Business communication courses play a key role in preparing students for job market challenges, such as matching resume skills to the job ad. This article presents a classroom activity where students analyze a job description, create a t-chart listing the criteria on one side and experience/skills on the other, and develop an action plan for filling the gaps between the skills and experience the student has and what the ideal candidate would bring to the job. Through this experience, students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses while creating actionable strategies to become the ideal candidate for their post-graduation employment.

This study investigates collaborative interdisciplinary research writing at a large public Western U.S. university through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and textual analyses. While 75% of faculty at this institution supported campuswide interdisciplinary initiatives, only 31% believed current institutional structures enhanced such work—a 44-percentage-point gap that our analysis suggests stemmed from five key obstacles to successful interdisciplinary writing: structural barriers, career concerns (particularly for pre-tenure faculty), disciplinary cultural differences, terminological conflicts, and divergent goals between faculty and administrators. Faculty in this study focused on immediate practical challenges and professional development, while administrators prioritize institutional transformation and structural change. The study concludes with recommendations relevant for universities with comparable resources and commitment to Writing Studies informed approaches, including revised tenure guidelines that explicitly value interdisciplinary contributions, dedicated funding mechanisms, facilitated networking opportunities, and targeted writing support programs. By addressing faculty’s practical needs and administrators’ strategic vision, institutions can create environments where collaborative boundary-crossing becomes not just possible but sustainable and rewarding.

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.

Taking stock of the diminishing material conditions faced by contemporary writers broadly conceived, this article (re)frames writing as a site and a practice of exploited labor. Arguing that writing scholars have often avoided interrogating writing’s links to labor, particularly with respect to declining working conditions and the appropriation of value from workers, I draw attention to the pervasive crisis of writing’s devaluation under late capitalism. To evidence this assessment, I apply political economist Harry Braverman’s conception of the “progressive alienation of the process of production”—the notion that labor is increasingly eroded through capitalism’s advancement—to the scene of contemporary gig writing, specifically Amazon’s microtask platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk, I maintain, offers a paradigmatic illustration of contemporary writers’ material exploitation, both for its efforts to de-skill writers and for its conscription of writers to advance their own exploitation by employing them to train generative AI.

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.

In response to disruptions introduced to the job market by AI resume screeners, this article introduces a novel theoretical framework for the life cycle of artificial intelligence systems to help unblackbox resume screening AI systems. It then applies the AI life cycle framework to a digital case study of RChilli’s job-resume matching algorithm. The article introduces an eleven-step computational job-resume matching assignment that writing instructors can use in their classrooms to explore the pedagogical implications offered by the AI life cycle framework. The assignment helps students simulate important phases in AI production and development while highlighting biases and ethical concerns in AI screening of resumes. By exploring job-resume analytics, this study helps to teach critical AI and data literacy, make job-resume matching algorithms more explainable, and transform how professional writing can be taught in the age of automated hiring.

The Northeast Ohio Medical (NEOMED) University Writing Center was founded in the winter of 2022 to support its medical, pharmacy, and graduate students. Through trial, error, and creativity, the Writing Center Specialists developed a successful writing center offering collaborative synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Often, graduate education needs a different type of support than undergraduate students do: in-house editing combined with traditional theory. This initiative highlights the importance of writing and editing support in medical education, addressing diverse needs across NEOMED’s colleges and promoting effective writing practices. On February 21, 2022, in a small meeting space between two offices, Brian sat at a large, wooden, boardroom table staring out the large window into the Aneal Mohan Kohli Academic & Information Technology Center, the official name of the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Library, waiting for the first students to appear for in-person writing tutoring. One week prior, Brian had signed a part-time (20 hours a week) contract to lead a writing center pilot project that ended on June 30, 2024. Brian was the Writing Center Specialist and was tasked with creating a writing center to support the more than 1,000 medical, pharmacy, and graduate students at NEOMED and had less than 30-months to do it. NEOMED is a stand-alone medical university in the rural community of Rootstown in Northeast, Ohio. It is not connected via physical space to any hospital system. NEOMED does not confer any undergraduate degrees but does offer several master’s and PhD programs for its students within its College of Graduate Studies. There are over 600 medical students, 300 pharmacy students, and more than 100 graduate students attending NEOMED. The school is within 50 miles of several teaching hospitals that partner with the NEOMED students in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas. The closest clinical location is a 20-mile drive from NEOMED’s campus. Brian’s background was in English Composition and Rhetoric, having taught at several universities since 2010. He worked in a Writing Center as a graduate student and followed writing center theory closely. Now, he was creating a writing center, carte blanche. He was given a common room and two offices. He had a small budget for paper products, a laptop, a bulletin board, and access to various means of communication. He met with the leaders of the three different colleges and asked the same questions: how can a writing center help your students? The answers were all different and began to mold the theoretical approach. NEOMED was founded in 1973 to meet Northeast Ohio’s critical need for primary care physicians. Much of the writing support for the College of Medicine (COM) was provided by the Assistant Director of Student Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. In the College of Pharmacy (COP), the Assistant Dean of Student Success worked with students as they navigated writing assignments. In the College of Graduate Studies (COGS), individual professors were tasked with this writing support. While the individual colleges attempted to support their students in their writing, typically, only the high-stakes professional writing—resumes, curriculum vitae (CVs), personal statements, and letters of intent—were given priority. As an example, the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the COM reviewed 150-160 CVs and personal statements between May and July each year. The group of third-year medical students submitted their applications for residency programs through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), the system used by medical graduates to apply for specialized training positions in hospitals. COGS, in which Brian had been an adjunct professor since 2018, needed academic writing support for its students. Many of the nine graduate programs had writing assignments throughout the semester. Some of the program’s students wrote master’s theses and others wrote doctoral dissertations. Many of these students utilized the Writing Center for support. Professors in COGS also asked Brian to create several writing specific videos which covered topics on grammar, punctuation, research writing, and formatting. COP had one goal in mind for the Writing Center, and that was supporting their second language learning (SLL) students. The SLL students struggled with plagiarism, understanding prompts, taking notes, research writing, and reaching out for help. In August 2023, 18 months after Brian was hired, funding was allocated to hire an SLL specialist, and Brook was hired to support the SLL students, specifically those in pharmacy. COM had a detailed list of needs for the Writing Center, much of which was high stakes writing. The number one need of the COM was to support the 600+ medical students as they create their professional CVs. Then, the Writing Center was asked to collaborate with the students as they create personal statements for residency applications and research opportunities. Medical students also created oral and poster presentations, journal articles, and many other writing projects. The University provided its students with 20 hours of writing support. Yet, after a week of being open, students did not come for the support they needed. Brian sent emails to cohorts. Announcements were made. It was clear that sitting at a table facing the window to the library and waiting for students to start coming in for in-person tutoring sessions was not happening. The typical, in-person consultation consisted of reading the paper out loud in the undergraduate writing center world that Brian was accustomed to. Undergraduate writing theory was not what the NEOMED students needed. Instead, it took trial and error, a lot of support, a little bit of money, and some creativity to establish the NEOMED Writing Center as a fully funded center of the University. Ultimately, the NEOMED Writing Center pilot program is a story that all graduate schools can use to create their own writing center. By promoting asynchronous sessions, screenshares, and collaboration, a graduate school writing center became successful.

