association of American Universities (2019) found that on college campuses, 59.2% of women experience some degree of sexual harassment during their time at the university (p. viii). While there is not enough definitive research to confidently assert that these staggering statistics are reflected in writing center spaces, it is clear to those working in these spaces that some level of harassment is making its way through the writing center’s doors from the campus at large. We have found this true in our own writing center especially, a writing center at a private Vincentian university, with the rates of student misconduct growing exponentially in the two semesters following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (namely Spring 2022 and Fall 2022). From racialized comments like the one Maya endured to inappropriate gestures during consultations, from clients derailing writing conversations in order to ask for consultants’ phone numbers to severe incidents of stalking, our writing center has been the background for an array of concerning incidents. As we saw the number of weekly incidents rising, we questioned how to move forward and what the best practices were to keep our consultants safe while maintaining the “homey” and welcoming feel we, and many other writing center administrators, desire our writing center to emanate, for better or for worse (McKinney 2013). The way forward was a journey for us, a journey on which we hope many more writing centers will join, as the work is nowhere near its endpoint. With this goal in mind, in this paper, we will discuss our lived experiences in our writing center as graduate assistants through a narrative format and the way we handled the threat of sexual harassment in our space. We share our collaborative process of creating a community contract for our writing center and offer the final version as a foundation for others to build upon. We create a framework that balances student agency and autonomy with necessary, protective policy that can easily be adapted by other writing centers negotiating their way through the muddy waters of student misconduct in their space. We believe that our work bridges gaps in existing research by demanding an intellectual consideration of sexual harassment in writing centers as a focal issue within student misconduct, something that desperately needs recognition within this field. We both work at our writing center as graduate assistants, so we are invested in the day-to-day operations of our center as leaders. [2] We toggle between our identities as administrators, mentors, and students, and this gives us a complex and unique perspective from which we conduct our leadership. [3] We see what is going on from a higher level– we know what needs to happen from an administrative point of view, what kind of training needs to happen, and how to keep the center running smoothly. But we also see how the job affects our undergraduate consultants in a very real way as we are “in the weeds” with them. Our campus is diverse in race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, economic backgrounds, and more. With this diversity at the forefront, we want our center to be a place that celebrates it, that champions students’ voices, and that feels like a safe space. When we started to notice that some sessions were impacting the space in a negative manner – for both consultants and for clients – we responded as both peers and student-leaders. Because of our unique position as graduate assistants, in many cases, we either saw or heard the incidents that occurred in our space, or were notified shortly after. Additionally, because we share close relationships with both the writing center’s director and assistant director, we felt empowered to act on behalf of our staff while knowing we were fully supported from above. While there were an alarming number of incidents, we have chosen to highlight the three that, along with Maya’s story, exemplify the crux of the issue at hand: blatant entitlement. In the spring semester of 2022, our campus was slowly transitioning back to its pre-Covid status quo. Masks were no longer required, distancing was loosened, and students were opting, once again, for in-person classes. This also meant that the writing center experienced higher traffic than it had in over a year, bringing in new students every day. One of these students was Arthur, a nontraditional student who frequented the center daily. At first, consultants found him a bit creepy but had difficulty articulating why. He had a certain suspicious demeanor about him, and many interactions with him seemed off-putting. He would lurk about the center, even if he did not have appointments, and began to make certain consultants uncomfortable with his presence. He had the tendency to “sneak up” on consultants and startle them when he wanted to ask a question and had little to no awareness of personal space. He acted as if the writing center was his alone, to the point that many consultants acknowledged that they felt that they no longer had access to their own workspace. As his behavior began to worsen, consultants took note. Many refused to be in spaces near him, and others requested to not work with him. When he would make appointments, he refused to make them himself online (as is our center’s policy) but would wait by our front desk until a female staff member was working there and then insist that that staff member make an appointment for him. Similarly, he would consistently book sessions only with our women consultants and come unprepared with no clear goals, thereby putting extra work on our consultants to direct a session that had no inherent direction. Often, he would also demand that these consultants do tasks outside their responsibility, such as plugging in his laptop for him. In one specific instance, one of our strongest and boldest consultants attempted to terminate the session after he presented no assignment to work on; this resulted in his refusal to leave and an attempt to cause an angry scene, demanding to speak to our director (also a woman). After this incident, we asked Arthur to leave our space and deactivated his account on our scheduling platform. He attempted to return in the fall of 2022 and, once again, put up quite the fight with our director, but we were able to stand our ground to ensure the safety and comfort of our consultants. We hoped that this was a one-off incident, but we were sadly mistaken. Our situation with Arthur only seemed to begin an influx of these types of events, heightening our awareness as leaders. In the fall semester of 2022, incidents began to increase both in intensity and number. Lauren, a senior consultant, came to us to report unwelcoming and hostile incidents with a client who happened to be a co-worker in her other campus job as a resident assistant. This co-worker had crossed boundaries multiple times outside of the space, including an instance where he refused to leave her dorm room. This particular client began making appointments with Lauren and usually did not convey clear goals or a specific assignment to work on. Other times, he would neglect bringing in any kind of writing assignment at all; he made appointments simply to chat with Lauren as his consultant. The advances he made during these types of sessions were unwanted and unencouraged, and altogether made Lauren feel unsafe. To address these incidents, we began by simply moving his appointments to other consultants. The student became apoplectic at the thought of his appointments being moved and complained to both the director and assistant director of the writing center, both of whom kindly explained the policy behind their decision. He responded that working with Lauren was a “clear right” as he pays tuition money that funds the center, and by that logic, funds his access to Lauren’s person. The disturbing nature of his presumptuous ownership over Lauren, a black woman, was made further alarming by their racial identities: as a white man, this client’s rhetoric embodied the financial entitlement that has historically commodified black women’s bodies and their labor. His response to our administrators demonstrated the full extent of his assumed privilege to consultant access, time, and intimacy of the consultation space in the center, a notion that we found to be increasingly shared by a vast number of the student population that utilized writing center services. At the same time, the student began to show up in Lauren’s place of residence, unexpected and unannounced. Because of the nature of these advances, the matter had to be reported institutionally with the Title IX office. This student had access to both of Lauren’s places of work, one of which was also her home as an RA. The harassment cornered her in almost every aspect of her daily life, causing distress and questioning/jeopardizing her safety. We wondered if working with a specific consultant truly was a “right,” and if any codes of conduct existed that would suggest otherwise, but our search into this matter institutionally came up empty, prompting us to fill the gaps. During the evening hours at our writing center, a student came in with a creative short story he wanted to get an opinion on. Once again, Lauren was the consultant for this particular session, and by this time, had unfortunately become accustomed to working through difficult sessions. The session began normally, and the story seemed innocent at first. It followed a budding college romance in the residence halls, but the story took a dark turn when the plot morphed from romance to murder. The story specifically explained in detail how the main character kills his love interest, proceeds to rape her inside their residence hall, and later eats her. Reaching this point in the story, Lauren became increasingly uncomfortable and excused herself to alert one of us and asked how she should move forward. At our writing center, we, of course, encourage writings of all types and typically instruct our consultants to help clients even if they disagree with the viewpoints being articulated as it can be a good chance for education and for changing the rhetoric surrounding oppression (Suhr-Systma & Brown, 2011). It is also the responsibility of both the reader and writer to authentically respond (Elbow & Belanoff, 1999). However, with the explicit nature of this story and Lauren’s clear uneasiness, we made the decision to shut down the session. When we explained this to the client, he stated that “he had the right to bring in whatever he wanted ” and work with whomever he likes. We wondered how far is too far with writing, what consultants actually consent to as they enter a session, and how much we can actually protect our consultants from uncomfortable situations. We share these stories to paint a realistic picture of our writing center and to express the urgency we felt to “deal” with the problem. Stories have a unique way of drawing storyteller and listener together into a relationship, even if temporarily; the hardships faced by one will by proxy be felt by the other (Dixon 2017). With this in mind, we invite you into the weeds of our writing center and share with you our collaborative process for overcoming the sexual harassment we saw. With our consultants’ safety risk increasing simply by existing in our space and doing their job, we knew we had to find a new way forward as leaders. To begin, we borrowed Dixon’s (2017) framework of accepting the messy, everyday parts of writing center work as integral to what we do. Rather than looking at these incidents as something to overcome, move past, and forget for the sake of trying to create an idealistic – yet unattainable – space, we addressed the discomfort these incidents left behind. In her research on queering the everyday of writing centers, Dixon (2017) suggests that negotiating sexual harassment and other incidents comes from working through unsettling events and asking how they “complicate our understanding of what it means to make meaning in the center.” In our case, what do these new levels of harassment mean? Do they affect how consultants interact with each other and/or with clients? What kind of environment do we want to build, and how do we get there? Next, we collected whatever resources we could find on sexual harassment and similar occurrences in writing centers. While the scholarship on the subject was relatively limited, a handful of studies aided us in our journey. Harry Denny’s foundational work, Facing the Center, situates sex and gender dynamics in the writing center as a pivotal point of study. He writes that “our sex, our gender, and the politics attendant to them are ubiquitous in writing centers and to the people that circulate through them” (p. 87). To ignore the different power dynamics, privileges, and potentials for harm that accompany sex, gender, and its intersections across multiple identities is to ignore a key component of the work being done in a writing center space. Denny reminds us that though we cannot fight every battle, we must find strategic moments to fight the gender and sex oppressions we see in our centers (p. 111). This sentiment reinforces the importance of the work we are attempting to accomplish. Dixon and Robinson (2019), and Nadler (2019) pushed us to question the space of a writing center itself – we want our spaces to be welcoming, but what does that mean? And at what cost? Nader (2019) discusses online writing center spaces and what kinds of behaviors and attitudes are welcome there. Specifically, he addresses tutor consent– by entering online space what exactly are tutors consenting to? Is this consent clearly defined (typically, the answer is “no”)? Similarly, Dixon and Robinson (2019) tackle what “welcome” means inside an in-person writing center, especially when institutional positionality is considered. The university places rules and regulations on a writing center that directly impact what shape “welcome” takes and who exactly is welcome. They call us to redefine comfort, space, ideology, and practice in order to consider what “welcome” means in practice. This is a call we took seriously as we strived to address the incidents in our writing center because we did not want our space to welcome harm. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) express, writing centers are situated in the midst of institutions that, more often that not, have conflicting agendas concerning the handling of sexual harassment. This is an area that writing centers need to tread carefully, balancing institutional responsibility with the well-being of the students who inhabit the space. Prebel (2015) writes of the implicit harm in mandatory reporting. She argues that mandatory reporting in centers, and across the institution, in reality victimize those who have experienced sexual harassment. Meadows (2021) builds on this work, highlighting key ideas that she believes will spark conversations in writing centers and move us toward finding a solution to sexual harassment that does not leave victims isolated and defeated. She asserts that we must start these conversations with each other and push for some sort of institutional reform – two things we look to accomplish through our work here. Using Prebel (2015) and Meadows (2021) as a springboard, it seemed clear that we needed to tackle the problem of institutional policies versus internal, departmental policies. We had no internal policy in place to deal with sexual harassment or other forms of student misconduct at the time these incidents began to occur. In our center, we try to have as few hard-lined policies as possible because we believe that policies, no matter how good-intentioned, typically tend to fail to serve the entire population which they are intended to regulate and can easily become tools of oppression. Our greatest desire is for both our consultants and our student-clients to have agency in the sessions, and we find that the best way to ensure that is to lessen the authoritarian policies in place. We adopted this mentality from the work of Natarajan, Cardona, and Yang (2022), who write about the policies on writing center landing pages from an anti-racist lens. They argue that policies even as simple as “no proofreading” or appointment allotments can send subtle yet clear signals as to who is welcome or not welcome in a space. Sometimes, policies are created with implicitly biased rationales. While many policies seem neutral when taken for face-value, underneath they expose roots in racism and ableism, disproportionately affecting already marginalized student writers and tutors. To combat this potential marginalization, Natarajan et. al (2022) suggest focusing on the students themselves and how policies affect them, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the actual policy. They delineate the distinction by focusing on the who rather than the what : We wanted to adopt their ideology of people-focused versus policy-focused procedures in our space. While policies do help standardized practices so that every student at the writing center, both writer and tutor, has the same foundation, these policies can also affect the students in different ways. This is something that writing center administrators must be aware of while working with students and when creating the policies meant to protect them. We took this thinking to heart in our writing center, wanting to respect the diversity of our space by keeping rigid procedures to a minimum. We intended our space to allow allow creative expression and autonomy for both writers and tutors to set the boundaries of their consultations. Yet, in doing so, we found that when things get dicey in a session for a consultant, especially concerning sexual harassment, the lack of clear, available policy works toward our disadvantage. Until these incidents, we had almost been scared of power and authority as concepts; it was now our chance to remedy this stance and find a healthy balance between power and autonomy. In writing centers and related scholarship, there is more often than not an acute need to move away from any sort of hierarchy to ensure that work can be done. We know and live by the mantra “produce better writers, not better papers,” focusing on equipping writers with transferable writing skills rather than making sure they have an A+ paper ready to go by the end of a session (North 1984, 438). Similarly, we strive for our centers to be welcoming homes and not stuffy classrooms or remedial-only spaces. Carino (2003) reminds us that peership is elevated in writing center scholarship as the ultimate form of tutoring, a practice we actively promote in our own center. It represents “writing centers as the nonhierarchical and nonthreatening collaborative environments most aspire to be” (Carino, 2003, p. 96). We see consultants and their clients as two equals, two students, two friends . But should friendship truly be the goal of writing consultations? Of course, considering friendship is helpful for many consultations, especially when the clients come into their sessions eager and ready to dive into their writing. But more often than not, it can create an awkward dynamic between tutor and writer. Students do not always come into our writing center with the intention to learn and do so happily; many times, students come into our space with the intention of getting extra credit, having someone to write their papers for them, or, in extreme cases, crossing boundaries. If I only see my tutor as a friend, what is keeping me from crossing boundaries and making inappropriate advances? Friendship is a familiar relationship, one that suggests intimacy. Yes, there is inherent intimacy built into the work of consultation as sharing writing is extremely personal and often feels like sharing oneself. Yet, at the end of the day, writing consultation is a job with specific goals. We want clients to feel welcome, safe, and productive while doing their work with a tutor, yet this desire should never come at the cost of our student tutoring staff’s well-being, all for the sake of “friendship.” There must be some sort of balance between the two extremes of hard-lined policies and idealistic friendship. Tutors need to have agency in their sessions to direct their clients as needed and to add whatever personalization feels right to them, but clear boundaries also need to be established between tutor and client for a safe working relationship to exist. We cannot turn a blind-eye to the power dynamics at play in tutor-client relations for the sake of friendship; this becomes especially important when sessions become difficult. Acknowledging that there is some sort of power dynamic occurring in sessions can help consultants embrace their desired autonomy, not only when shutting down unwanted advances but also in the more predictable difficult sessions, such as when clients are on their phones or clearly have faulty expectations of what writing center consultants can do. Carino (2003) reminds us: While we do not want to cross the line into an authoritarian regime where administrators dictate exactly what can occur in a session and create rules for every little thing, some level of actual authority given to our consultants and policies in place to help guide sessions truly can be a healthy thing. In order to create policies that brought us closer to this healthy foundation, however, we had to navigate institutional systems and authority, which many times proves to be a much trickier task. When it comes to institutional responsibility for a sexual harassment or student misconduct case, the path to accountability and due process can often come with difficulty to alleviate a threatening situation. Institutions are responsible by Title IX to ensure that there is equal access to all University spaces and that such access is not hindered, for example, by another student’s threatening presence. However, institutional responsibility also includes ensuring compliance to reporting, evidence, and investigation standards, some of which have come under scrutiny for taking agency– and consent– away from the victim/survivor. When writing centers welcome individuals into sessions, they do so with the other person’s consent and right to self-determination, but this culture comes to a halt when mandatory reporting practices bind writing centers to situate the victim/survivor outside of their own autonomy. Holland et al. (2021) write that “lack of consent lies at the heart of both sexual assault and universal mandatory reporting” (p. 3).  