Adam Phillips Abstract This article focuses on the academic job market for the field of Writing Studies primarily using data from 2021–2022 to provide insight for early career scholar-teachers. This study looks at the total jobs available for the 2021–2022 job market compared to previous years, the number of tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) positions, […]

Abstract In Elizabeth Brockman's final “Editor's Introduction,” she reminisces about her twenty-four-year tenure as column editor of From the Classroom. The primary focus, however, is a celebration of Bev Hogue's “Ink, Blood, and Bones: Excavating History via Natasha Trethewey's ‘Native Guard,’ ” which is the final FTC manuscript she edited.

Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Technical communication job advertisements can indicate current and future trends for pedagogy and practice, and for the development of the profession. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Although recent research has explored US technical communication job ads, no study to date has examined advertisements specifically for technical writer roles based in the UK. The unique academic and industrial context in the UK warrants such a study. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What role do educational qualifications play in the UK technical communication job market? 2. What skills and competencies do employers see as part of technical communication roles in the UK job market? 3. What are the sectors in which technical communicators are employed in the UK? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study involves a quantitative and qualitative analysis of job advertisements collected over a one-week period from LinkedIn and Indeed, and two prominent job search aggregator platforms in the UK. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Despite the absence of formal third-level technical communication academic programs in the UK, the terms “technical writer” and “technical author” are prominent in the job market. Where educational requirements are included in advertisements, these tend to be domain-specific. Software development is the leading employment sector, with available jobs distributed across a range of additional sectors. Personal characteristics and competencies required are broadly in line with previous research. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Our findings suggest key competencies associated with the specific job title “technical writer/author.” They are a springboard for further qualitative research—e.g., using interviews—to explore the profiles and boundaries in technical communication in the UK. A mixed-methods study that includes job ads, questionnaires, and in-person observations would enable further classification of technical communication roles.

In the globalized labor market, skills gaps between industry expectations and university preparation are becoming more prevalent. English communication skills (ECS) are vital soft skills in all workplaces, particularly in international business, where English is commonly used as a lingua franca. This case study examined the nexus between academia and industry regarding the instruction of ECS and their applicability to meet the requirements of the globalized business landscape by collecting data from 43 personnel in the international ready-made garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh. The research reveals that English courses in higher education do not adequately address the communication needs of the international RMG business, which requires practical experience in the workplace, trade-specific vocabulary, intelligibility, and clarity rather than a high level of fluency. The study recommends promoting the teaching of English for general business purposes in Bangladesh by integrating theoretical and practical learning in the classroom and workplace as part of the curriculum.

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

This article discusses a newly created method of UX journey mapping---User Experience as Racial Storytelling (UXRS)---designed to centralize Black user narratives in design thinking, and the teaching implications as a Black woman non-tenure track (NTT) online technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor. Revisiting an assigned group activity in a synchronous online technical writing course for engineers at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), this essay will share pedagogical approaches of user experience as TPC pedagogy used to scaffold this method of racial storytelling as an anti-racist practice to adapt a social justice framework. This essay suggests UXRS can aid engineering students' perspective of inclusive design.

This article uses the results of a five-year study of job seekers to argue for improving job search preparation. Graduate students entering the job market want advice that is knowledgeable, realistic, and honest and that goes beyond emphasizing tenure-track research jobs to include a consideration of their needs and interests.

ABSTRACT With higher education in a state of flux, it’s time to more clearly understand what flux—mobility—means for the work of faculty at colleges and universities. With threats to shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom representing one sort of change, what would it mean for faculty to lean into the vulnerability that they are experiencing? Mobility has consequences: one of them is the risk of harm; another is the potential to destabilize concepts and entities. This article is an argument for faculty to lean into vulnerability, with all of the consequences attached to it, in order to change the trajectory of higher education in an era of flux, but recognizing that doing so will require courage and new forms of solidarity.

This article describes five first-year writing instructors’ experiences with personalizing shared curriculum across three different course delivery formats (face-to-face, hybrid, online). The data is drawn from teaching journals that the co-authors, a non-tenure track, part-time Lecturer and a tenured Writing Program Administrator, and three Graduate Student Teaching Associates completed throughout Fall 2022. The findings illustrate both benefits and drawbacks related to shared curriculum: discussing and troubleshooting curriculum in a community of practice is highly valuable, but separating course delivery from course design is challenging. In our study, those challenges manifested as disconnects between course content and disciplinary identity, as well as personal feelings of failure. On the other hand, the need to personalize shared curriculum across multiple delivery formats proved productive, especially when instructors used asynchronous online materials as a starting point to develop hybrid and face-to-face lesson plans. Ultimately, we advocate for more conversations about how writing programs can support contingent faculty as they personalize shared curriculum through both course delivery and design, and we offer an example of a successful community of practice that revises shared curriculum in response to community members’ experiences with teaching in multiple modalities.

This mixed-methods study reveals the underrepresentation of non-tenure-track (NTT) scholars in academic publications in English, even while they teach the majority of courses. Interviews with NTT scholars and editors reveal time, in several dimensions, as a significant barrier to publication. An analysis of interviews with editors and journal websites suggests models for change.

The majority of first-year writing “is taught by teachers whose educational backgrounds are more likely to be in literature, cultural studies, or creative writing than in rhetoric and composition” (Abraham 78). This disciplinary knowledge gap poses a challenge for FYW faculty to adjust to new shifts in FYW pedagogy. We would expect inhouse faculty development opportunities to help fill these gaps; however, the results of our year-long qualitative study indicate that the lack of shared disciplinary knowledge and the constraints on adjunct faculty make it challenging for faculty without backgrounds in writing studies to adapt their pedagogies. We add to the body of scholarship on professionalization in two-year college writing studies (e.g., Andelora; Griffiths; Jensen et al.; Sullivan; Toth et al., “Distinct”) and argue that addressing this problem will require investing resources in adjunct support; changing hiring practices to prioritize expertise in writing studies; and designing faculty development that focuses on both theory and pedagogy.