Regaining this lost sense of autonomy and control is “essential to recovery and healing after individuals experience sexual trauma” (p. 2). However, when an individual– client or consultant– reports to their graduate assistant or directors at the writing center, they may then be subjected to a series of interrogation from one department to another. This may require them to reiterate their stories and endure trauma for the sake of attaining justice, as well as have their consent to privacy be undertaken by university surveillance, the police, attorneys, private investigators, and the perpetrator– all of which came from one nonconsensual report (Know Your Title IX 2021). The ramifications of mandatory reporting become even more pronounced when consultants occupy marginalized racial identities. In these instances, the consequences extend to issues of racialization, mistrust of authority, and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. As with the consultants in our story, the victim/survivor’s racial identity increases their susceptibility to harm from surveillance measures. As Holland (2021) reminds us, mandatory reporting can reinforce the mistrust persons of color already carry as a result of previous racialization, over policing, and personal experiences of police brutality. The fact that “providing safety and support has become synonymous with increasing police presence [and] surveillance” shows what little consideration mandatory reporting policies give to this mistrust (Méndez, 2020, p. 98). In this way, white supremacy becomes enmeshed in mandatory reporting and decreases a student of color’s likelihood of reporting. For Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC), specific gendered and racialized stereotypes can further inhibit them from reporting out of self preservation. Black women who report face being stereotyped as the “angry black woman” to minimize justified anger over sexual harassment (Morrison 2021). Furthermore, race-specific stereotypes that label Black and Brown women as overly promiscuous can lead institutional authority figures to orient their investigation towards the victim/survivor’s credibility (Buchanan 2002). Surveillance as a result of mandatory reporting then turns into a measure of scrutiny rather than safety for BIWOC victims/survivors. For writing centers, this dilemma of institutional responsibility and ethics of care is crucial to our commitment to social justice. In her work on mandatory reporting in writing centers, Bethany Meadows (2021) asks, “if we believe students have the right to their own language and voice, then why do we remove survivor agency with mandatory reporting?” If we acclaim students’ self-determination in consultations, then how can we implicate ourselves in processes that remove autonomy, forcibly re-traumatize, and subject survivors/victims to surveillance from institutions that systematically oppress the racial and gendered identities of those who come forward? For writing centers, these dilemmas of institutional responsibility and ethics of care are crucial to our commitment to social justice. Mandatory reporting removes students from a place where they “can experience some distance from institutional authority” to a space where “the center– and consultant– is more in consensus with the institution than in collaboration with the student” (Prebel 2015). In our cases of consultants facing harassment from clients, the balance between institutional cooperation and the culture of collaboration and care we shared for each other became complicated. As Méndez (2021) asks, “to what extent is having Title IX as the only option available to address sexual misconduct one of the preconditions for silencing a diverse range of survivors?” To be able to actualize the work of reducing institutional harm, writing centers must build “viable responses and healing options for the range of survivors who have been deemed systemically disposable” (Méndez 2021). At our writing center, we created our own code of conduct to give our consultants the option to resolve peer harassment without creating unwarranted surveillance or pressure on a student. Doing so, we hoped to enact an ethics of care for our consultants alongside the ethics of care we pursue for student-clients. Throughout the commentary on the newest revisions to Title IX regulations, there is much debate over the requirement that indirect disclosures, such as through an assignment, must be reported. Under these guidelines, “nearly all employees will be required to report when: they have information about conduct that could reasonably be understood to constitute sexual harassment and assault because they… learned about it ‘by any other means,’ including indirectly learning of conduct via flyers, posts on social media or online platforms, assignments, and class-based discussions” (Holland, n.d., p. 186). According to Prebel (2015), “disclosures of sexual assault made in student essays and reflective pieces like personal statements are considered reportable” and under these circumstances, “the mandate to report can thus be interpreted as a form of textual interventionism, a limit on how individual writers might ‘own’ their texts or develop agency through their writing” (p. 4-5). While Prebel references a client’s disclosure about being a victim/survivor, you will remember from Lauren’s story that our writing center was faced with a client’s fictional first-person narrative, whereas the narrator perpetrated sexual violence and murder, including rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism in a dorm setting. The client’s consultant, feeling physical and mental discomfort, removed herself from the session and a graduate assistant explained to the client that he would not be allowed to bring in writing that was harmful to the consultant’s psychological being. The student-writer lodged a counter complaint that they were denied their right to write about and seek consultancy on any subject matter. This is not a debate distant from writing center scholarship as many have reported the complications arising from “questions about whose it is to adopt or accommodate to whom and to what effect” when it comes to working with a client whose writing threatens respect and dignity for the existence of one or many fundamental identities of the consultant (Denny 2010). However, the social injustices that emerge from a passive or indifferent response to these works create a culture that de-prioritizes the consent and inclusivity of consultants and even other clients. The crux of the issue lies in how a writing center approaches inclusivity. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) write, “inclusivity becomes complicated when writing centers have clients who visit the center with racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive papers.” Arguments to maximize inclusivity of these clients and their ideas often root in taking a writing-based approach that perhaps challenges sources and evidence, but not ethics. While this more objective angle does enhance the comfortability of the client, it does not serve social justice and through performance, indicates an indifference to the personhood of consultants or clients who share the identities being oppressed. Critical to this proposition is the radical social justice praxis set forth by Greenfield (2019) who addresses the issue of allowing writing consultants to help authors “be more effective in communicating their racism or misogyny” (p. 4). Considering the writing center’s positionality within the larger institution, “our privileging of writers over righteousness risks in both small and large ways our field’s complicity in enabling or even promoting systems of injustice many of us personally reject” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 5). When “the work of writing centers is implicated in these various systems of oppression,” then “we have an ethical responsibility to intervene purposefully” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 6). Others may argue that textual or even verbal intervention in violent writing contradicts the core writing center value of championing a client’s language and voice, but then one must also ask, whose voice and what message is upheld in that apathy? Moreover, where is the consultant’s consent to hear and handle writing directly opposing their existence? While consultations often defer control to student-clients in order to practice student-centered approaches, it does not mean that consultants also drop their subjectivity. The process of recognition and response is alive on both ends, and both clients and consultants work to balance the inherent power dynamics in their relationship.  However, when a client presumes entitlement to a consultant’s right to self-determine their boundaries in a session, including a consultant’s right to remove themselves from a space where their existence or autonomy no longer felt welcome, power is wielded to enact control and oppression. An ethics of care for clients grounds much of our considerations on what “comfortable” and “welcome” mean for a given space.  However, it is time that an ethics of care for consultants is also closely considered. It is in that deeper examination that we found the larger implications of student misconduct on our space. Primarily, student misconduct reveals gendered assumptions of consultant work and a client’s rights to the consultant’s mobility, time, intellectual resources, and emotional faculty. Writing center staff is typically female-dominated, perpetuating the stereotype of women as helpers. The notion that women should exist in remedial spaces and provide help to the men that need it and/or desire it, though the men (more often than not) are reluctant to accept such help, is a persistent problem. Denny (2010) writes of this issue: Thus, how we interact with gender in a healthy manner is of utmost importance for the safety of all students that inhabit our spaces, consultants and clients alike. Denny (2010) writes that “our gender and sex are among those political and historical variables that cut through the scene of tutoring. For some, the point of entrée into this conversation vis-à-àvis writing centers revolves around gendered notions of writing—that there are uniquely male, female, feminine or masculine ways of doing and learning it” (p. 89). Gendering in writing centers cannot be escaped– gender is such an outward-facing expression of our innate identities that it is difficult to hide or ignore, even if we wanted to. Similarly, as Morrison (2021) points out, consultants do not leave their race at the door of writing centers, and “racism itself is not dropped at the door of the writing center by anyone” either (p. 120). In and out of the writing center, “experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1243). At these intersections, the dual axis of marginality imposes extra layers of emotional taxation in addition to being stereotyped as nurturing “helpers.” For women of color, their racial identity presents an additional axis that increases the emotional labor placed on them. BIWOC consultants are placed “in a position of constant negotiation” of identity politics, having to perform what Morrison (2021) calls a “balancing act” of filtering responses to racialized hostility to maintain a hospitable work environment, especially if it’s lacking a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices (p. 124). The lack of a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices amplifies the challenges that women consultants of color face, perpetuating an environment where racialized sexual harassment can thrive. For example, while some instances of racialized sexual harassment may be more overt, such as “hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl,” other instances may be more covert, making it harder to validate feelings of racial targeting within sexual harassment. Such experiences “can be incredibly direct and personal for those who live them, while those who perpetrate the acts may deny them or fail to notice them and their exclusionary effect” (Morrison, 2021, p. 128). In the case of Lauren’s client, implying that access to Lauren was “paid for” by his tuition may have been just one final attempt to pre-approve his harassment; but for Lauren, these comments may invoke a scary reminder of the present manifestations of racial capitalism. The sexual harassment here was apparent. However, the racism Lauren felt may go unacknowledged for multiple factors: its covert presentation, the consultant’s need for self-preservation from gaslighting, and the racial consciousness of the writing center at hand. To cultivate an ethics of care for all consultants, it is essential for writing center culture to commit to addressing overt and subtle expressions of systemic racism and the emotional labor they require to overcome. Because writing center spaces offer a welcoming environment that encourages empathy and collaboration, they can often be misinterpreted as informal environments where anything goes. Regardless of gender, consultants have to engage in various forms of emotional labor as part of their daily work. It follows, then, that women consultants are already doing a great degree of this type of labor before adding in the gender bias that disproportionately affects them. Navigating gender bias itself takes a great degree of emotional labor, a labor that could easily weigh on a consultant long after the session concludes. This begs the question of what kind of emotional labor is required of students in writing centers, especially of consultants. Mannon (2021) asserts that emotional labor is typically something we simply expect of writing center consultants without training. It is something we believe is central to working in a writing center, yet we treat emotional labor as if it is something consultants should inherently understand and know how to navigate. It is not something trained or taught; rather, it is simply expected. However, when we ignore this type of work as a very real and very valid part of the writing center experience, we create a space “where the work of managing writers’ emotions is invisible, devalued, and disheartening” (Mannon, 2021, p. 145). Complicating further the consultant’s emotional burden is the neoliberal idea that students at a university are consumers whose needs must be met at any cost. As displayed in the three stories we shared, there is an overarching theme of entitlement– entitlement to the consultant herself, her time, to the writing center space, to have any sort of behavior accepted, etc. Universities do everything in their power to attract high performing (and high-paying) students, promising an array of services in return, ranging from state-of-the-art gyms to trendy residence halls and to, of course, writing center and tutoring services (Mintz, 2021, p. 88). In this kind of framework, the “customer is always right,” which leads consultants in writing centers to consistently navigate what the client expects of them– another emotional juggle that is not taught, and further, should not have to be. This becomes extremely problematic in writing centers where the front-facing consulting service is primarily conducted by women. The underlying notion of client-as-consumer tips the scale of the power dynamics between client and female consultant before the session even begins. When dealing with the emotional labor and trauma that accompany sexual harassment in sessions, the conjunction of neoliberal ideals and gendered expectations exacerbates the problems faced by our women consultants. By failing to create a space where emotional labor is validated as hard work as well as having limited policies in place that empower consultants in this emotional labor, both consultants and clients suffer. Nadler (2019) affirms this when writing about student consent for both student-consultants and student-clients. What do we consent to? What do we not consent to? How is this communicated? How does this change depending on the space we find ourselves in? He asks, “when consultants lose agency because of undesirable circumstances they have no choice in entering, how is that not the ultimate form of harassment?” (Nadler, 2019, pt. IV). We centered this question when attempting to find a way forward in our own sexual harassment situation and determined that lacking space for the acknowledgement of emotional labor and the protection of agency in our own center was becoming increasingly problematic. Protecting the consultant’s agency and giving them a clear route to achieve this became our top priority. Searching for a way forward proved difficult as we wanted to strike an appropriate balance between policy and agency. Denny (2010) raises the question of gender and sexuality in the writing center, asking, “whose burden it is to adapt or accommodate to whom and to what effect. Like the dynamics around sexuality, these moments of gender conflict are fraught with policy and political complications” (p. 93). How do we protect consultants? How do we have clear policies while steering clear of total authoritarian attitudes? We found a solid foundation in the work of Kovalik et al. (2021). Their work in community contracts for online spaces gave us a foundation for our own solution and ushered in a new way to handle policy in writing center spaces. Given the problem of emotional labor Mannon (2021) makes clear, the weight of responsibility writing tutors have when sessions go awry is clearly problematic, especially considering power structures, different identities, and different uses of language. The issue of harassment and misconduct in a writing center muddies the waters for tutors and can cause harm in a space that is supposed to be open and safe (Kovalic et al., 2021). Additionally, because students are typically not trained to handle misconduct (and we must ask – should they be? Is this their responsibility? In their pay grade?), the responsibility falls solely on the tutor experiencing the problem, isolating them and asking them to negotiate in the moment far more than a session agenda. Many tutors shrug “off their uncomfortable interactions, thinking they would never come into contact with the student again– so why bother?” (Kovalik et al., 2021, p. 2). Their idea to combat these inequitable dynamics was to create a community contract, specifically for their online sessions, to take the full responsibility off of their tutors and to share the responsibility equally across the tutor-client relationship. The contract stated what a session is, what its purpose is, what will happen in the session, and what is not to happen in a session. Everyone must sign the contract, ensuring that everyone understands what is expected. This study by Kovalik et al. (2021) became the bedrock of our own– it revealed to us an equitable way forward and promised a bright solution to the problem that had been darkening our center. In brainstorming sessions with upper administration, there were questions about what this contract posed theoretically for the power dynamics within writing center culture. Contracts, in a broad sense, are prescriptive agreements between two parties, a set of rules and regulations to abide by that are designed to protect individuals by limiting interpretation and scope. Given that writing center practice prioritizes anti-hierarchical and student-centered approaches to collaboration, contracts in the space can seem too authoritative on the consultant’s end, considering the power they inherently bring to the session. However, according to the collaborative theory of contracts (Markovits 2004), a shared sense of intention and obligations actually sustains cooperation and collaboration better than otherwise. Framed as a legal theory in this context, Markovits’ theory the sustainability of collaboration and community through contracts or promises holds profound implications for how writing centers can reassess the importance of establishing healthy, clear, and secure boundaries. This reconsideration can enhance the comfort of both clients and consultants, fostering a collaborative environment where they can work towards a common end-goal without apprehension of inappropriate motives. Having a community-contract certainly changes the relations among the clients and consultants who engage in them, but these changes can enhance opportunities for collaboration despite their formality. Markovits (2004) writes that promises “increas[e] the reliability of social coordination and promot[es] the efficient allocation of resources” (p. 1419).  This is because promises “establish a relation of recognition and respect– and indeed a kind of community– among those who participate in them” (Markovits 2004, p. 1420). Recognition and respect are the feedback loop which defines the bond between a consultant and a client. As Trachsel (1995) writes, “the intersubjective dynamic of recognition and response, the relational self in close connection with another self, is crucial to the successful enactment of a learning process centered around the student” (p. 38). Even more so, staying honest to a promise or contract “enable[s] persons to cease to be strangers by sharing in the ends of the promises” and fulfillment of their joint intentions (Markovits 2004, p.1447). When clients and consultants can each hold up their end on the promise to conduct themselves with respect for the other’s boundaries and self-determination, they “cease to be strangers and come to treat each other, affirmatively, as ends in themselves, by entering into what I call a collaborative community” (Markovits 2004, p. 1451). Within the nuances of this theory and its application on our own writing center community contract, one can see how what seemed authoritarian actually comes to be integral in sustaining a respectful community. With the spirit of collaboration and an ethics of care, our methodology for designing a contract included an all-staff meeting as well as an accessible brain-dump document where all consultants could anonymously pose suggestions for what boundaries would allow them to ensure safety and self-determination in a session. It was easy for us to invite the consultants into these conversations as non-hierarchical collaboration is modeled to us through our own position as graduate assistants, and because their voices are incredibly important to a document that directly affects their experience in their workplace. Consultants were eager to be a part, and were active participants throughout the process. Our writing center staff is committed to one another, as friends and as colleagues, so everyone took the drafting seriously in the hope it would strengthen the already existing bonds in our space. As we can see here, many of our consultants posed their concerns side-by-side in what textually feels like solidarity to protect each other and themselves. The root of many of these issues– such as phone distractions, expecting a consultant to “fix” papers, crossing personal boundaries– rested in the harmful assumption that a consultant’s time and intellectual resources could be disregarded and disrespected. In this document, the staff brought together what they believed defined the contractual obligations or promises of the relationship between consultants and clients from their personal experiences. Most of all, they emphasize a need for shared intention to be present and active with writing to work on in a session. Shared intentions, as per Markovits’ (2004) analysis, is the foundation to coordination. For example, one of our consultant’s suggestions, “must have intention to work on their own writing” better allows for both client and consultant to move forward with the session. When one party does not share this intention, then the consultation moves backwards in progress. These statements relate to our mission, to the expectations of a client so that a consultation can be collaborative, and to the non-negotiable behavior in a workplace. We wrote this first draft of the contract towards the end of the semester, when student misconduct and sexual harassment reports had lessened, but we still felt its impact across the space. Examining the language here, such as posing every statement with “I agree” and requiring initials, one can interpret how we feared losing the safety of the writing center space, alerting us of a need to be stricter with policy writing and interpretation. To the process of initialing and signing, we also added that these were “non-negotiable” rules for a client to “abide by.” While the language here emerges from the anxiety and need to protect interpretation so that another client could not bend our policies to justify their inappropriate behavior, it nonetheless exacerbated power dynamics in client-consultant relationships. It was focused on giving the power to dictate rules and control interpretation to the hands of writing center staff, rather than welcoming collaboration from our community– something we would later revisit and revise. Writing this draft, there was much concern about how certain terms would be interpreted and how we could best enforce a culture of accountability that served social justice. One critical method we implemented here was writing what would be considered a breach of this contract. As Markovits (2004) theorizes, “contracts enable persons who are not intimates nevertheless to cease to be strangers; and breaches do not just reinstate the persons’ prior status as strangers but instead leave them actively estranged” (p. 1463).  This means that a contractual relationship allows for community building (rather than remaining strangers post-consultation) when recognition and respect of intentions, goals, and obligations are met. However, when they are breached, the contract itself contains the codified authority that allows for a clear discontinuation of that relationship. Because we did not have a clear policy on student misconduct and what breached appropriate behavior in our writing center, clients often felt not only entitled to returning to the writing center but also entitled to working with the same consultant that they had harassed. By having a written document that clearly defined what constituted a breach of appropriate behavior and the consequences for such, consultants and clients could easily point to their right to remove themselves from a consultation and disengage in any unwanted future relationship. After we had returned from break, graduate assistants and upper administration sat down with our previous draft of the contract. Significant changes were made as we had returned to the community contract with our mission to practice care, collaboration, and non-hierarchical praxis in mind. We removed the initials and replaced “I agree” statements with language to indicate these terms as expectations rather than rules. Removing initials and signatures came from our desire to emphasize that this is a shared community document and to maintain a horizontal relationship with our clients and each other, rather than the traditional vertical hierarchy of promisee and promisor often found in more traditional contracts. By doing so, we also hoped to reiterate these guidelines as part and parcel of community-building in the writing center. We removed the term “non-negotiable” from the title as we began to realize that “writing centers become arenas where the support they provide and the cultural assumptions that go along with them present unfamiliar points of contact between people who might not otherwise be thrown together” (Denny 2010, p.100). As Denny questions in his article, we too considered how we might ensure the safety of our staff while still maintaining spaces that “embrace a diversity of bodies, identities, and practices?” To this point, we altered the language of this contract to match our embrace of restorative rather than punitive approaches toward clients who commit misconduct while still upholding the consultant’s autonomy and feelings as valid and deserving of a righteous response. Our final community contract and its terms represent a culmination of emotions, thought, scholarship, and advocacy we all experienced in the previous year. Outside of structuring the contract in a more welcoming and supportive tone, we also hoped that our specific terms would assist us in facing interpersonal as well as larger institutional issues we encountered. Our first item establishes our intentions and goals as consultants by pointing clients towards our mission statement. Items two and three as well as term five continue on the mission of creating available and clearly stated expectations to be shared between consultants and clients for greater cooperation. Item four is designed to lower instances where a consultant feels overburdened in the emotional labor they provide to a session. As Mannon (2021) writes, “affective engagements are central to writing center practice” (p.144). By asking clients to come to a consultation when they are ready to be actively engaged and indicating exactly what that labor of engagement involves, clients can hopefully better imagine this often-invisible emotional laboring on the client and consultant’s part. For consultants, “emotional labor might take less of a toll in environments that define it, value it, and establish conditions where it resonates positively” (Mannon 2021, p.161). Mindful of this, term seven also seeks to validate a consultant’s autonomy by authorizing their feelings as sufficient enough reason to end a consultation. Items six, seven, and eight are designed to protect consultants and clients psychologically and physically. Specifically, in term eight, we sought to clearly answer what Dixon (2019) asks writing centers to contemplate: “We perpetuate the idea of comfort to foster a setting for vulnerability, yet how do we know what is comfortable, what welcome means, for everyone who comes into our space? Who do we prioritize welcome for and how?” In term eight, we assert consultations as spaces with professional boundaries despite being peer-to-peer relationships. In both of these terms, we also hoped to “intervene purposefully” (Greenfield 2019) in the institutional taking of survivor/victim consent through mandatory reporting. By asserting the right of clients and consultants to end a session without having to report to others, we hope this contract can provide one template by which writing centers can “expand anonymous and voluntary reporting options that survivors can control” (Holland 2021, p.3). Following our student-centered model, this contract as a whole provided our writing center the status of a community with a heightened sense of empowerment and choice. Rather than enforcing the hierarchical practice of signing the contract, which demands a client’s acknowledgment toward the higher power of the staff’s voice against theirs, we decided to place the contract at the bottom of our homepage for clients to view and know before entering a session (see figure 4). While the client still retains the responsibility of knowing the terms of the contract, we do not necessarily present the contract in a way that might fashion hostility before the consultation even begins. At its end result, this contract shows how collaboration works best when boundaries are clearly drawn, rather than ambiguously assumed. This becomes increasingly important as the writing center at our university is a female-majority space where consultants’ identities are publicly visible via our scheduling platform. With high rates of sexual harassment on campuses, a female-majority space requires distinct protections necessary for collaboration to flourish. While there is a concern that boundary setting will enforce too much formality, thereby prohibiting consultants and/or clients from feeling comfortable in their sessions, it is important to note that these boundaries in actuality enhance the comfortability of both clients and consultants to work without fear of losing their agency or of tolerating inappropriate behavior (Carino 2003). With the contract in place, consultants and clients enter sessions with clear expectations of what comprises successful sessions, and they have a written and agreed upon exit strategy should a session go awry for any reason. It is our deepest desire that the steps that we took at our writing center will bring a tangible lasting change. As both of us are moving on from that university, our involvement in the day-to-day interactions with consultants will be at a minimum, so we lose a little of our ability to monitor the contract’s success. However, we left ways for the future graduate assistants in the space, as well as other administrators and consultants themselves, to keep track of the safety of our consultants. We employed, like Kovalik et al. (2021), a behavior log to keep track of student misconduct and the circumstances surrounding it. This will help our writing center keep track of incidents and potentially be able to predict them before they occur if we see patterns form. We will do this through the center’s scheduling platform, WCOnline. Typically, consultants create client report forms to send to the client as a recap of the session, but they can also be internal reports for the center itself. If there is any problem, discomfort, or misconduct in a session, we can make a report that stays in our system. This will be useful for any future research that will be done in the space and will be helpful for us as we monitor the appropriateness of sessions. Additionally, we suggest that the future graduate assistants do regular well-being checks with the staff at staff meetings, to see how things are going from their perspective, as well as work to educate new staff on the contract. Because we are a staff completely composed of students, there is much turnover, a problem any academic knows too well. While the student staff that helped create the contract knows the contract well and understands its importance, it is imperative to continually educate future hires of the contract as well, so that it does not lose its credibility or its place in our center. In the same vein, it is our hope that this contract will be a living document, constantly evolving to suit the needs of the writing center population. As new staff comes in and learns of the importance of these policies, we invite new conversations to be had and new iterations of the contract to be created. This is not a project to be sealed shut and packed away– active contributions will keep it alive and ensure that the spirit of the project remains. We share this process in the hopes that other writing centers across universities will be able to adopt and transform this framework in ways that accommodate their unique spaces and students. We also share the process with the keen desire that we see more scholarship addressing these issues as our work is in no way comprehensive. There is an array of different writing center environments and factors that could change the scope of this work and must be considered. We pose a few lingering questions for future researchers: what happens when misconduct occurs in a center that has evening hours when no administrators are around? What happens when the sexual harassment or misconduct occurs between members of the staff, rather than between a staff member and a client? Even more severe, how do we come alongside students that may feel harassed by their own administrators, beyond whatever institutional measures are already in place? And, lastly, while this work accounts for the sexual harassment of women, especially BIPOC women, how might we consider the other communities that may be at risk of this type of harassment, namely the LGBTQIA+ community? We also want to encourage the administrators who deal with student misconduct in their centers to remember that they are not alone. Because of our deep level of care for our center and for the students we interact with everyday, we experienced extreme fatigue while working towards a solution. We often speak of protecting the emotional labor of the writing consultants, but confronting and mitigating these incidents requires emotional labor on the part of the administrators as well. Unfortunately, as administrators, there is sometimes no higher authority who can offer the validation of having your needs and labor recognized. This further adds to the emotional labor taken upon by administrators. We experienced this in real-time, and we want to acknowledge how painful it is to juggle institutional expectations and personal commitments. It can sometimes feel fruitless, especially when the atmosphere of your space has changed, and you work desperately to get it back. It is hard but meaningful work. If you are feeling these things, give yourself some grace. Know that the work is worthwhile. All in all, we believe that the community contract is a helpful tool to writing centers to make concrete policy that protects student workers and student clients alike, all the while maintaining the collaborative, non-hierarchical feel that most centers desire to achieve. We are incredibly grateful to have been able to work with each other and with the undergraduate staff at the writing center to develop this community contract. After seeing the toll that these numerous accounts of student misconduct had on our undergraduate consultants, it feels good to know that we have something in place that will hopefully be able to help. Sexual harassment is an ongoing and under-researched problem in writing centers, something we would like to see change in the near future. We hope that these narratives along with our solution provide inspiration to other centers to begin to tackle the problems of sexual harassment head-on. The work is not over, and it will take all of us, writing center staff and students alike, to change the writing center landscape for the better. [1] Throughout this paper, all names will be changed, and stories anonymized to protect the identities of our student population [2] We would like to take a moment here to acknowledge and thank the third graduate assistant in our WC, Chris Ingram, who worked closely with us as a student-leader as these incidents were occurring. He was instrumental in helping us mitigate these issues in real-time, as well as helping us consider alternate strategies of addressing the misconduct, some of which can be found in Appendix B. [3] Our position is relatively undefined. We exist in a liminal space between the WC’s administrators, the director and assistant director, and the undergraduate staff. We work closely with the center’s assistant director and help him with any administrative tasks (such as scheduling and leading staff meetings) that need to be done. Our primary role, however, is still one of consulting and working with students one-on-one. Approximately 30% of our work is administrative. This makes our position as graduate assistants very fluid; no one day is the same. We often find ourselves liaisons between the administrators and the staff, simply because we are part of both “worlds.” Buchanan, N. T. P. D., & Ormerod, A. J. P. D. (2002). Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American women. Women & Therapy , 25(3-4), 107–124. https://doi.org/10.1300/J015v25n03_08 Carino, P. (2003). Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring. In M. A. Pemberton & J. Kinkead (Eds.), The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship (pp. 96–113). University Press of Colorado. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review , 43 (6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 Denny, H. C. (2010). Facing Sex and Gender in the Writing Center. In Facing the Center (pp. 87–112). University Press of Colorado. Dixon, E. (2017). Uncomfortably queer: Everyday moments in the writing center. The Peer Review , 1(2). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/uncomfortably-queer-everyday-moments-in-the-writing-center/ Dixon, E., & Robinson, R (2019). Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue. The Peer Review , 3(1). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/ Elbow, P. & Belanoff, P. (1999). Sharing and Responding (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Humanities. Meadows, B., T. (2021). Cracks in the system: Ethics and tensions of mandatory reporting for writing center professionals. The Dangling Modifier. https://sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/cracks-in-the-system-ethics-and-tensions-of-mandatory-reporting-for-writing-center-professionals/ Greenfield, L. (2019). Introduction: Justice and Peace are Everyone’s Interest: Or, the Case for a New Paradigm. In Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement (pp. 3–28). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvg5bszx.4 Holland, K., Hutchison, E., Ahrens, C., Goodman-Williams, R., Howard, R., & Cipriano, A. (n.d.). Academic Alliance for Survivor Choice in Reporting Policies (ASC) Letter on Proposed Title IX Regulations. https://psychology.unl.edu/sashlab/ASC%20Response%20Letter%20to%20Proposed%20Title%20IX%20Mandatory%20Reporting%20Regs.pdf Holland, K. J., Hutchison, E. Q., Ahrens, C. E., & Torres, M. G. (2021) Reporting is not supporting: Why the principle of mandatory supporting, not mandatory reporting, must guide sexual misconduct policies in higher education. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , 118(52), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116515118 Know Your Title IX. (2021). The Cost of Reporting: Perpetrator Retaliation, Institutional Betrayal, and Student Survivor Pushout. Retrieved from https://www.knowyourix.org/wp- content/uploads/2021/03/Know-Your-IX-2021-Report-Final-Copy.pdf Kovalik, J., Haley, M., & DuBois, M. (2021). Confront student misconduct at the writing center. The Dangling Modifier , 27. Mannon, B. (2021). Centering the emotional labor of writing tutors. The Writing Center Journal , 39(1/2), 143–168. Markovits, D. (2004). Contract and collaboration. The Yale Law Journal , 113, 1419–1514. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/224_ah6tbit6.pdf Méndez, X. (2020). Beyond nassar: a transformative justice and decolonial feminist approach to campus sexual assault. Frontiers, 41(2), 82–104. Mintz, B. (2021), Neoliberalism and the crisis in higher education: The cost of ideology. Am. J. Econ. Sociol., 80: 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370 Morrison, T. H. (2021). A Balancing Act: Black Women Experiencing and Negotiating Racial Tension in the Center. The Writing Center Journal , 39 (1/2), 119–142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27172216 Nadler, R. (2021). Sexual Harassment, Dirty Underwear, and Coffee Bar Hipsters: Welcome to the Virtual Writing Center. The Peer Review , 3(1). Natarajan, S., Galeano, V., Cardona, J. B., & Yang, T. (2022). What’s on Our Landing Page? Writing Center Policy Commonplaces and Antiracist Critique. The Peer Review , 7(1). North, S. M. (1984). The idea of a writing center. College English , 46(5), 433. Prebel, J. (2015). Confessions in the writing center: Constructionist approaches in the era of mandatory reporting. The Writing Lab Newsletter, 40(3–4), 2–8. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v40/40.3-4.pdf Suhr-Sytsma, M., & Brown, S.-E. (2011). Theory in/to practice: addressing the everyday language of oppression in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 31(2), 13–49. Trachsel, M. (1995). Nurturant ethics and academic ideals: Convergence in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 16(1), 24-45. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/43441986