As we enter our fourth academic year impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we already see evidence of institutional and cultural forgetting, or at least looking away from, the way this virus has changed our institutional (not to mention personal) lives. For most institutions, there has been a mandated return to normal. Gone are masks, more online accommodations, and reentry testing. And fading, too, are the conversations about the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on learning and on the mental health of our students, faculty, and staff.It is clear, by now, that there will be no return to “normal.” It is also clear that normal is often a revised history, or a history of omission, that represents a mythical bygone time that served few and denied many. Bettina Love (2020), a scholar of education theory and practice, reminds us how schools were failing “not only children of color but all children” long before COVID-19, citing the “norm” of high stakes testing, disproportionate expulsion of Black and Brown students, scarcity of teachers of color, school shootings, inadequate funding—the list goes on.Conversations in higher ed have also pointed to the labor disparities present in the “before times” that the pandemic has revealed and reinforced. In a Chronicle opinion piece, Emma Pettit (2020) observes that the global pandemic is only deepening pre-COVID-19 labor inequities for women-identified faculty, and especially women of color. And a study during the pandemic shows increased emotional labor required by BIPOC cisgender men, BIPOC cisgender women, white cisgender women, and gender non-conforming faculty, who work overtime to both help students navigate the challenging terrain of learning during COVID-19 as well as to manage their own emotional response to sometimes untenable working conditions (White Berheide, Carpenter, and Cotter 2022).As we embark on another pandemic-impacted semester, we feel, and carry with us, the weight of prolonged emotional labor. We tend to the emotional and material burdens our students experience, answer for and carry out policies we don't agree with, and scramble to adapt to the ever-changing educational landscape. All the while, even on our worst days, we strive to convey to the students, preservice teachers, and the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) we teach our commitment to the power and possibility of pedagogical work. On our best days, we see this moment as an opportunity. The pandemic has changed us, and it has laid bare what needs to change in our institutions.We are not interested in a return to normal. Instead, we are committed to a process of learning from COVID-19’s shock to our institutional systems. So we turn to three moments in our respective professional lives that expose and survey the tensions and complexities we dwell within, using this upheaval to spur questions and imaginings toward a new way forward.As a junior writing program administrator (WPA) my primary responsibility is the education, mentorship, and support of GTAs assigned to teach in our first-year writing program. At any given time, I supervise approximately fifty different GTAs, who come to us from a range of concentrations in the MA, MFA, and PhD programs. Each fall, I teach a graduate-level practicum that GTAs take concurrently with their first semester as instructors of record. Historically, the course has served as a place to workshop issues that emerge when teaching for the first time (e.g., strategies for engaging a quiet class, approaches to making commenting and grading more sustainable, responding to problematic student comments, incorporating more multimodal work into the classroom, etc.). In the fall of 2021, though, in the first semester of my institution's return to fully face-to-face instruction, these issues took a backseat, and almost every class focused on the ongoing pandemic, rising cases, sick students, contact tracing, and my institution's changing guidelines for how we should act and respond to this moment.My practicum classroom began to feel eerily similar to the White House briefing rooms I spent the last two years watching on my TV, laptop, and smartphone. I'd walk into the room smiling under my mask and feigning enthusiasm for being there. Sometimes I'd be carrying binders or printed copies of policy memos to read from. I'd grip the podium in front of this group of people who were simultaneously my students and my teaching colleagues, and as soon as I opened it up to the floor, I'd be peppered by questions about the latest emails sent out by upper administration. I tried to appear calm and confident, even enthusiastic at times, and performing this emotional labor was increasingly difficult a year and a half into the pandemic. My answers all felt hollow and rehearsed; they were deeply unsatisfying. “The university would like to remind you that you cannot inform your students if someone in your class tests positive.” “The university assures us that they are working to address the problems you all have observed with contact tracing.” “The university is discouraging moving classes temporarily online.” “The university is asking instructors to do all they can to support students during this time.”Even as I said those words, I recognized my deliberate use of metonymy to obfuscate responsibility for decision making. “The university” functioned as a convenient and effective way to strategically divert responsibility away from the chancellor and provost who were making most of these decisions (under pressure, of course, from our conservative state legislature and the university system board of governors they have appointed). “The university” is a collective. It makes it sound like a group decision. That language feels almost democratic. It also operationalizes the ethos associated with “the university”; these are learned people, after all. Surely they must be making the most well-informed decisions, right? And, of course, I was also using “the university” to distance myself from responsibility, to avoid the recognition of my guilt and my own complicity in echoing, implementing, and policing adherence to these policies, which is, of course, partly my job (or at least how those above me would conceive of my job). Indeed, the role of a WPA as a frontline or middle manager tasked with implementing the will of higher administrators and executives has been theorized before (DeGenaro 2018; Heard 2012; McLeod 2007; Mountfort 2002), and much of this scholarship reflects on an identity crisis experienced by WPAs, a tension between how they see themselves (as politically radical system disrupters) and how others are now seeing them (as system maintainers and institutional apologists). Mountfort specifically discusses how WPAs experience less freedom to represent their private points of view because they are called on to speak publicly for larger collective views.About halfway through the fall 2021 semester, as I explained once again that the official university guidance was that instructors should not move a class online simply because the instructor has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19, I heard one of the GTAs say quietly and out of frustration, “This is bullshit.” And, of course, it was bullshit. It was not a policy born out of the most recent public health guidance nor out of a desire to protect the welfare of students and teachers. It was not a policy concerned with pedagogical effectiveness. It was about optics. The university was focused on maintaining the appearance of normalcy and control. The GTAs knew this, and I knew this.This was, of course, not the first time I had announced policy decisions I knew or felt to be bullshit, but what has made the bullshit different during the COVID-19 pandemic is the stakes. We are now talking about people's health, potentially their lives. These are not just issues of ideological tension and debate anymore. They are foundational matters of safety. And as the research has made clear, these are decisions that will disproportionately affect people of color, poor people, women, those with disabilities, and so many other groups lacking privilege and access at this moment. This is why so many people are experiencing what Smith and Freyd (2014) describe as “institutional betrayal.” And that feeling of betrayal was evident in my practicum course. GTAs articulated feeling disposable and unsafe, like the institution had abandoned its investment in science and research for profit and optics, like all that they had been promised during the early days of the pandemic had been retracted. And I have been a part of that betrayal, and the emotional work of processing that is something I feel I will spend the rest of my career struggling with. I also saw my GTAs struggling with this same sense of complicity because, of course, they found themselves repeating university policies to their students. We've all been interpolated into this; it goes all the way down.Two years later, working with a new group of teachers, I continue trying to figure out what my role is, should be, or might be. This will be yet another cohort that feels betrayed by and disillusioned with the institution, though for slightly different reasons. New crises are continually emerging in higher education, wiping old ones from our memory. And while this cohort continues to be frustrated by the legacies of the institutional response to COVID-19, they have been even more angered by the institutional failure to adequately address the student mental health crises impacting our campus and campuses all across the country. In this new crisis, I find myself once again parroting institutional talking points that