The state of movement is a question—of movement, in theory.What is movement, a movement, perhaps not least as the condition of arrival, an “original” beginning? Where does it come from? How does it work, in better and worse ways? To what does it lead—and why? If these standing questions remain open, there is also a chance that they are not questions at all, that they remain in some basic way beyond inquiry, precisely as they beg the question, as Giorgio Agamben has contended, of how “movement” remains “our unthought,” of the way in which “movement” presents us with the puzzle of an unconceived concept, the tension of a word whose work demands forgetting the “defeats and failures” of its use in the name and at the edges of democracy, and getting around the aporia of its necessary power without end (2005, 1). Perhaps we can only boggle—and perhaps we should. To inquire into the “state of movement” may be less a struggle for answers than the condition of question-ability itself, a movement of movement that appears in theory.Inspiring gesture. Endless stasis. Myriad advances. Countless retreats. Emerging hopes. Multiplying panics. Forced dislocation. Involuntary relocation. Indefinite incarceration. Sovereign and disciplinary borders crossed, closed, and blurred. Speech acts—in action. Moving words—gone sideways. Gathering judgments. Calling out and compounding injustice. Cancelling the show. Incursions, attacks, invasions. History’s (always) incoming storm. Recalling, extending, and setting aside law’s precedent. Blown away, in a gust and a measure of time. Rising sea levels, receding forests, spiraling temperatures. Rustling aspen trees at altitude. Getting back on the bike. Staying put for the planet. Finding, instilling, and following desire. Unbounded discovery. Undue appropriation. Undoing what’s been done. Bodies at work, play, and ecstasy—and in decay, duress, and internment. Swept off the streets—and the quad. Vectors of transmission and expression. Breaking quarantine—and cliché. Soft landings and winding supply chains. Streaming words. Tropes turning into (intelligent) algorithms—and back again. Bullets flying . . . in homes, hospitals, classrooms. Struck by the light of a nebula and a sky full of kinetic kill vehicles. Populist uprising—progressive overreach. Equal and opposite reactions. Runway culture. Throwaway sociality. Publicity’s collapse. Privatization’s disclosure. Hopes for stillness and repose. Travel bans . . . for life. Packing the U-Haul for a better life. Generations letting go—and digging in. Rounds of chants. Days of marches. Cycles of emergency. Revolutionary aspirations in the avenues. Circling the leader, demanding commands. Running resistance. Caught out. Making way—and away.Asking after the state of movement may be less about the pause of cataloguing than the open that appears with being still, making a way of moving without movement, for a moment—to reflect on our understanding of the modes, manners, grammars, and vocabularies of movement and to speculate on the experience and so, in some basic sense, the assumption of movement, the line between those movements that remain in the background, out of view and taken for granted, often in the name of being able to simply get on with things, and those that provoke, invite, and disturb inquiry. If, for instance, the sort of movement named a “journey” is a long-standing and basic feature of the human condition (one can think variously, of better and much worse instantiations, from the Odyssey to the bloody quests for “salvation” that might have but mostly didn’t hinge on the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow to the Trail of Tears and Middle Passage to the moon shots), what’s happening in an American culture currently besotted with the idea of “being on a journey”—of discovery, fitness, creativity, acceptance, recovery, parenthood, leadership, home ownership, and so on and so forth. One wonders—or boggles—if such journeys, if they are journeys, whether as events, metaphors, or, speech acts, amount to prefigured objects or open-ended activities (Folit-Weinberg 2022). If not nostalgic, many seem self-indulgent if not self-confounding, at least those that have no apparent way of beginning or ending and so amount to passing time. Some smack of a home-baked lockdown hangover cure, while others present as a way to resist political stasis, though it’s not always easy to differentiate this latter impulse from the desire to run away, whether from oneself or from everyone else. More than a few are looking to find a more or less lost plot, one that’s been perhaps derailed by too much scrolling. It’s difficult to say, as the trope (topos, more likely) rarely distances itself from its own cliché. And so, this too shall pass—and quickly. Madison Avenue (itself now displaced into the influencer ether) will soon enough turn its eye to another notion. The journey will come to a close, whether successfully or as a function of getting lost or just running out of steam. One movement will enable, cover, and confound another. And so on. Entropy and revolution will touch, a coincidence that bears wholly on the fate of the romanticized “social movement,” the pure light of a heralded beginning giving way to the shadowy work of institutionalization and the latter’s paralyzing “corruption.”As Aristotle had it: “Now if a thing is moved, it can be otherwise than it is,” except for that unnamed and unnamable “something—X—which moves while being itself unmoved, existing actually” (XII, vii, 1072b). Timely, at least for its hint that inquiry into the state of movement confronts and expresses an exception, an aporia, and a paradox. First, the exception, as the state of movement is . . . movement. It’s all (in) motion, all the time, in the background, round and round. At quantum, atomic, cellular, and bodily levels, there is no pause—in gravity, form, life, or death. And for the most part, as we go about the movements of the day, all of this remains in the background, the ground of the lifeworld. The sun rises. One breath follows another. The coffee drips into the cup. Ideas appear, not least with the words that arrive, and the words that are expressed, more or less where they are supposed to go. Paths are forged, though mostly followed. Places along the way are ignored, encountered, and forgotten. Mis-steps happen. Mis-takes are made. All in all, bedrock is a vast and mostly unseen and unappreciated complex of movement, which means that there is nowhere to actually stand, no place that affords certain standing. The irony of the human lifeworld (in antiquity: the ground of tragedy) in which zoē gives way to bios, in which life exceeds the necessities of simply staying alive, is that living being cannot be what it is—in constant motion, in infinite flux, in complete contingency. If all movement all the time is stasis, everyday life, at least, begins in exception to its movement, a way of being inside and outside what it is, moving inside and outside its movement, in the name of a beginning, a power to pause and move anew.Second, the aporia, the statement that expresses the state of movement only by altering its speed and blocking its trajectory, often forcing it to turn—around, one way or another, if not on itself. As an impulse to inquire into the existence, nature, or qualities of movement, the statement aims toward and proffers what movement is, an account that puts movement in its place, even as movement qua movement has long been a condition of the epistemic interest that underwrites the work of definition—the movement of reason (Kotef 2013, 5). If understanding the world entails leaving the cave and getting out into the world, such movement may be thwarted by the words that are addressed to moving, the words that move themselves but which can’t keep up with (their own) experience, that arrive to movement only by displacing, slowing, rerouting, and perhaps stopping it in its tracks. In kinēsis (and semiotics): movement-disturbing-movement is not simply tautology. And in so many words, in language, an account of movement amounts to its reification, its interruption, an aporia that turns more complicated precisely as the word that is always behind, always dragging movement toward a halt is itself moving, the moving words of the speech act, trope, rhetorical-argument, poetic, and translation, the words that move within and beyond what they state, that hold a power to move that vibrates, resonates, and shimmers with potential, a power that remains in-between, that may or may not come to be.1Third, the paradox, the movement that puts us in a state, a condition fundamental and anathema to politics, that recalls Oedipus’s recollection of the dangers held in kinēsis, the movement that disturbs the given design and profanes the sanctified order, the constitutive mysteries that inaugurate the movements that they then strive to control (1527). Hence the difficulty of locating let alone critically accounting for movement, a concept that appears in the midst, at the very center of the political-ethical life that cannot fully bear its disorder, insecurity, and ambiguity. As Agamben observes, “Movement is the impossibility, indefiniteness, and imperfection of every politics” (2005, 3). It is, in Hagar Kotef’s useful account, the “manifestation (and precondition) of a free social order” at the same time that such “freedom is only politically valuable if it relies on some mechanisms that would regulate the movement that manifests it” (2013, 8). The capacity for movement, whether intellectual, physical, economic, sociocultural, or political, sets the promise of the democratic and autonomous (liberal) subject, a promise that is then selectively narrowed and policed in the name of constituting a state that establishes and extends the right of movement to citizens, the subjects deemed capable of moving reasonably, that is, with the movement of rationality that marks “civilization” and which is then taken to warrant imperial-colonial movement, the confinement, relocation, domestication, and redistribution of those, the “savages” and the “dissidents,” held to roam without purpose, meaning, or propriety and who turn to resist these movements with another (6, 8). Taking leave of “normal” politics and so resisting definition, this movement, for Agamben, is nevertheless decisive: “Movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people as a political body, is in demise” (2005, 2). Movement is paradoxical precisely as it is always in transition, for a transition that defies full account.The remarkable essays that follow shed significant light on the exceptional beginnings, aporetic potentials, and paradoxical transitions that arrive with and follow inquiry into the state of movement. And they do quite a bit more. In a variety of idioms, approaches, and speeds, the essays ask after a number of intersecting, diverging, and sometimes parallel ways of moving and do so through a variety of movements. Recalling another and often overlooked sense of kineō, the collection asks after and indeed disturbs the assumptions on which the concept of movement tends to rest. Momentum is altered—and sometimes broken. What can we yet say about the given modes, manners, and forms of movement? On what does movement depend, and what does it yield, as energy, force, or power—in time, across space, and through words? On what conditions does it disperse, dissipate, and still? How is it experienced, understood, and perhaps assessed as so much the better or worse? And with these inquiries, one finds a dedicated concern for the movement of inquiry itself, the arrival, appearance, and disturbance of a question, with its turns, arcs, circulations, and deviations, including the disorderly and disordering economies of interdisciplinary wonder. In short, these essays move. And, not least as essays, they are on the move. To their credit, individually and together, they are not quite here, not necessarily, where they are supposed to be, as they take their leave, often very subtly, to ask after the state of movement, holding out and expressing the possibility of being elsewhere and otherwise, at least for a moment, with and without the promise of return.In and along their way, finding and making way, these essays move with movement. They do so in a way that recalls and recollects an old and perhaps still important idea, one that is not always easy to see and for which there is not always a place. Here, there is a disclosure of theory, of theoria—as movement, in its movement, the paths beyond the walls that are found, followed, and sometimes forged by the theoros, those who undertook a passage if not a pilgrimage in the name of setting eyes on a spectacle before returning home (nostos) and setting forth their vision in so many (pre)measured words (epideictic).Theory moves—or, at least it used to. In theoria, it may have begun with a call to take leave, a decision if not a demand to set out and see the sights, take it all in, and report back. In the sixth and fifth centuries (BCE), as Andrea Wilson Nightingale reads the record, theoria was “generally defined as a journey or pilgrimage to a destination away from one’s own city for the purposes of seeing as an eye-witness certain events or spectacles” (2001, 29).2 In a civic capacity, the theoros was “an official envoy” charged to consult an oracle, undertake various rituals, and return with an account of what they had done and witnessed. Such work, if it was work, could also involve travel to religious festivals, events that blurred the line between secular and sacred space, precisely as it afforded the chance for the theoros to “assert the voice of one’s own polis” and gather those words that arrive from beyond (Rutherford 1995, 276). In all of this, including the excursions of private citizens interested to see the world and experience other cultures, Nightingale contends that “the practice of theoria encompassed the entire journey including the detachment from home, the spectating, and the final reentry” even as she stresses that “at its center was the act of seeing, generally focused on a sacred object or spectacle” (2004, 3–4). In theoria, the theoros “entered into a ‘ritualized visuality’ in which secular modes of viewing were screened out by religious rites and practice” (4). Thus, prefiguring the familiar concept of theory as first and foremost rooted in the ocular (theoria from thea, rather than theo or theos), the stress here is on each “end” of the movement undertaken by the theoros, the spectacle taken in upon arrival and the epideictic words offered upon return (Cassin 2004, 1037).What then of theory’s passage, the grounds, appearance, experience, and value of the movement on which a basic sense of theoria is held to rest, in which it unfolds, and through which it promises insight? Inquiry into the state of movement offers one way (there are a variety of others) to dislodge and (re)open this question, perhaps all the more so in light of the city-state’s charge to the theoros and its contested rules (evident, for instance, in Plato’s Laws XII, 953) regarding who can pass through the gates, hear the oracle, speak for the polis, and judge what is best said upon return. It’s a question that may unravel itself, as it involves un-assuming theory and setting it (back) into motion, perhaps by wandering off method’s oft-trod telic path (hodos) and displacing the theoros turned itinerary-laden tourist unable or unwilling to wonder after the “excluded” middle of the trip.3 As they stand, as neither of these typical excursions show much interest to actually leave the city, there is then little chance of their being without the banister of recognition, of being unrecognized, if only for a moment, without the laws of analysis, interpretation, and communication. So too, on this trip without movement, there is never a doubt that the homologeō rides for free, with no charge for its baggage. Never then at a loss for words. No need even for a moment of silence. No need to hear let alone listen. In short, no experience of language as such, as a question not to be asked in so many words but as questionability itself. Benjamin’s aside is crucial: “(A questioner is someone who never in his entire life has given a thought to language, but now wants to do right by it. A questioner is affable towards gods.)”; that is, the appearance of potentiality in which the beautiful soul turns on its addiction to (its own) “becoming” and confronts the bad infinity of (its own) promise turned into endless waiting.4 In the name of politics, at least, the movement of transition abides in a difficult middle, in the collision of the power of beginning and the aporia set down by the causality of fate.The state of movement is a question—of theoria, as movement.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is an evidence-based exploration of philosopher John Dewey's influence on the Republic of India's constitutional mastermind Bhimrao Ambedkar—but such a description understates Scott Stroud's achievement. Drawing on material and archival research, Stroud chronicles Ambedkar's reception, creative appropriation, and reconstruction of pragmatism in the unique context of India's emerging democracy and battle against caste oppression. As a contribution to the global history of pragmatism, and as an extrapolation of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric, Stroud's book speaks to scholars interested in rhetoric, philosophy, pragmatism, democracy, social justice, religion, caste/class, politics, public address, and their complex intersections.From the outset, Stroud stresses the importance of not merely finding similarities between Dewey's work and Ambedkar's. Instead, he reconstructs the actual content and form of Deweyan ideas that Ambedkar encountered while at Columbia University and throughout his life. Stroud's project is to account for Dewey “as Ambedkar knew him” (3, emphasis original). Rather than simply adopting Dewey, Ambedkar also rejected, revised, and synthesized portions of Dewey's thought with his own distinct philosophy. For Stroud, Ambedkar is a pragmatist whose audience awareness and rhetorical practice were likewise shaped by Dewey. Additionally, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar had a deep, early interest in connecting Buddhism to pragmatism as a potential solution for caste oppression. This is a significant reconsideration of the commonly accepted story of Ambedkar, but Stroud offers both tantalizing and compelling evidence that Buddhism was a focus for him while at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and therefore may not have been a late development for his thought. Stroud is careful to clarify that Dewey was not Ambedkar's only, or perhaps even principal, influence but, rather, contends that Dewey “is the best documented influence on Ambedkar's development at Columbia, the most evident source of inspiration and material for important parts of vital writings and speeches by Ambedkar, and a vivid inspiration to Ambedkar's revisioning of Indian traditions such as Buddhism” (12, emphases original). As Stroud argues, if we take seriously the influence of Dewey and pragmatism on Ambedkar, then we are also in a position to view Ambedkar as a unique theorist of democracy, who ought to be taken seriously in his own right.What classes did Ambedkar take from Dewey while studying at Columbia? What influential insights did he glean from them? How would those matter for this young Indian student, born an “untouchable” Dalit, who would eventually become the central anti-caste activist of the twentieth century in the world's largest democracy? This is the subject matter of Stroud's first chapter. Based on archived syllabi, Dewey's prepared lecture notes, and student-recorded transcriptions, Stroud reconstructs the content of Dewey's Philosophy 231 course that Ambedkar took in the fall of 1914, as well as Dewey's Philosophy 131–132 course, a two-semester sequence on ethics. Many aspects of Dewey's curriculum shaped Ambedkar, including the fundamental vocabulary of individual, society, stimuli, habit, attitude, custom, reflection, force, and freedom. From Dewey, Ambedkar learned that socialized individuals could reform society via reflection, changing problematic attitudes and constructs such as caste through a process of “reconstructive meliorism” (35). Democracy, thus approached, is the “possibility of any individual having a share in this general redirection of society” towards better ends (64). These Deweyan terms and methodologies became important for Ambedkar's later rhetoric and activism.An often-overlooked instance of Ambedkar's early rhetoric and activism is his book review of Bertrand Russel's Principles of Social Reconstruction, which was perhaps his first public attempt to affect change in India. As Stroud argues in his second chapter: “Russell's book gave young Ambedkar a conceptual vocabulary and testing ground to develop the prototype of what would become his fully employed reconstructive rhetoric” (75). This rhetoric is a reform strategy that meliorates the problem of force—namely, that the oppressed easily become oppressors. Dewey endorsed “coercive force,” such as group shaming of individuals; but, since that same type of force perpetuated the caste system, Ambedkar instead drew on Russel's idea of reform as education (93). Stroud summarizes: If “reform can be forcefully and effectively pursued by individuals” and if “reform pursued through rhetorical action could be seen as a form of education,” then “the reconstruction of society” could be “pursued through individual effort” and education (99, emphases original). This type of rhetorical, educative reform is what Ambedkar went on to pursue.In chapter 3, Stroud analyzes Ambedkar's 1919 testimony to the Southborough Committee regarding Indian enfranchisement. Writes Stroud, this “testimony is important [. . .] as the earliest instance of Ambedkar's reconstructive pragmatist rhetoric being applied to a specific situation of caste-based social justice” (104). The testimony employs what Stroud calls rhetorical “echoing,” or Ambedkar's tendency to utilize language, ideas, and even complete paragraphs from Dewey without quotation or acknowledgment (115). As Stroud demonstrates, Ambedkar's choice to cite, revise, or echo Dewey was governed by his audience and rhetorical situation. For example, Ambedkar excised sentences from Dewey about education because he was combatting caste's educative norms. In this way, Ambedkar not only talked about reconstructive social reform but also embodied reconstruction as he engaged Dewey's material. This allows Stroud to outline seven principles of Ambedkar's reconstructive rhetoric that largely summarize the first three chapters regarding: (1) societal reconstruction, (2) the individual-social dialectic, (3) rhetoric and reform as educative, (4) the need for and problems of force, (5) selectivity, (6) reconstruction in and through discourse, and (7) the tentative and impermanent nature of reconstructive efforts. Stroud concludes: “Ambedkar's use of Deweyan text [. . .] not only describes reconstructive method to his audience, it performs reconstruction insofar as his quotational practice selectively adapts and adopts Dewey's ideas to fit a program of caste reform in India” (123–124).Having examined Ambedkar as a student, writer, and rhetor, Stroud next explores Ambedkar as a reader. In chapter 4, he performs an exhaustive analysis of two books that Ambedkar owned, read, and heavily annotated: the 1908 Ethics by John Dewey and James H. Tufts and Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education. The passages that Ambedkar most heavily engaged with are synthesized, reconstructed, and echoed near-verbatim in his famous 1936 text The Annihilation of Caste, a text that represents a hinge point between Ambedkar's early desire to reform India from within Hinduism and his later advocacy for a complete break from Hinduism. Stroud aptly asks: why would Ambedkar plan to give such an incendiary speech to an audience of high-caste individuals if his radical solutions were unlikely to be accepted? Perhaps, as Stroud argues, this puzzling rhetorical move can be better understood as Ambedkar's personal embodiment of reflective morality; since his audience was not actively reflecting on caste as a habitual attitude, Ambedkar's speech forced them to reflect for themselves. Thus, Stroud demonstrates that large portions of The Annihilation of Caste reveal a dynamic interweaving of Ethics and Democracy and Education aimed to “produce the irritation of doubt” that could expand into “an epochal reorientation within each member of [the caste-based] society” (177). In Stroud's reading, The Annihilation of Caste is a vivid example of Ambedkar's rhetorical project of educative reform that underscores his belief in the power of the individual to enact societal reconstructions.Eventually convinced that Hinduism and caste were inextricable from each other, Ambedkar resorted to a rhetoric of Buddhist conversion as a strategy for annihilating caste. Stroud analyzes this conversion rhetoric in his final chapter, primarily throughout Ambedkar's speeches to fellow Dalits in the 1930s, which often drew on Dewey's 1888 essay “The Ethics of Democracy” and other aspects of Dewey's late 1880s thought. Stroud explains that Ambedkar absorbed Deweyan concepts to inform his rhetoric of conversion—conversion being an individual act of agency and will toward self-flourishing, dignity, and growth of personality. Moreover, conversion is a name change for the individual that reconstructs society into a new religious order (i.e., Buddhism) that avoids social stratification. Buddhism became Ambedkar's new religion of choice, and he staged a highly public conversion that Stroud reads as a profound rhetorical act. Stroud summarizes: “Ambedkar's conversion . . . culminated in something more than his speeches and writings ever intimated: it was the affective living out of what he had preached and argued for in so many previous ways” (221). “In this way,” Stroud continues, “his performance unites the themes of individual reformers mattering, speech as educative to those who hear it, rhetoric as reconstructive, and the value of an agent's willfulness” (224). Stroud concludes that Ambedkar's public conversion was “an absolutely unique event in the evolution of pragmatism, and perhaps philosophy in general”—the climax of Ambedkar's own embodied process of reflection, renunciation, and conversion (231).In his conclusion, Stroud consolidates five tentative propositions that comprise what he calls Ambedkar's “Navayana Pragmatism” (238). Weaving together Ambedkar's 1950s work such as The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Riddles in Hinduism,” and “Buddha or Karl Marx,” Stroud situates Ambedkar's thought in the global history of pragmatism by abstracting its philosophy outside of a caste context, making it applicable even to scholars with no background or geopolitical interest in India. Thanks to Stroud's distillation, Ambedkar's philosophy pertains “to societies pursuing the democratic ideal in light of injustices that may or may not include caste division” (237). Stroud emphasizes Ambedkar's vision for a social democracy that balances the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Importantly for Ambedkar, fraternity is both a means and an ends-in-view that limits the types of force one can employ against oppression to the soft but powerful force of rhetoric and persuasion, always in a spirit of love rather than anger. Stroud summarizes, “Ambedkar's Navayana Pragmatism issues a stern warning: we cannot achieve justice in the sense of a balance among the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity if we sacrifice one of these values” (254, emphasis original). Most importantly, Stroud's reading of Ambedkar enables us to appreciate him not only as “an anti-caste figure” but also as “a theorist of democracy” whose philosophies have rich potential for those pursuing freedom amid rampant and systemic injustice (237).Stroud's work is rigorously researched and exceptionally executed. When it comes to archival and argumentative integrity, Stroud exceeds expectations. His book offers a sophisticated balance of meticulous detail with impressive scope. What I appreciate most, however, is the relevance of his work for contemporary exigencies in rhetorical studies. I am always grateful when scholarship transcends its raw materials in a specific historic or geographic context and yields rich conceptual utility for other situations. While Ambedkar has often been viewed as an anti-caste activist, Stroud re-envisions Ambedkar as a theorist of democracy whose ideas and practices address systematic and social injustice of many kinds: caste, similar, or otherwise. Both Stroud and Ambedkar are full of insights with significant implications for global democracies; and, thanks to Stroud, Bhimrao Ambedkar and his legacy are now poised to facilitate greater equality, freedom, and community—if his work can become more widely known. In an increasingly interconnected society, American academics ought to be familiar with the work of important thinkers and activists from outside the Global North. Stroud models such transnational engagement and illuminates the benefits of taking the resistant ideas of the colonized seriously. In this way, a book like The Evolution of Pragmatism in India can, perhaps surprisingly, offer significant resources for rhetoricians who are engaged in the work of actively reconstructing other, very different worlds.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

Review of Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives, edited by Gesa E Kirsch, Romeo García, Caitlin Burns Allen and Walker P. Smith.

On archives and archival impressions, this essay extends archival research to the elsewhere and otherwise. The essay asks, how do we reposition the contents of archives so that we can position ourselves in relation to it otherwise? It puts forward a theory of (decolonizing) archival impressions.

Rhetorical critics have often explored the dualism present in identification. Namely, that identification is intimately linked to division. Coming together involves some undoing of the previous identity; the creation of new material and symbolic connections. While identification has been theorized in the past by Burke, Black, and Ratcliffe, today's scholars of national identity and identification include Khan, Engels, Mercieca, and Stuckey (plus, so many more!). Lee and Atchison enter this conversation on the side of separation and division. We are Not One People: Succession and Separatism in American Politics since 1776 by Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison provides a necessary challenge to theories of identification by underscoring the rhetorical work of division within U.S. politics. We are Not One People is a fascinating interrogation of secession as such practices have appeared diachronically across historical contexts from the nation's founding to the present. This book offers readers an astute understanding of the rhetorical tactics that anticipate, desire, and/or negotiate separatism.The structure of We are Not One People is far-reaching in scope and discussion. This is a comparative volume, a long durée historical analysis that offers global insights both within and across rhetorical discourses and practices of secession. In a prologue along with seven chapters, Lee and Atchison walk us through practices of secession and union across U.S. history. The volume begins its analysis chapters with libertarians who “opted out,” or created a separate community, followed by a chapter on Confederate secessionists. Later chapters include discussions of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, lesbian separatist communities of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as Mormon exodus during the early-to-mid 1800s. Insights gleaned from this volume demonstrate the paradoxical relationships between secession and union; separation and division. We are Not One People is a wonderful contribution to how political communication scholars understand political division and identification in and through the lens of rhetoric.One of the most prominent features of this volume is that Lee and Atchison offer rich histories of separatist rhetorics within each content chapter. For instance, the chapter on lesbian separatism incorporates work on engineered communities of the period, as well as broad-ranging historical discourses that may have inspired or guided actors in the 1970s and 1980s. The range of discourses supplied in this volume offers readers an accessible chart of how efforts to build communities are predicated on removal of existing communities. For instance, chapter two, on libertarian opt out, is a sweeping history of libertarian thought as such philosophy applies to community building. Yet, Lee and Atchison do not allow libertarian thought to be presented without a necessary corrective: that when libertarian idealism is challenged on principle, attempts to “opt out” reveal an unstated desire to oppress and/or enslave minoritized populations. Lee and Atchison both explain the rhetorical tactics that libertarians use to demonstrate their resistance to authority, while also elaborating on an exceptionalism founded on brutality. Lee and Atchison continue that line of reasoning to demonstrate how contemporary island homes engineered by Silicon Valley libertarian ideologues are efforts to ignore federal law and power, to escape the destruction wrought by climate change. The work of resisting authority within the confines of the state is fully actualized as an extra-juridical, rhetorical maneuver, an ongoing set of escapes rather than a singular action.Rich histories of secession are connected tightly to the political and rhetorical maneuvers of division and identification. We have long been a nation of separatism, imagined as a necessary condition for distinctions between groups and the basis of personhood and citizenship. Even the Declaration of Independence was understood as a paradoxical document—with beliefs that espouse both a rejection of taxation and state authority, as well as an embrace of the nation to come. The dualism, even dialectic, relationship between separation and union, is at the heart of this volume. Lee and Atchison weave the nature of this dualistic relationship throughout the text, highlighting how the desire for separation co-emerges alongside the desire to connect with others. Carefully engaging each of the case studies, this volume neither praises nor blames separatists but rather analyzes the rhetorical maneuvers of separatist discourses within the political motivations of the times. In this way, Lee and Atchison study both the contextual reasons that motivated secession and the larger political contexts that suggest how exit plans were predicated on exceptional exit. The exceptional exit is to create a selective utopia after decimating shared resources and habitats. This book offers a powerful way of engaging with rhetorical tactics of separation and exceptionalism.This volume presents useful critical approaches for scholars to follow. For instance, one way to extend the arguments presented in this book is to consider how the relationships between union and secession may also be constitutive of certain historical erasures. That is, there are moments in this book, where—if Lee and Atchison had an infinite number of pages (unlikely)—they might have had time to extend their argument that rhetorical devotion to utopia is based in dystopia. In chapter six, on the numerous exoduses of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (CLDS), Lee and Atchison analyze records from the Council of Fifty from the 1840s. In these documents, the Mormon church debated where the community might find safe harbor after genocide in Missouri, murder in Illinois, and wars in Utah. In We are Not One People these debates are focused on theocracy, with Mormon leaders, or Saints, arguing that the Kingdom of God needed separation from the United States of America as an enemy nation. Undoubtedly, the Mormon leaders of the Council of Fifty desired the Kingdom of God on earth as—Lee and Atchison demonstrate—the CLDS, like many other religious communities in the nineteenth century, believed that Jesus would eminently return. The Saints needed to be ready, spiritually but also tactically if they were to live. Lee and Atchison provide exceptional history and rhetorical analysis of these documents.Yet, the Council of Fifty documents are also a vision of utopia that does not simply imagine a future but also manufactures a CLDS history that erases and devalues broader church histories. Lee and Atchison write that Council of Fifty documents show a church built on Joseph Smith and his legacy. Smith, often worshipped as a utopian visionary, eventually became corrupt and demanded the community capitulate to his whims. Lee and Atchison highlight that Smith would, in his final decades, encourage church members to submit their wives and children to him. Smith wielded sweeping power over the church. Smith's unwavering authority derives from a discovery he made on September 22, 1827. On that day, Joseph Smith was said to have arrived on Hill Cumorah where he received a set of golden plates, telling him of Jesus's arrival in the Americas and the inspiration for a new church. In all of church lore, that discovery is announced as Joseph's alone. Such a singular position was fully realized by 1844, when the Council was convened. Yet, Smith was not alone in his discovery. His future bride, Emma Hale, was often with him. She relished in his discovery and helped Smith translate the Book of Mormon. Emma was also an early Saint. Yet, Emma's place in church history is a hotly contested topic. The official history created by the Council of Fifty elides a much more foundational violence. In this history, the Saints claim all the glory, and their children and wives are written out of this narrative. It is this erasure of others that allows Smith, Young, and others to create a utopian vision for CLDS.The utopian/dystopian dualism demonstrates the wealth of ways We are Not One People can inform rhetorical methods. Using the theocratic principles enunciated by the Council of Fifty allows Lee and Atchison to explicate a double movement: First, there is the erasure of much of the content of upon which Mormon belief is based, namely that Joseph Smith had been guided by the angel Maroni, who was described as Indigenous, and told him about the golden plates. Maroni is the one who tells Smith that Jesus had appeared in the Americas. In response to these revelations, Smith expended huge efforts to unsuccessfully minister to First Nations, who immediately recognized that Smith wanted to “save them” as they were “red sons of Israel.” By 1857, Mormon poisonings and murders of native peoples demonstrated the nastiness of the Saints exceptionalism—that if Indigenous peoples did not capitulate to the one true faith, violence was justified.Second, as a function of the Council's theocratic principles, women were erased from their part in church history and made explicitly subservient within the structures of the church. Emma Smith was present at many of Joseph's significant revelations—or later shared in those discoveries—but the power of women to receive the eucharist, to be a Saint, is fully denied in church structure. Saints are men, and women are allowed access to the Priesthood of belief only through their fathers, their husbands, or their Elders. It is the submission of women—to marry whomever she is told, to bare as many children as possible, and to do whatever her Priesthood holder commands—that allows the church to grow throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mormon adoption of women's lack of access to God—to a literal divorce of women from their heavenly father—is how Saints create their theocratic future. For the Saints to march into Zion, they demand full authority over those seen as lesser members of the community and against the peoples who do not adopt Maroni's vision of the new Israel.This brief example is meant to show the dexterity of We are Not One People. Its method's portability enables this volume to be exceptionally useful. We are Not One People is accessible for seniors, graduate students, faculty, and readers of popular press political communication scholarship. Readers will discover that the concepts in this book and the careful nuances supplied by the authors allow for extension and commentary. Indeed, some of the topics are so rich that, on their own, they merit full elaboration and present significant opportunities for further research. We are Not One People should be assigned reading for scholars invested in political communication, polarization, identity politics, U.S. politics, and national identity. Lee and Atchison are in conversation with the work of Paul Elliott Johnson, Mary Stuckey, Kevin Musgrave, E. Cram, Joshua Trey Barnett, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Christian Lundberg, and so many others. Lee and Atchison generate deep and wide understandings of national identity as already imbricated in division and secession. As founders dream of the utopian future, Lee and Atchison take care to show how idealistic visions and initiatives are necessarily based on divisive, often violent, actions. Here is where the method of rhetorical history illuminates the intricacies of secessionist motivations. Whereas Confederate secessionists were motivated by greed and avarice, Marcus Garvey's motivations were based on survival and the need for Black futures. Lee and Atchison draw attention to these distinctions and their rhetorical and political functions. Being able to read secession as a dualistic rhetorical action is what enables such flexibility. Identification and division remain a central paradox that actors must nevertheless negotiate.