are, well, bullshit. “Counseling Services is here to support you during this time.” “The university has partnered with an app-based mental health counseling provider to increase access to mental health support.” “The university has not publicly acknowledged the recent suicides this term because of privacy concerns.” With each of these official communiqués, I feel these teachers losing faith in the institution and me. Is it my job to help repair that crumbling trust? Should I be working to build their trust in me? Maybe these are the questions we should be exploring with our GTAs. What does it mean to work in an institution that has betrayed us? One that continues to betray us? How do we reckon with the memory and experience of that betrayal? How should our work and our responses change in the future? How have COVID-19 and the crises that have followed in its wake helped us see the radical work there is to be done?In the second year of the pandemic, I received a small teaching grant aimed at incorporating multimodality into weekly reflective assessments in one of my courses. I was later asked by the granting office to provide a brief presentation about my work to my faculty colleagues during an optional summer professional development series. As an assistant professor of color in a research-intensive institution, I was both apprehensive to “teach” my more senior colleagues, but also a bit enlivened. So, rather than solely discussing my incorporation of multimodal options into my formative assessment structure, I decided to dive a bit deeper and engage the inequitable roots of many taken-for-granted academic practices, spurred on by Joel Feldman's (2018) book, Grading for Equity. In his quest to remove as much bias as possible from the grading process, Feldman notes how practices like assessing penalties for late work, assigning zeroes for missing assignments, and even marking off points for incorrect answers on formative assessments all contribute to the “education debt” owed to minoritized students (Ladson-Billings 2006). Feldman writes primarily for an audience of K-12 educators, and as a teacher educator myself, I was careful to note in my presentation that incorporating Feldman's strategies was part of my own parallel practice, a term coined by Lowenstein (2009) to describe the work of modeling for preservice teachers the same affective, curricular, and pedagogical approaches that we want them to incorporate in their future classrooms.As I shared these points, and specific ways I incorporate both multimodality and Feldman's equity-driven course policies into my teaching, I noticed a colleague of mine, a cis white woman, in the audience visibly fidgeting, her sighs occasionally punctuating my spoken sentences. When I concluded my brief talk and opened the floor to questions, hers was the first hand in the air. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “in addition to everything else, we're now supposed to have multimodal assessments, and no late penalties, and no zeroes, and not take off points for wrong answers? I have a baby at home, and a husband! How am I supposed to find time to do all of this, plus my research, and be a parent?” I understood her question to be mostly rhetorical, but, a bit embarrassed, I did my best to diffuse her frustration and provide actionable steps. I noted that I use only one catch-all for my formative assessments and that the of late penalties made my grading more as to come in that were for me to with. I once again Feldman's that assigning on those with the to solely on school at our the of students is my best these points to and the room I my and off by the this talk had I began to of my in of the larger of the pandemic, and all of the labor and it has to our collective was a in my and me to Feldman's as well as a of I did away with policies, both because I to up to class if felt even slightly and also because I knew mental health days were more and more for my students. I began to classes with the help of an which with and for each class in I and office every out from the of the pandemic least so I have these policies and have even found myself on making copies of course for students who the time or the to copies for and with students as they in my office so many of the long of the pandemic have them in difficult and with students a for our after yet another at a And while this has all a bit difficult to when I to a future in which COVID-19 to be a I am of the that I and many others are in the so many of us have to our students is in addition to with our own and we have felt to deeply the and of our students, and to to our pedagogical approaches As though I feel a of my during my I cannot help but and with her At what do our in the of to the of these practices, and our own called work, emotional labor of these been coined and by or labor and these all describe a of work associated with mostly in which the emotional is to by those in (2018) notes that this labor is in that it for the of the of in so and in the of and that must be by those with minoritized gender This is, in the of and that even after our work has for women and gender of color, our us with and us as more than of affect by a of the university or at it does feel as though much on the work I on of my students to it What is the to days I the of the work I do as a teacher more often I long for a way out of this How can I less of myself and be an present How might in our present and the between our work and our began fall 2021 at my institution in a a or mask The had just to high as the new through the even the campus a mask the instructor or one of the students was at high or to be classes be to My with a of from teachers in my How do I my students if they are at high they want to out is the on teachers and One into the new semester, the a mask which the university to being the was a it the of our of a mask was followed by another student a at a days of student and One of the students in my to and course said her our university in the and the had the same problems as do she with only masks, I saw of my students spent late in the were not because the of their own They just They were also is the chancellor to a We asked What does it mean to and to respond well, to on our that first I the students to me an me why they the class, their for the semester, and if there was I should that would help me support their new to the university said they felt being in after a senior year of classes in their felt new to the university as they and in for the first of them said they from I to each making a to that too, with and to that we in a time of and They were not this have come less to me early in my it felt felt them in their to a we don't have to away our mental health our our in the of an academic or And I I to for students what I myself, especially in the of about a return to normal and to be work through the students as well as be They began to with each each through and when they see And they few students, who were to our class, because of mental health I sent so many to on students that began to in my and did students at all during the we It was The teachers in my program to me with shared They were losing students to mental health students were more They how to how to They were so I now at the of the fall semester, the of COVID-19 but are mostly We have all more but for and are to even as more of us are that those us well, in the first In a recent Chronicle and to the of to will and will not that and our will not the of a will not the inequities this pandemic has laid and the of that has served as its We a way to and a case that after more than two years of “the and all it required of us, we don't more of We to respond with a they “The pandemic is not a nor should we it as We are through an that we our to higher education on every a more and system in its They an of for a from time in our classes to to students about what does and their learning to to on how we are the of the pandemic and what will us in the They are that the is not something to be to our already it about what can be to for on our our of higher education, and for my own we have found it to time to as the during the pandemic to in the or to for a office about a classroom or it to a sense of our collective work with students. When we come we the faculty in my and I also to what it to and to teaching, at this moment. We concluded that it is for us, as a to the emotional labor required to teach at a time when we see on gender and In the of to and we decided that as a we will We will about teaching We will if only for each the emotional labor required of as a I I will work to that work to the We get of the system we are but we are not can by responding from our own of in our and in our than continue to and through the and this pandemic has required of the that is us for something other than a return to “normal.” us to What does it mean to respond well to our students and to each What does it mean to and emotional What of can we do away our not with clear answers but with more questions, and our to a larger What do we for now, if not a return to in the early days of the pandemic, Love (2020) not only a return to but also that for those who have the privilege and a global crisis is time to to Indeed, this pandemic was in so many it only to use of this time to and respond in ways that are, too, time to to on the tensions we have and to and difficult As our on this has us, these questions are asked and on from across institutions, and is that we might engage in more and work to support that emotional labor and research that new responses to For and for COVID-19 has us of our than to to to and our colleagues, to on that to move in and