ABSTRACTThis article explores rhetorics connected to the 1918 graduation of Korea’s first women’s college. The study examines textual and visual archives from the early 1900s to 1965, drawing on scholarship in colonial studies, Korean studies, history, and rhetoric. I argue that Japanese, Koreans, and US missionaries competed at this college’s 1918 commencement to define and take credit for the school’s work. I show how weather constrained Koreans and missionary leaders as they leveraged visual rhetorics for divergent objectives. I analyze how the Korean valedictorian employed the English language and US cultural references to compose anticolonial mimetic rhetorics. Finally, I examine how Japanese and US spatial rhetorics worked to displace Koreans and erase their history. This study suggests how traditional textual sources might be complicated by considering mundane meteorological, sartorial, linguistic, and spatial details. The article also seeks to demonstrate the importance of broadening our field’s languages and regions of study.KEYWORDS: Colonialismcommencement rhetoricsmimesisspatial rhetoricsvisual rhetorics AcknowledgementsI thank the reviewers for encouraging and challenging suggestions that advanced and clarified my arguments. My thanks to the RSQ editor and staff for their patient support. I am deeply grateful to experts in archives, libraries, and museums in Korea and the US who generously located and helped me secure permission to use textual and visual primary sources—this project would have been impossible without them: to 손현지 Son Hyunji at the Ewha Archives and 서은진 Seo Eunjin at the Ewha Museum for years of invaluable assistance; to Candace Reilly, Manager of Special Collections at the Drew University Library; to Alex Parrish at Drew University’s United Methodist Archives and History Center; to Frances Lyons at the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History; and to the staff at Research Information Services at the National Library of Korea.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1 “梨花 學堂 卒業式 [이화학당 졸업식] (Ewha Academy graduation).” Here and throughout, I have modernized the obsolete vowel • to its modern equivalents (toㅏ when it appears alone and to ㅔ or ㅐ when it appears as part of another vowel).2 This and all translations are mine, except for the titles of Korean-language works in the bibliography.3 For example, see Finnegan “Doing Rhetorical History” and “Studying Visual Modes”; Gries, Still Life; Hariman and Lucaites.4 Campt; Coronado.5 See especially Hyaeweol Choi, “Visual” and Heejeong Sohn; also, Clark, Missionary Photography.6 See 김윤 Kim Yun; Chung; Hyaeweol Choi, New Women and Gender; Yoo.7 Quoted in Bordelon 511.8 Kim Hwallan, Grace 44.9 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim 116; McKenzie 292–93.10 In 1952, for instance, Frantz Fanon famously observed the rhetorical power of seeing Martinicians return from France wearing European-style clothing and speaking European languages (18, 20).11 In rhetoric, see Enoch, Domestic 9–10; Jerry Won Lee and Jackie Jia Lou; Eun Young Lee 2. In other disciplines, see Qian; Wright; and Yeoh.12 See Hsia for Japanese architecture in Taiwan.13 See, for example, Fuller on Italians’ “dehistoricizing” of Ethiopia (401–02). Fuller cites Nezar AlSayyad’s characterization of this phenomenon as a colonialist “myth of the clean slate, the need for dominance to wipe out and rewrite history” (416 n. 17).14 https://sunrise.maplogs.com/seoul_south_Korea.84.html?year=1918.15 See the records at the Korea Meteorological Administration: https://data.kma.go.kr/data/grnd/selectAsosRltmList.do?pgmNo=36.16 Many thanks to 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum for extensive help interpreting this picture. To help me establish the compass directions of the photograph, she identified the buildings on a historic campus map (https://www.ewha.ac.kr/ewhaen/intro/history-campus.do). Main Hall in the foreground (which no longer survives) was southeast of Simpson Memorial in the background. Students are therefore staring nearly due east. The sun appears to be shining directly in their faces, and there is almost no shadow cast from the Simpson Memorial roof on its walls, suggesting that the sun was still somewhat low in its ascent toward the zenith and that this was sometime in the morning. My conjectures are based on the assumption that we can take the caption on Figure 2 literally and conclude that “at commencement” means 27 March 1918.17 Main Hall, on the left, was the campus’s first Western-style building, completed in 1899 (Conrow 6). Simpson Memorial, on the right, had been completed in 1915, just three years before this photograph (Conrow 14).18 박인덕 Bak Indeok/Induk Pahk recalls her winter clothing at Ewha in the 1910s: “In the winter we wore padded blouses made from ten to twelve pieces of cotton or silk for the outer part and seven pieces for the lining” (47).19 In Figure 6, women wearing caps are visible immediately stage left of the open church door and through the top and bottom window panes stage right of the door. According to 김희정 Kim Hee Jung, traditional fur caps including pungcha and 남바위 nambawi fell out of fashion after the mid-1920s, but both should still have been a viable option for Ewha students in 1918, had students been permitted to wear them (ii, 131).20 See Clemente for a study of the ways women students and school leaders engaged public perceptions about dress, higher education, and gender roles in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.21 Kim Seok-hee (11); Pahk (18); 임영신 Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim (54).22 Kim Hwallan Rural 37; Grace 97; “女學生 (Problems)” 13; 김윤 Kim Yun 40, 50–52.23 Classical Chinese: 內鮮一体, Korean: 내선 일체, “[Japan] and Korea, one body.” For an overview of the campaign, see Uchida 137. On “cultural genocide,” see Clark, Living 197, 210. See Yoonmi Lee for a recent study of how convincing this campaign was to idealistic young Japanese elementary school teachers tasked with implementing it in rural Korean schools.24 Kang 111.25 Personal correspondence with 서은진 Seo Eunjin at 이화박물관 Ewha Museum, 30 November 2021.26 김윤 Kim Yun 51–53; 김활란 Kim Hwallan, 그빛속의 [Little life] 209; Grace 97. See 윤주리 Youn Ju Ri 8 for images of students wearing mombbe at Ewha and elsewhere; see 김윤 Kim Yun 51 for images at another women’s school.27 Without further evidence, of course, these are speculations. It is possible that participants of that year’s commencement were unconscious of any politicization of color, although this ignorance would have been despite government proclamations. But these ideas were a growing component of Japanese assimilation-minded colonial discourse—and Korean resistance to it.28 In addition to Kohl and Fanon cited above, see (among the extensive literature on mimicry) Bhabha; Ferguson.29 See the discussion of Japanese restrictions on missionary schools in notes 39 and 40. See also Marker et al. 40–41 for Ewhaians’ struggles to obey Japanese language regulations in 1913.30 See, for example, the colonial government’s 1920 English-language publication Manual of Education in Chosen [“Chosen” is the English spelling of the Japanese term for Korea at the time], especially pages 60–61; see Heé on similar Japanese propaganda relating to Taiwan.31 For example, see Enoch, Domestic, chapter 3.32 In addition to the Manual of Education in Chosen mentioned above, the Japanese colonial government published the English-language Annual Reports on Reforms and Progress in Chosen between 1907 and 1945, propagandizing its rule of Korea: see Dudden 20; Grunow 86–87.33 Kim Hwallan, Grace 38.34 “국내 최초의 여학사들, 조국의 미래를 위해 헌신하다!” Ewha University Blog, 19 November 2012, https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?isHttpsRedirect=true&blogId=the_ewha&logNo=20171598761.35 See Kwon; Choi Gender, chapter 7.36 I have so far been unable to locate their names—a fact that underscores Koreans’ marginalization.37 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, “Mission Photograph Album—Korea #5 Introductory Page,” UMC Digital Galleries, accessed 22 June 2023, https://catalog.gcah.org/images/items/show/10841.38 Harris delivered words of “commendation and encouragement” at commencement (Frey et al. 48).39 In its first decade following annexation, the Japanese government forbade the teaching of Christianity at missionary schools and required them to achieve stringent certification standards—actions that led to the closure of nearly 50% of such institutions by 1919 (Yoo 62–64).40 See Andrew Hall for Sekiya’s role in formulating Japanese educational policies in Korea. In 1913, Ewha leaders had described Sekiya as having “been most kind to us. He has been very much interested in our school and we are sure after talking with him a number of times that nothing will be done to hinder us in our … work” (Marker et al. 41). Given the broader US-Japanese conflicts that had defined the first years of Japan’s occupation—in addition to the educational conflicts described in footnote 39, the Japanese had imprisoned a missionary during the so-called Conspiracy Case just a year earlier (Clark, “Surely” 50; Jun 51–58)—it is tempting to read this statement as masking anxieties that had led to the fear of the government “hinder[ing]” Ewha’s work. Whatever their real feelings, Ewha’s leaders and Sekiya evidently kept up a working relationship for at least two years until he delivered his speech in 1915.41 Nordlund provides a recent study.42 See 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun 96 for a map.43 For studies of Gojong’s reforms in Jeongdong district (where Ewha Hakdang and the First Methodist Church were located), see김현숙 Kim Hyeonsuk and 서정현 Seo Jeong Hyun. In English, see Clark, Living 13; and Henderson (although this source is very dated).44 In 1912, for example, missionary William Elliot Griffis (admittedly a Japanophile) expressed his contempt for the common one-storey Korean buildings, which he derided as “the squatty native structures in use from king to coolie” (209).45 In 1954, Im Yeongsin/Louise Yim remembered Gojong’s death as murder by poisoning by the Japanese (102). In their 2011 study of Gojong’s death, 이해웅 Hai-Woong Lee and 김훈 Hoon Kim “assume that the possibility of poison murdering is high” (125, 132). In her own 2011 study, 윤소영 Yoon So-young disagreed. Recent fictional depictions also reveal the continuing importance of Gojong’s death in South Korean thought and culture—see his implied poisoning by a Korean collaborator with Japan in the film 덕혜옹주 The Last Princess (2016).46 For one example of this translation into English, see Clark, “Surely” 53. For a modern, English translation of the full declaration, see Han-Kyo Kim. An original document can be viewed at https://www.heritage.go.kr/heri/cul/culSelectDetail.do?pageNo=1_1_1_1&sngl=Y&ccbaCpno=4411106640100.47 Clark, “Surely” 53.48 Clark, “Surely” 53; Kim Hwallan, Grace 40.49 On US colonial rule in the Philippines, see Jimenez. See Desser for a rhetorical study of the United States in Hawaiʻi, and Enoch, Refiguring, chapter 3, on US schools for Native Americans.

Reviewed by: Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History by Jason Barrett-Fox Lisa Mastrangelo Jason Barrett-Fox, Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5828-6. Jason Barrett-Fox's Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History offers feminist scholars and in particular feminist historians a dense but useful theoretical method for reading and recovering feminist artifacts. In particular, Barrett-Fox is focused on media such as film and book publication. He uses his new method for reading to examine work by the film star and medium Mae West, the silent film scenarist, novella writer, and autobiographer Anita Loos, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, the writer, editor, and co-owner of socialist publishing company Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company (source of the famous Little Blue Books series). On the surface these seem odd choices since all three have already been "recovered" and there is extensive scholarship about them. However, part of Barrett-Fox's critique of earlier recovery projects is the tendency to recover the women that we recognize most easily from our own vantage points, particularly academic women. His project therefore diverges in order to read West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius through new rhetorical lenses. [End Page 450] Barrett-Fox explicitly builds on early feminist historiography scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Carol Mattingly. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of extant models, Barrett-Fox jumps off from these previous models of feminist historiography by using a concept he calls "Medio-Materialist Historiography" or MMH. This concept provides new methods for reading texts from the past, particularly complicated ones, and requires several things from the objects in consideration. Chief among them is the original creator's use of some form of "inscriptional technology" and their "facility with a particular medium" (48). Next, "another facet of a likely candidate would be the quality with which she manipulated her chosen media and how those manipulations coincided with particular messages, critiques, or other, less overt demonstrations of (distributed) rhetorical force" (48). Importantly (and in a deviation from much current rhetorical recovery work), the material creator, in Barrett-Fox's imagining of MMH, need not be intentionally creating feminist material and may instead be responding to the private circumstances (social, historical, economic) of their own lives (31). MMH would allow for researchers to trace not just the materializations of the subject but also the distributions that result. Barrett-Fox begins with a discussion of how works may move between the ontic and the ontological in what he calls "radical inscription: materialized inscription that punctures the membrane separating the ontic from the ontological and, often, the past from the present" (4, emphasis original). With this in place, Barrett-Fox sets up the discussion of MMH and the ways in which it can be used to move beyond previous readings and even previous qualifications for whose work is recoverable. Chapter 1 of the text introduces us briefly to each of the three women under discussion (West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius) as well as some background of the ways in which these women have been remembered. Barrett-Fox also lays out some further background for the concept of MMH through the discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose 1887 experimentation with telepathy pushed the threshold between existence and knowability, and Georges Méliès's concept of the "cinematic stop trick," which used distortion to create images that were not "real" (much as current cinema does with CGI). Perhaps the most important concept introduced in this first chapter is the idea of cold kairos: the idea that a text or artifact may have been dormant for many years but can now be mediated. This notion is particularly helpful for those of us who routinely encounter historical artifacts and think that they are interesting but need a larger or better framework for thinking about how and why they should be recovered. Through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius, respectively), Barrett-Fox introduces new concepts to help bolster an MMH reading of each of his subjects. In Chapter 2, for example, Barrett-Fox introduces the idea of using MMH...