Reviewed by: Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith Nancy Myers Michelle C. Smith, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. 234 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8093-3835-1. In her 1863 self-researched and self-published The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work, Virginia Penny points out that "the false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must be changed ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage."1 Penny's research may have expanded her readers' views on women's work in the nineteenth century; however, Michelle C. Smith's Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age illustrates for the contemporary reader the "social, economic, and cultural shifts" and contexts during the antebellum period that effect gendered labor issues today (11). Comprised of five chapters, Utopian Genderscapes presents three rhetorical case studies of intentional communities: Brook Farm (1841–1847) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Harmony Society (1804–1905) settling near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1825; and the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in Oneida, New York (3). These examinations on gendered labor are framed at the beginning of the book with Smith's theoretical lens, historical [End Page 97] context, and rhetorical argument about gendered labor during the antebellum period and at the end of the text with the continuing utopian fallacy of gendered and class labor in our own time as expressed through tropes such as "tidying up," "leaning in," and "having it all" (148–153). Smith's overarching argument claims that "such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender" (5). She grounds her argument through her clearly articulated and detailed theoretical approach of analyzing the intentional communities as "ecologies of gender" (6–11). This material-feminist rhetorical lens examines each community's practices in its resistance to the larger context of American industrialization and in its reflection of that industrialization as well as the societal and the cultural attitudes about gendered labor. The three case studies, as Smith explains, convey "the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women's work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women's work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today" (4). In "Domestic Rhetorics," which details the distribution of labor at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, Smith focuses on women's work to argue that while women branched out into nondomestic labor, men did not venture into traditional housework, thus reinforcing its stigma as representing menial chores. To alleviate the burden of daily living and provide time for other endeavors, the community's middle and upper-class women employed working-class women for housework further associating those tasks with class divisions. "Professional Rhetorics" demonstrates how women, labor, and prestige are not allied. In fact, as is illustrated by Gertrude Rapp in the Harmony Society, the success of one woman's entrepreneurial and rhetorical endeavors becomes a synecdoche for all women working in the silk industry. Unfortunately, many women at that time in the silk industry were laborers working for low wages and in unsafe working conditions, so they were not aligned with Rapp's privilege and whiteness. Focused on the Oneida Community, "Reproductive Rhetorics" illustrates the complex dynamic between an intentional community's mission and its practices resulting both in reinscribing societal norms tied to motherhood, childcare, and housework and in creating new hierarchies of gendered and class labor and authority. In the final chapter, Smith appropriately positions herself as researcher and scholar, as she did in the book's opening, with her clearly articulated argument and analytical method. She expands on her aims in writing history "to restore a sense of possibility" and to make that history relevant for today as a means to imagine what "might yet be otherwise" (27). She validates her aims by drawing connections between each intentional community and current social, cultural, and economic practices and attitudes about housework, professional women supporting the advancement of other women, and the continued tension...