A World of Turmoil is part of the Michigan State University Press series “US-China Relations in the Age of Globalization.” As Stephen J. Hartnett writes in a preface to the series, “This series . . . strives to practice what Qingwen Dong calls ‘edge ball’: Getting as close as possible to the boundary of what is sayable without crossing the line of being offensive.” At the beginning, Hartnett calls himself “a participant-observer in the reemergence of China as a global power” and, importantly, “a supporter of the ongoing successes of Taiwan” (xxvii). He addresses an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers in “communication, history, international studies, political science, globalization, and more” (li). It's clear from the content of the book that he does not expect his readers to be intimately familiar with the history of postwar U.S.-Taiwan-China relations, although readers well-versed in this history will also benefit from his communication-based perspective. Focus is on “moments of rupture and innovation” in U.S.-Taiwan-China relations because they illustrate how the disruption of communicative patterns in moments of political crisis led to new ways of communicating (xlvi). Therefore, he focuses on five “case studies” of communicative challenges: The period from the end of World War Two to 1952 (the end of the Truman administration), when Chiang Kai-shek lost the Civil War with the Communists and escaped to Taiwan, and the United States separated the Communist and Nationalist forces;The beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55 (also known as the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis);Nixon's and Kissinger's visits to China and negotiations over the Shanghai Communiqué in the early 1970s;Lee Teng-hui's presidency, his visit to Cornell, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, and the Clinton administration's “Three Noes” policy; andThe Tsai and Trump administrations of 2016–present.Hartnett analyzes the cases using rhetorics that he argues characterize the communicative dynamics of relations among the United States, China, and Taiwan: “China's rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” in which the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) draws upon China's “century of humiliation” beginning in the nineteenth century to accuse the West of continuing to suppress China's rise as a major geopolitical power;U.S. “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” a phrase used to describe how the United States has used misinformation and sown confusion in the pursuit of global influence;“United States’ treatment of Taiwan via the rhetoric of marginal significance” (xxix), which belittles Taiwan and treats the people as minor participants in their own future;Taiwan's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion,” which during the Lee Teng-hui period portrayed Taiwan as a model for a future democratic China; andTaiwan's “rhetoric of democratic disdain” (xxx), a more recent response to CPC pressure on Taiwan, casting the Communists as a hidebound authoritarian government that has nothing to offer the Taiwanese.Chapter one covers the Truman administration's relations with China and the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in Taiwan. The chapter focuses on the rhetorical contexts for two of Truman's speeches on U.S.-ROC relations, which Hartnett argues show how the president's policy on Taiwan changed between January and June of 1950 due not only to the Chinese involvement in the conflict on the Korean peninsula but also to McCarthy era accusations of appeasement. Hartnett argues that Truman's eventual involvement in the Taiwan-PRC conflict treated Taiwan with “the rhetoric of marginal significance” by protecting both Taiwan from attacks by the PRC and China from attacks by the Chiang regime. Still, China reacted with the “rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,” viewing U.S. involvement as yet more western imperialism.The second chapter focuses on the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–55. Hartnett argues that although Eisenhower entered the White House with a clear anti-communist stance, intending to release Chiang from his U.S.-imposed restrictions on attacking China, eventually the U.S. government found itself back in the role of restraining Chiang even as it moved from an unintentional “rhetoric of geostrategic deception” (unintentional because, Hartnett argues, it was more a reaction to events than a purposeful strategy) to a chillingly clear rhetoric which found the U.S. for the first time threatening nuclear strikes on China's military assets. Hartnett intriguingly proposes that the Eisenhower administration's use of “fuzzing,” which is often seen as the origin of “strategic ambiguity” and an example of Eisenhower's brilliant Cold War strategizing, was actually the result of confusion, disagreement, and lack of information about China's purposes in shelling the offshore island of Quemoy. According to Hartnett, evidence shows that Mao Zedong never intended to use the shelling of Quemoy as a precursor to invading Taiwan—in fact, Hartnett argues that Mao did not want Chiang to give up Quemoy because such a retreat would result in a “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan” scenario that was unacceptable to the Communists. However, not everyone in the Eisenhower administration agreed about Mao's intentions, which resulted in the frightening statement that the United States would consider using “tactical” atomic bombs on China (43). An eventual result of this miscommunication was that the PRC was able to get from the Soviets materials to develop its own nuclear weapons.In the third chapter, Hartnett argues that Nixon's approach to the China-Taiwan problem was more intentional than that of Truman or even Eisenhower. Hartnett contrasts the formal written product of negotiations between Nixon/Kissinger and Chou Enlai (Zhou Enlai)/Mao Zedong with the—until recently—classified conversations that the two parties had, illustrating how unwritten (or at least confidential or classified) aspects of negotiation, where there's an attempt to be ambiguous in the product, can result in the meaning or effect of the document getting away from the intentions of the authors. Nixon expected to get reelected and be in power until 1976, and what he and Kissinger said to Zhou depended on that. Pro-Taiwanese advocates reference the text of the Shanghai Communiqué to say that “acknowledg[ing] that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China” is not the same as “accepting” that position; according to Hartnett, however, this is not what Nixon and Kissinger told Zhou Enlai (71). In fact, they exercised what Hartnett calls a “rhetoric of abeyance,” tied to the “rhetoric of geostrategic deception,” to persuade the CPC of Nixon's plan to tell the American people and the government of Taiwan that the Communiqué did not signal any change in relations with China or Taiwan.Chapter four covers most of Lee Teng-hui's twelve years as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan). As the first president to be directly elected by the people of Taiwan and as a Christian, Lee embodied the “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” in his speech and interactions with the PRC. Hartnett begins, however, with a brief discussion of the 1978 U.S. decision under President Carter to break off official relations with the Republic of China and normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. Accompanying normalization, however, was the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which made many of the official interactions with Taiwan unofficial and established “the non-governmental, embassy-but-not-an-embassy ‘American Institute in Taiwan’ (AIT)” (87). While losing official relations with the United States made Taiwan once again the victim of the “rhetoric of marginal significance,” the TRA also made the PRC once again the victim of “the rhetoric of geostrategic deception.”When Lee became the first Taiwanese president of Taiwan ten years later, he asserted that a democratic Taiwan was a model for what the PRC could become if it turned away from authoritarianism. Hartnett argues that Lee's approach to China also signaled to the United States that Taiwan would not accept being treated through the rhetoric of marginal significance anymore. Unfortunately, Lee's popular reelection in 1996 amidst threatening Chinese military exercises was followed by what Hartnett calls U.S. President Clinton's “slow motion betrayal of Taiwan” (109). Clinton's “Three Noes” (no support for Taiwan independence, for “Two Chinas” or “One China, One Taiwan,” or for Taiwan's participation in international organizations that require statehood) shook Taiwan. Clinton once again treated Taiwan to a dose of the rhetoric of marginal significance, while arguably capitulating to Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's “rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism,” which advanced a vision of a postcolonial China “striv[ing] for national greatness by trying to absorb [its] less powerful neighbors” (102).In the fifth chapter, Hartnett jumps ahead to the administrations of Donald Trump and Tsai Ing-wen, where Taiwan's stance toward China changed from Lee's “rhetoric of democracy as conversion” to a “rhetoric of democratic disdain,” mocking the CPC's outdated authoritarianism in response to misogynistic rhetorical attacks on Tsai. Internally, Tsai exercised what Hartnett calls a rhetoric of “postcolonial nationalism” that sought transitional justice to heal the wounds the people suffered under the previously authoritarian state (128). This rhetoric also acknowledged the need to recognize Taiwan's Indigenous people and its colonial past in order to move forward; notably, moving forward meant moving away from a Chinese identity and toward “a Taiwanese version of postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (129). Hartnett thus argues that the Tsai administration's celebration of the Republic of China's National Day (October 10) contradicted the effort to build a Taiwanese identity. This chapter also criticizes Donald Trump for sending confusing signals to Taiwan and China, characterizing him as “an anarchist setting into play words and forces meant not to sustain the status quo or build trust, but to release the unpredictable energies of creative destruction” (145).I have doubts about Hartnett's concluding recommendations for peaceful and productive relations among China, the United States, and Taiwan, including his suggestion that Taiwan should simply stop calling itself the Republic of China and change its constitution. Hartnett implies that the changes he recommends for the United States, China, and Taiwan are all interdependent: Taiwan cannot change its name and constitution without believable assurances from the CPC that it is willing to change what has basically motivated its relationship with Taiwan since 1949—the belief that Taiwan is part of China and needs to “return” to China. However, as Hartnett points out, the CPC is stuck in a stance toward Taiwan that accepts no compromise regarding Taiwan's fate. It is not clear to me what would lead the current CPC leadership to change their stance toward Taiwan.Hartnett also recommends that the United States should engage more with China as an equal partner in areas that recognize the PRC's status as a rising power. But U.S.-China relations inevitably encompass U.S.-Taiwan relations. China terminated climate talks after former Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, for instance. It is unclear how the United States can interact with Taiwan in a way that will not result in China exercising the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism or the rhetoric of postcolonial colonialism. That is, in the end, it seems to me that everything depends on China giving up its dream of “reunification” with Taiwan, which is rather unlikely in the foreseeable future.I also disagree with the author's criticism of Taiwan's use of the rhetorics of “democracy as conversion” and “democratic disdain.” Humor or sarcasm can be seen as a “weapon of the weak” to counter the strident rhetoric of the more powerful PRC government. While this kind of humor might anger them, Hartnett's own analysis implies that the rhetorics of traumatized nationalism and postcolonial colonialism that would drive their responses are performative.A minor aspect of A World of Turmoil that might confuse readers not familiar with the nuances of Taiwan's history and politics is the usage of “Taiwanese” to describe the martial law regimes of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo as well as the more Taiwan-centric administrations of presidents like Lee Teng-hui and Tsai Ing-wen. It is particularly surprising to see a statement that describes Chiang Ching-kuo as “arguing for Taiwanese independence” (108), rather than saying that the younger Chiang was arguing for the legitimacy of the Republic of China on Taiwan as a sovereign state. There are also some small errors, such as calling Hakka the “dominant” language in Taiwan (xxii).These issues aside, for communications scholars interested in U.S.-China-Taiwan relations, A World of Turmoil will provide an accessible discussion of the problems in international communication among the three countries. Hartnett's reading of the history of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations through the lens of the various “rhetorical dispositions” opens opportunities to rethink what has worked—and, more importantly, what has not worked—during the past nearly eight decades (163). It is also gratifying to see a major work of rhetorical history that focuses at least in part on Taiwan's rhetorical practices. Perhaps this book will serve as a basis for further study of Taiwanese rhetoric.

This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

Using data sets from ethnographic research, this article examines how language minorities navigate textual regimes in disaster recovery procedures governed by bureaucratic recovery technologies. To discuss the impacts of Western climate governance regimes and alternative disaster recovery communication, this article traces rhetorical practices of transnational multilingual communities of color around a disaster relief program. I argue that community-engaged translation practices operate as the locus of rhetorical strategies against disaster recovery injustice.

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples’ experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as “an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation.”1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, “Reconciliation as a way of Seeing,” Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, “Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle,” Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors’ memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, “Conceal,” “Desire,” “Grateful,” “Attempt and Remain,” and “Purchase, Wealthy” (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, “Images of Contact,” Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of “everydayness” in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of “looking past,” Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might “challenge how images have been assigned meaning” (58). This act of resignification is a kind of “sifting” through collective memory for “colonial debris” which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of “contact” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the “before and after,” depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the “before” pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is “The Long Goodbye.” Deploying the “civic skill” of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person “I” throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A “rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation,” this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, “Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter,” Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the “colonial debris” of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a “palimpsest, layered and textured by memory” (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and “unsettle” colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or “milieux de memoire” (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of “dancing with ghosts” to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as “a beating heart of episodes,” physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.

On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old white gunman murdered ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.1 In a rampage that appeared racially motivated, the gunman targeted victims in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The attack provoked outrage and prompted a familiar rhetorical refrain among Black Americans, in which many questioned their future in a country that seems irreparably anti-Black. “America is inherently violent,” said Zeneta Everhart, the mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, at a House Oversight Committee meeting. “My ancestors, brought to America through the slave trade, were the first currency of America,” she explained, “I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans and as a nation. Hear me clearly: This is exactly who we are.”2 Everhart's criticism of race and violence in the United States—her articulation of America as an anti-Black colonial project beyond redemption—is a recent installment in a long history of Black rhetorical pessimism. Author Andre E. Johnson convincingly genealogizes this persistent, critical skepticism about the American racial character in his book No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.Johnson traces Black rhetorical pessimism to Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a leading Black spokesperson in the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Turner was distinctive in his combination of stature and scolding. As a Georgia state representative and senior bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), his political prophecy warned against a future for Black people in the United States. In a notable rhetorical maturation, which Johnson thoroughly elaborates, Turner abandoned the “sacredness and divine mission of America” for the “sacredness and sacred character of God” (13). Turner ultimately advocated for Black emigration to Africa, prefiguring the political projects of both Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. “Such being the barbarous condition of the United States,” Turner once wrote, “and the low order of civilization which controls its institutions where right and justice should sit enthroned, I see nothing for the Negro to attain unto in this country” (7). In his analysis of Turner's rhetorical negativity, Johnson contends that pessimism, a prominent though misunderstood practice in African American rhetoric, is a productive and culturally sustaining discourse in response to persistent, entrenched racism.Upon Turner's death in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois remarked that Turner's life had been that of “a man of tremendous force and indomitable courage” (173). Turner was born emancipated in South Carolina in 1834. Regarded as a talented, exceptional youth, yet barred from formal education, Turner was schooled in his early years by family, local attorneys, and most significantly, the Methodist Church (7–8). He eventually became a Methodist preacher but chose membership in the AME, as the Methodist Episcopal Church would not, on the basis of race, permit him to become a bishop. As a member of the AME, Turner's career flourished. He preached in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., wrote for the Christian Recorder newspaper, and became a vocal supporter of the Union during the Civil War when he worked also to influence Congress and recruit soldiers. A Union victory inspired Turner's belief that the United States could become a “multiracial democracy” (8). After the Civil War, however, the Southern political powers unmade much of the progress of Reconstruction. Namely, Turner himself was expelled from office, following election to the Georgia legislature (8). At the same time, violence and disenfranchisement against Black Americans increased—a development that hardened Turner's political and theological outlook, thereby inspiring Turner's signature pessimism and Johnson's titular object of study.No Future in This Country consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 details Turner's criticism of the Supreme Court (an “abominable enclave of negro hating demons”) in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation (39). Chapter 2 explains how Turner developed a Black nationalist theology (“Negroes should worship a God who is a Negro”) (57). Chapter 3 charts Turner's opposition to the Spanish-American War (“The Negro has no flag to defend”) (81). Chapter 4 shows how Turner assailed Black post-Civil War allegiance to the Republican Party (“Negro devotees believe that the Republican Party is first and God is next”) (111). Chapter 5 articulates Turner's emigration rhetoric (“. . . why waste our time in trying to stay here?”) (125). Finally, Chapter 6 encapsulates the final stage of Turner's rhetorical pessimism (“I am as near a rebel to this Government as any Negro ever got to be”) (155). With each step in Turner's rhetorical and political development, Johnson illustrates not only how Turner used pessimism to persuade Black audiences toward action but also how Turner's productive pessimism anticipated major Black rhetoricians of the Civil Rights Movement.Among his most prominent interventions, Johnson establishes Turner's rhetorical and theological pessimism as an opportunity to expand the genre of prophetic rhetoric. Johnson defines prophetic rhetoric as “discourse grounded in the sacred and rooted in a community experience that offers a critique of existing communities and traditions by charging and challenging society to live up to the ideals espoused” (9). From Johnson's perspective, scholars heretofore have not effectively articulated prophetic rhetoric, in part because they have not extensively explored its development and application within African American rhetoric. Historically, for example, scholars have emphasized the rhetoric of American Puritans. Johnson, as an extension, proposes that prophetic rhetoric is “located on the margins of society” and “intends to lift the people to an ethical conception of whatever the people deem as sacred by adopting, at times, a controversial style of speaking” (9). From this standpoint, Johnson argues that the African American Prophetic Tradition (AAPT) provides scholars a new, third conceptual distinction within prophetic rhetoric—the first being “apocalyptic” and the second being the “jeremiad.”In apocalyptic rhetoric, speakers appeal to their audiences by revealing that current, exigent circumstances are part of a larger, cosmic plan that requires pivotal action. The jeremiad argues that, despite difficult and disorienting times, “chosen ones” must and are especially primed to actualize a righteous reality in line with a higher calling. Johnson reads AAPT against these two traditional strains of prophetic rhetoric by suggesting AAPT “has its origins not in freedom, but in slavery” (11). Accordingly, African American rhetoric has, occasionally, questioned a cosmic plan (i.e., the apocalyptic), asking instead “Where in the hell is God?” (11). Likewise, many Black rhetors have rejected the burden of being “chosen” and “did not have confidence or think that ‘the covenant’ would work for them” (11). From this perspective, Johnson argues Turner provides a gateway to an underappreciated avenue of rhetorical practice—“a pessimistic prophetic persona”—which contended that African Americans had no future in the United States and therefore emigration was the best option (14). In Johnson's view, this argument is prophetic in that it is both hopeful and revelatory, but it is also pessimistic in that it rejects traditional premises of redemption and covenant.No Future in This Country is more than a rhetorical analysis of Turner's speeches and writings. Framed as “a sequel of sorts” to Johnson's own The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), this work offers a practice in rhetorical history, which Johnson defines as the “historical study of rhetorical events and the study from a rhetorical perspective of historical forces, trends, processes, and events” (14). In his methodology, Johnson illustrates how rhetorical practice and historical developments influence one another in a dialectical relationship. Rhetoric, as both constrained and enabled by speakers’ and audiences’ realities, provides a lens with which we can evaluate Johnson's analysis. Specifically, Turner's rhetorical pessimism (which operated at the margins of both rhetoric and society) sheds light on the analytical potential at the intersections of rhetoric and critical race studies.In particular, Johnson's reading of Turner urges further exploration into Afropessimism, a strain of critical race studies that seeks to highlight inherent anti-Blackness within traditional political and critical discourses. Johnson conceives of Afropessimism as “attempts to find space for voice and agency, to find recognition and inclusion in society will only result in more death” (17). Johnson argues that “much of Turner's work would also echo these sentiments,” since for “at least Black folks in America, there was no hope of achieving any notable and positive status, because not only would white people not allow it but anti-Black ideology shaped the American ethos” (17). While Johnson concludes that Turner's underlying belief in Black agency is not explicitly Afropessimist, this rhetorical history is nonetheless a provocative case study in the ideological and racial constraints that shape rhetorical practice (176).No Future in This Country asks rhetoricians to reconsider what agency looks and sounds like when hope is or seems lost. In a 1907 speech, Turner lamented that Black Americans were “‘tying their children's children’ to the ‘wheels of degradation for a hundred years to come’” (167). “God and nature,” he said, however, “help those who help themselves.” Over one hundred years later, Zeneta Everhart, mother of one of the Buffalo shooting victims, told Congress, “After centuries of waiting for White majorities to overturn white supremacy . . . it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves. . . . And I stand at the ready.”3 With his book, Andre E. Johnson reveals that with the works and words of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Zeneta and many others may stand more solidly “at the ready.”

Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World are models for bringing feminist rhetorical studies to bear on the current turbulent political and cultural times. As we write this review, we are experiencing an ongoing global pandemic; an extension of Cold War hostilities that are breaking down global trade—causing increased food insecurity and scarcity across the globe; attacks on women's rights in the United States; continued danger of asylum-seeking at borders in the United States and abroad; and violent attacks on racialized groups worldwide. These books offer glimpses of how rhetors carve out possibility within seemingly impossible situations. Read together, they can help rhetorical scholars theorize new forms of agency, coalition, belonging, and hope. While Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope traces hope and belonging in U.S. national contexts, and is especially situated in higher education, How to Belong focuses on patterns of agency and coalition-building transnationally. These books provide a better understanding of feminist rhetorical practices within and beyond nation state borders. Likewise, together, they show how rhetorical agency and coalition-building can explicitly respond to the uneven structures of power that frame all rhetorical action.Glenn's and Southard's monographs resonate with recent conversations in the field that take up how to do rhetorical work as we continue to navigate legacies of injustice and unprecedented instability. For example, as demonstrated in Rhetoric Review's most recent “Octalog IV,” considering how current instability has shifted how we all teach, research, study, and “do rhetoric” requires new approaches that are, like the ones Glenn offers, anchored in hope. Yet as the authors in the Octalog make clear, the urgency of our time requires us to question our taken-for-granted and established knowledge (see Martinez and Rois), expand beyond the academy (see Skinnel), and imagine new texts and methods (see Epps-Robertson and Van Haitsma).1 Like these authors, Glenn and Southard offer a hopeful glimpse of how rhetorical scholars can find unique forms of belonging and connection, even during seemingly hopeless situations. In response to Glenn's and Southard's monographs, we ask rhetorical scholars to consider how they might engage with hope and coalitions in their scholarship and teaching during fraught times.In Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope, Glenn forwards what she calls “rhetorical feminism” (4). She develops her theory of rhetorical feminism by tracing key feminist rhetorical practices, including those of women from outside of Western culture. The goal of the book is to equip the field with a new feminist lens that brings forth dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration. Through these practices, she theorizes alternative means of persuasion—a questioning of traditional rhetorical practices and attention to silence and listening. Throughout the book, she offers grounded instances of rhetorical feminism and hope for a new and open field of rhetorical studies.Examples of this hopeful rhetorical analysis begin in the first chapter. Glenn identifies “Sister Rhetors,” such as Maria W. Miller Stewart, Angelina Grimké, and Sojourner Truth, who exemplify how feminist rhetoric can be used to pursue the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, “the greatest good for all human beings” (5). Modeling agentive rhetorical action, she analyzes how these Sister Rhetors’ public speeches advocated for suffrage, expanding theories of rhetorical feminism. While identifying how individual exemplars’ rhetorical practices can broaden understandings of rhetoric as Glenn shows, the focus on individuals means that the book omits an extended analysis of the ruptures in the suffragist movement, caused by the virulent racism of white suffragists. This choice is significant given Glenn's focus on how rhetorical feminists can reach across difference. Nevertheless, the chapter “Activism” provides historical examples of how rhetorical feminism can guide activist movements, which Glenn further explores in chapter two, “Identities.”The chapter “Identities” focuses on rhetorical feminism's connection to lived experience and difference. With historical examples, Glenn demonstrates how coalitional work across difference is difficult. She analyzes an infamous public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. Glenn takes the lesson that white feminists must acknowledge their privilege by practicing “silence and listening to Others” (42). While this focus on lived experience and listening are indeed important points for scholars of feminist rhetoric, this chapter does not address what this complicated, important work of dwelling in difference requires, most notably attending to histories of racial, ethnic, and gendered inequalities and violence. This dovetails with broader conversations in the field, particularly from Karma Chávez and Sharon Yam, scholars we return to later who address how coalitions can productively form across difference. Glenn's focus on rhetorical feminism gestures towards the possibility of coalition built on shared hopes. For example, in the chapter “Teaching,” Glenn explores how feminist teachers can honor their own and their students’ different lived experiences. This sort of rhetorical feminism, Glenn suggests, can help students cultivate the rhetorical awareness needed to navigate and intervene in structural injustices, including patriarchy.Likewise, in “Mentoring” and “(Writing Program) Administration,” Glenn critiques the “masculinist models’’ of mentoring that are used as gatekeeping mechanisms in academia to create exclusionary spaces (150). Glenn encourages rhetorical feminists to work on “disidentifying” from these norms and instead use familiar feminist rhetorical practices such as “dialogue, silence, and listening” to create relationships that are non-hierarchical, mutual, and networked (150). With these tools, feminist mentors can make room for more women and feminists in academia and begin to change the structures of the academy altogether. In fact, Glenn sees how on-the-ground academic administration can be a place where mentoring and coalition-building can happen. The final chapter, “This Thing Called Hope,” returns in time and space to the consequences of the Trump presidency. Glenn reflects on how rhetorical feminism should guide political action but spends much of the chapter pondering the academic successes of rhetorical feminism. For Glenn, the continued challenge of the Trump presidency (and now legacy) is why we need “this thing called hope” to guide us in working together (212). Like the scholars in the Octalog IV referenced above, Glenn demonstrates hope and new methods of bringing rhetorical feminism to bear on precarity in academic institutions. Extending Glenn's political commitments beyond the United States, Southard brings this sort of rhetorical analysis to global political contexts in How To Belong.In How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World, Southard explores how contemporary women leaders curated forms of belonging and agency that “[n]egotiated gendered and geographic boundaries” across “transnational flows of political and economic power” to move beyond citizenship and nation-state inclusion (3). She defines agency as a person's “can-do-ness” and, as such, considers how contemporary power relations might affect a rhetor's ability to be an agent of change (7). Southard looks to women leaders globally, turning most prominently to West Africa to better understand how women's agency has been constrained or enabled by political upheaval. Importantly, these leaders articulated belonging based on gendered violence and displacements by factional and national conflicts. Southard's observation extends work by transnational feminist rhetorical scholars who over a decade-and-a-half ago noted how “with few exceptions, scholars in rhetoric . . . have not systematically engaged the complex material and rhetorical dynamics of transnationality or questioned the nation state as a unit of analysis.”2 Her project does precisely this: shows how women denizens actively demonstrated the limits of the nation state.The book begins by examining the rhetorical practices of West African women who rearticulated notions of belonging based not on citizenship but instead through their relationships as “denizens of homes, landscapes, peace conferences, and politics” (Southard 18). Southard argues that these women redefined belonging and demonstrated how they, as rhetorical actors, were central to creating functioning peaceful communities. Southard highlights “dwelling practices,” such as seemingly powerless women forcing themselves into peace talks organized by men who are political leaders, establishing alliances between Christians and Muslims, and protesting when formal peace talks ignored them. While Southard situates her analysis in the recent political upheavals of West African nations in the 1990s, she does not address the longer history of European colonization in the area. Given Southard's project of engaging transnational work that decenters the nation-state, it would be productive to address this colonial history, which is responsible for the conceptualization of the nation-state as it currently exists in West Africa.3 As readers, we were drawn to thinking about how women denizens were engaging a decolonial project through their organizing.Southard moves on to examine how these women made it possible for Liberia to elect their first woman president. Southard reads Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's autobiography and public addresses to demonstrate how Sirleaf articulated women's national leadership as a necessary part of membership in a global community by normalizing women's rights within supranational and regional governing bodies, advocating for a national policy that protected women educators from sexual assault and crafting Liberian women's agency as a national and cosmopolitan ideal. While Southard demonstrates how Sirleaf and others became agentive rhetors, this focus on individual women who are empowered by existing political structures is complicated. We see the individualized nature of agency as similar to Glenn's discussion of this concept, a pattern that we discuss further below.Towards the end of the book, Southard presents the outcomes of African women's rhetorical agency, namely the success of creating a security resolution mandating that women be part of and protected in any peace talks. Yet, as Southard importantly points out in relation to the formation of UN Women 2010, this resolution did little to address the ways that supranational organizations privilege First World understandings of what it means to enact feminist change. Southard traces how the rhetorics of belonging espoused by Michelle Bachelet, the first Executive Director, reshaped the power relationships among global elites and the women they claimed to represent.As these brief summaries demonstrate, the ways that Glenn and Southard address the concepts of rhetorical agency and coalition-building productively shift scholars’ attention to how rhetors enact change on local and global scales. They offer ways to place the role of identity formation, agency, and hope within historical and contemporary feminist intentions. Glenn's theory of hope as a way to create more feminist futures and Southard's vision for rhetorical agency as “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” are places where feminist rhetors and activists build understandings of belonging and power (Southard 10).Questions of agency form the backbone of both Rhetorical Feminism and How to Belong. For both writers, agency is fundamentally linked to claiming a voice, working together, and taking action. According to Glenn, agency is “the power to take efficacious action” (4). She elaborates that agency “is always contingent . . . adopted strategically,” and can be used “to redefine rhetorical history, theory, and praxis” (4). This orientation could “represent more ethically and accurately the dominant and the marginalized alike (even as we rethink this metaphor); and . . . prepare the next generations of rhetorically empowered scholars, feminists, teachers, and citizens” (Glenn 4). Thus, agency is how we enact hope.Agency, for Glenn, is not just the ability to act but to imagine the radical possibilities of new social orders. Through a transnational lens, Southard adds that agency is “dispersed, networked, and interconnected” (10). Put simply, rhetorical agency is “what enables one to do rhetoric and how, where, and when one can do rhetoric” (Southard 7). Like Glenn, Southard links agency to “embodied social praxis” that is possible amid the constraints of the institutions and hierarchies we live in (12). Southard explains, “rhetorical agency [is] a negotiation between a rhetor's choices and their discursive contexts, such that interventional strategies are thought to shape and be shaped by transnational flows of political and economic power” (84–85). While Glenn's of agency at the of in to take action, Southard is particularly with how structures of power shape rhetorical Southard's of agency adds to Glenn's is a understanding of how women to together, such as through their shared of coalitions how different feminist have up agency in her of in rhetorical feminist thinking in chapter For example, in the of scholars such as who have for lived experience as a of Glenn and and into agency, a of or instead voice, even As scholars, we should the of the of and question how colonial structures that women were and from of Glenn agency, or the as a between silence or for individual She and rhetorical to agency in this of her which us such a does not that agency is both and this of agency as a means of claiming on a global is by the examples of agency by For example, in her chapter on as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Southard explores how Sirleaf redefined national in to address women's as on women's of and Southard how Sirleaf adopted at transnational conferences, such as the World on that as change of supranational and national Southard traces how a public as a for rhetorical agency to but women Glenn and Southard to understand rhetorical agency as and in social to focus on individual rhetors it for to understand the and networked nature of We see this between individual agency and attention to and transnational economic structures as a project that more rhetorical scholars might take In we that both Southard's and Glenn's understandings of agency as within an individual who is empowered by their within political that can agency to individuals who are outside these one form of rhetorical We how agency is what we as agency in contexts not be agentive for Extending Glenn's discussion of the that what agentive for white not for to in the of rhetoric should be of the histories of and an awareness can Southard and Glenn's work to consider how agency is in legacies that forms of Glenn's of agency legacies of for why this has been made impossible across different and demonstrates awareness of new forms of rhetorical agency when she shows how West African women in legacies of power by forms of belonging that outside the concept of the The of belonging by the Liberian Women's and as Southard identifies who used rhetoric to create “dwelling both discursive and where they could with and their as of to with different for are unique and In this focus on the of rhetorical Southard for the ways that these peace women the of men and women by networked and with leaders to within Liberia as a and made space within public places to and for on these women's rhetorical Southard practices can places and nations from the or of the into places and nations where the marginalized and the can their We find this of agency in that existing political make it impossible to agency to rhetors can move and these to take action. Glenn focuses on to an existing Southard is how agency for these denizens outside of the colonial nation-state This networked and contingent understanding of agency not coalitions but it to change an of we in our on agency, of how feminist can form coalitions through both Glenn's and Southard's Glenn's understanding of rhetorical feminism is grounded in an that lived shape their to rhetoric and In her of rhetorical feminism as a theory and Glenn approaches this as a of identity is such that they an who are to consider in Glenn how rhetors can work productively across identity to form agentive In she a few different rhetorical strategies for including concept of and Glenn returns to historical examples to demonstrate how this coalitional work can be For example, she points out the of identity in U.S. feminism by the public exchange between Mary Daly and Audre an open a feminist for her to for all were constrained by her and the experience and of women and marginalized Glenn takes the lesson that all feminists must do the work “to open up across difference and that white feminists in need to consider their and in to Glenn's of the limits of feminist is Yet feminist on a coalition that the of is In her book, The with from a of feminist thought including and critiques feminism” for on within a and that must be in with for racial, and and to be by those most by these of working in coalition with through the question of how coalitions can form when we take identity difference as a of Glenn rhetoric and rhetorical listening as strategies for understanding and political focus on listening to lived experience is indeed an important for scholars of feminist this of listening of the complicated, necessary work of dwelling with an awareness of relations of power and to the between and Glenn provides an of what when coalitions form the hierarchies in Glenn does not offer a where rhetorical feminists used these listening strategies to form coalitions that used their networked, agency to change. While listening is an important of coalition with those who are marginalized about of power is for feminist This is that Southard focuses on her book and, in chapter as Michelle Transnational this chapter, Southard how Michelle used rhetorical agency as of UN Women to the of possibility for transnational and and as rhetorical While the transnational Southard looks at in this chapter are in a by at the that through UN and by leaders like Bachelet, Southard points to the coalitions that women across national borders and hierarchies through these This is where Southard's understanding of agency as and out in to Southard shows, for example, how address to the on the of Women made space for women's rhetorical For example, that must be by the local and lived of of and state violence the space for others to their in at the UN (Southard Glenn and Southard the of rhetorical silence and but Southard points to the power of listening as a form of for rhetorical scholars might as in this book are the strategies Southard points to for which for transnational and action, even as the book the local contexts of rhetorical and lived experiences. This is the of connection that can make transnational and change concepts of belonging and hope both We that these are and that can in our We these concepts as we for how rhetorical scholars can enact these in our Glenn identifies hope as a feminist way to us through of activist change. Rhetorical scholars across can from Glenn's of hope as a for activist research, and Glenn that the most feminist teachers are those who students to with analysis of the hierarchies and structures of power they move through in their Glenn identifies practices that must be in this of such as which frame students’ approaches to understandings of and agency, and action in response to this provides a hopeful at transnational feminism most rhetorical scholars in this at constraints on rhetorical agency, Southard looks at new for belonging rhetorical practices . . . in ways that and national As we Southard focuses on women as transnational who new ways of belonging as through and within transnational These forms of belonging help us the agency and rhetorical of those who outside and in between the of and the and of rhetors who are the rights of we are drawn to in Southard's book is that the goal of agency is not to within the structures of citizenship but instead in alternative institutions by women with shared and for the Southard and Glenn us to see hopeful of community within and outside of and together, Glenn and Southard show us that hope is and for to build belonging across difference. from what Glenn and Southard offer us in their monographs, hope and belonging should respond to existing structures of power and us to work and them. These books us with How do we form coalitions to pursue hopeful How can we transnational forms of belonging that in the of different lived of local can rhetorical scholars from these monographs and take up in their own research, and through Glenn and Southard's we how hope and belonging could create possibilities for change in our current While their on agency and coalition the field of rhetoric and to these the examples Glenn and Southard use to their of these could be For example, Southard's of agency as this as a of individual The way that transnational relations and these rhetorical possibilities is that scholars in the field have productively as we have above, Glenn's of agency and coalition, at difference and does not for the ways that different lived and within histories of white and we Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope and How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World with scholars who are work on agency and coalition, such as recent work by Karma Chávez and Sharon scholarship provides a of how different and groups form coalitional with one even For example, of it possible to build fraught colonial histories and creating the for relations and across in the possibility for agency and rhetorical action, both and outside established of political this understanding of coalition reads into the relationships between and In a recent given at the of extended her of coalitional possibility to address the most recent in and the transnational of with the and Likewise, what Karma work on coalition adds to this is an understanding of as always to and nation-state of Southard and Glenn's notions of agency to about how the rhetorical of are always marginalized necessary coalitional among the marginalized Chávez coalition the of the the the activist and to demonstrate how U.S. policy has to citizenship for the need for belonging outside of nation-state The book how working these violent and structures made possible of Glenn and Southard's texts can help scholars to the conversations about what agency and coalition can or should like in our local spaces and within in a fraught books demonstrate hope and scholarship work is working to coalition and belonging, these texts can help us cultivate new of in our work and our We scholars, as transnational feminist scholars and feminists of have called to rhetorical agency as always and

Abstract In 1954, the Ford Foundation, new to international grant-giving, administered a small grant to a U.S.-educated Tehran native, Najmeh Najafi, to begin a development program for “village women” in rural Iran. Development was fast becoming a central transnational discourse of the post-war decolonization period and the early Cold War, and Najafi appears as a unique contributor to this discourse, as investment in women and women's programs would not become commonplace in international philanthropy until the early 1970s. But rather than a mere footnote, Najafi's case represents an important example of Ford's surveillance and increasingly “projectized” approach to development processes in strategic areas of the world, even as Najafi evaded Ford's attempts to make her “legible” in their global philanthropic system. This essay offers a rhetorical history of Najafi's negotiations with Ford and the tensions that arose between them around the binaries of North/South, East/West, developed/developing, and masculine/feminine. Using a lens of “scalar geopolitics” to emphasizes linkages between the local, national, and global, the article mines both Najafi's memoirs and Ford's grant archives in order to reflect on the complex ways development and philanthropy were framed and constituted during a tumultuous era in Iran and beyond.

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

This study reviews the current underlying theories relevant to writing centers as well as the research methods being used in the early 21st century. The first section covers the theories used in writing center scholarship from the 1980s onward based on influential articles and texts. The second section covers published research both in the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and other publications from 2010 onward and discusses the current state of research methods. Readers may not be aware of some of the fine divisions of theory; for example, the distinction between collaborative learning and social constructivism. Researchers may benefit from the overview of methods, which covers the most popular and current methods (survey and textual analysis) and promising but little-published research methods, such as ethnography. Keywords : collaborative learning, social constructivism, writing as a social process, Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, cognitivism, feminism, transfer of learning, threshold concepts, tutoring encounter, social and environmental justice, survey, mixed methods, textual analysis, descriptive studies, theoretical research, archival research, quasi-experiment, quantitative methods, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case study, usability, ethnography