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Preparing students to pursue user-experience (UX)-related writing careers requires infusing UX instruction into several technical communication courses throughout a degree program. But university writing programs that seek to add UX courses into their curricula often work inside a slow-paced system where amending course objectives to align with job market demands is a slow process. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> For this collaboration, we forged a symbiotic relationship between a lower- and upper-class course to introduce students to UX early in their program of study and apply additional or nuanced UX methods in several writing courses as they progress through the program. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> Faculty in a writing program that does not currently have stand-alone UX classes can collaboratively improve the student UX in a timely fashion while maintaining the flexibility to adapt best practices and contemporary UX processes across classrooms. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods/approach:</b> A close reading of test plans (n = 14), usability reports, and reflection essays from 200-level students provided key insights into the understanding of UX strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Introductory students struggled to make explicit connections between UX strategies and their work, but they demonstrated gained UX skills by the end of the project. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Students realized many benefits from learning about and conducting UX research that helped them become more empathetic professional writers. However, instructors should consider additional symbiotic relationships between courses in a professional writing program at several points in the writing process.

This essay initiates a critical conversation about (in)fertility in academia. We argue that four patterns of discourse exacerbate the challenges for women and trans* academics struggling to conceive while navigating so-called “biological clocks” and “tenure clocks” simultaneously: conflicting rhetorics regarding egg quantity and quality in relation to the typical age one starts a tenure-track job; sexist and transphobic rhetorics of fear-mongering in medical and academic settings; rhetorics of silence surrounding the impact of miscarriage, which often accompanies infertility; and cisheterosexist institutional discrimination in the face of exorbitant treatment costs. We use feminist “strategic contemplation” to reflect critically on these patterns of discourse in relation to our lived experiences of (in)fertility. In doing so, we validate those struggling, educate those who are not, and seek a more just reproductive landscape for academic women and trans* people whose clocks are ticking.

When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.

Kevin Musgrave's Persons of the Market: Conservatism, Corporate Personhood, and Economic Theology breaks novel ground in rhetorical studies by unspooling the historical evolution and contemporary significance of a phenomenon so seemingly worldly as corporate personhood. This robust transdisciplinary conversation on economic theology is suasive in arraying its theoretical and methodological provisions for discerning how notions of the sacred are vouchsafed in the secular formations of modern economic life. And too, Persons of the Market is cogent in advancing the claim that by attuning to political economy's theological inheritances, critics can enter into a generative grappling with Western capitalist and racial power in the era of juridical personality.Corporations are people too. If this provocative, vexatious, and even baffling refrain of the neoliberal public sphere is an obvious exigence for this study, then Musgrave pierces its roots by using personhood to rethink historical relations among Christian theology and liberal capitalism. Departing from a common account of political economy, which looks to secularization to explain how an economic order founded on market rationality displaced the sovereign and divine right of kings, his hermeneutics traces “the gradual process of the emergence of a new social imaginary that occurs in and through theological grammars, not against them” (xiv). When we discern how such grammars historically authorize the capitalist order, we discover new relations of persons—between the person of Christian theology and that of political economy; between human and corporate personhood; among the person and an array of human and nonhuman, racialized, social and political, earthly and divine bodies; and more. To re-see political economy as relation rather than negation of theological thought, Musgrave situates the contending legacies of economic theology by taking Foucaultian biopolitics as a theoretical vocabulary for critiquing political liberalisms from within; then repairs against Foucault's atheistic framing with Agamben's reinstatement of the theological; then, finally, works from the current consensus in humanities studies that, one way or another, economic theology must inform political economic critique. Enfolding rhetorical dispositions—Black's cognizance of subjectivity, Burke's socioanagogical sensitivity—within a genealogical approach inflected by Nietzsche as well as Foucault, he offers economic theology as a register of meaning-making. It bears noting that this attunement does not seek “a unified and clear development of its conceptual basis in the teleological or dialectical unfolding of capitalist logic or in the concerted efforts of a unified bourgeois stratum” (xvi). Rather, by accenting rhetoric's ontological and material dimensions, it strives to grasp how notions of corporate personhood are seeded theoretically, supported juridically, and sustained politically in complex, even haphazard rhetorical dances between the theological and the secular, the religious and the rational.How do corporations become persons? In a quick synopsis: When courts rule that for legal purposes they are persons, and social and political worlds fall in line. Prior to, within, and beyond juridical decision-making, the bizarre corporation-to-person becoming has discursive and intellectual co-requisites. Before anything, corporate personhood incubates in the fecund environs of liberal political and economic thought, ripening in rhetorical traditions that—from Roman slave law to Trinitarian doctrine, from Adam Smith to Roberto Esposito—gradually economize the theological heredity of personhood with the recombinant genetics of self-ownership as a contractual right. From this mutative embryonic nurturing, a corporation assays to capture in studied succession the key thematic attributes of personhood: a Body, a Soul, a Voice, and a Conscience. Locating each acquisition at a chaotic yet formative juncture of U.S. political economic history, Musgrave narrates something like the four-stage tour of a body snatcher, the piecemeal making of a Frankenstein, but in this case, the suturing of the animate form strangely does not yield a monster. Quite the contrary, it refigures an entity “once understood as a monster of capital, an alien, and even a worm in the entrails of the nation” (45) as a normative model of personhood so elegant that corporeal persons can only aspire.The Body is, first, seized from the conflicted terrain of the expansion of industrial capitalism in the mid-late nineteenth century. The corporation wrested embodiment from the incorporation conflicts that, emerging around the development of commerce and the amalgamation of actual corpora in the body public, claimed the Chinese laborer as embodied host for rising racio-economic anxiety: “If the nation was civilized, Christian, prosperous, and pure—that is to say, white, in all of its coded language—how could it incorporate a people that was deemed biologically incapable of reaching these statuses?” (29). Musgrave's impressively detailed analysis shows how the corporation, once anathema in Jacksonian democratic sentiments, sails to legal protection thanks in large measure to the theologically-soaked rhetoric of one eventual Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field. Through two cases that laid jurisprudential ground for the landmark 1886 Waite Court ruling that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, Field liberalized corporate law vis-à-vis the right of Chinese laborers. To be clear, these rulings were far less about protecting the laborer's right to safe and legal working conditions and far more about preserving the industry's right to exploit their productive capacities for profit. How are we not surprised? No synthetic fabrication, corporate corporealization requires the appropriation and expenditure of the actual material bodies of racialized persons. By marking the Chinese worker as “the racial other of the corporation” (51), these legalities stood the corporation as an embodied symbol of white Western capitalist rationality, securing its ascendancy through the symbolic hierarchies of personhood.The Soul is next, as early twentieth century Progressive activism placed the corporation in need of salvation. Musgrave's theologically-attuned economic rhetorical analysis finds early masters of mass communication turning to the cultural power of advertising not only to promote the corporation's commercial products but also to “personalize” the corporation itself. Merging Protestant convictions with free markets ideals, the new discourse of evangelical capital mobilized the “great parables of advertising” within secularized versions of Christian spiritual themes—shepherd and flock, confession, transformation, redemption—to renew the corporation as a “benevolent shepherd” (63), which could minister a lost public to salvation. Then it's Voice, as political antagonism toward the New Deal and the affects of the Cold War vitalized godly libertarian businessmen to better align Christianity with capitalism, launching a new wave of jurisprudential activity that granted the corporation legal voice.Lastly, Musgrave offers Conscience, as the nearly-personified corporation forges from the evangelical neoliberalism of Reagan, to the paleoconservative backlash, to Trump's successful rallying of conservatives around key issues of conscience—that is, “freedom from a godless and all-powerful state apparatus that polices language through a soft totalitarian discourse of political correctness on the one hand, and mandates that companies abandon their religious convictions in the name of state-sanctioned multiculturalism on the other” (140). With each successive acquisition, the corporation more fully realizes personhood, even as personhood is itself flattened and recast as “a mask that never fully adheres to the face that wears it” (3), reordered as a dispositif of techniques and technologies for systematizing biopolitical bodies.The operative claim of this book is that our best hopes for resistance against neoliberalism do not lie with rational persuasion. Rather, they depend on our capacity to enter onto an existential plane where we may query our theological commitments and convictions about human personhood. Rhetorical readers of many persuasions will appreciate this book's potential to incline critique and analysis in various directions, not least into further discussion of the intriguing possibility with which the book closes: the potential for rhetorical thinking on economic theology to instantiate more humane and democratic configurations of personhood by adopting a post-human humanist orientation to life as a gift. If “the cosmic and existential levels of economic theology” (175), as Musgrave argues, suffuse our public and political worlds, then scholars of communications and rhetoric indeed stand to gain by engaging them—as do scholars of economic theology, arguably, by inviting the contributions of communications and rhetoric. What new future may emerge for a rhetorical critique of economy that better apperceives how sacred and secular understandings of the person share affinity? What might economic rhetorical inquiry discover when it looks both at and beyond the clear-cut theologies of evangelical capital discourses? How might theological attunements that surpass Judeo-Christian adherences to also account for non-Western, non-white, and non-dominant belief systems open rhetorical studies to more diversely cultural knowledges of moral and market order, and thus better equip them for critique? Persons of the Market poses these questions; they are ours now to answer.

This article presents the findings from a small case study to examine how community-engaged research is systemically delegitimized over the course of a scholar’s career. Analyzing a genre system of university professionalization documents prior to tenure and promotion shows how such documents discourage emerging scholars from thinking of their community-engaged work as research, except when it results in traditional forms of scholarship like a publication or conference presentation. A more complicated understanding of this genre system reveals pressure points to leverage for institutional change that might allow community-engaged scholars greater institutional freedom to create and sustain strong community partnership projects.

Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in the present moment.Mark Brenden is a PhD candidate in writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he also teaches writing classes. His current research investigates the digital transformation of higher education, particularly as it relates to writing pedagogy.K. Narayana Chandran currently holds the Institution of Eminence Research Chair in English and Cultural Theory in the School of Humanities/English at the University of Hyderabad, India. An occasional translator and writer in Malayalam, he has been teaching a wide variety of courses and publishing papers in Anglo-American literatures, critical and reading theories, comparative and translation studies, and English in India—its history and pedagogy.Tyler Jean Dukes is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor at Texas Christian University. She specializes in early British literature and the medical humanities. She is also a childbirth doula, a role that informs her scholarly pursuits as she investigates the connections between storytelling and healing. To attend one of her in-person or virtual narrative medicine workshops, please visit https://dfwnarrativemedicine.com/.Sandy Feinstein's scholarship ranges across early literature, most recently on Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac in Early Modern Women; and on Mark Twain and heritage management forthcoming from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. She has also published creative non-fiction on reading Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court during COVID-19. Cowritten articles with Bryan Shawn Wang appear in New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, CEA: The Critic, and Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, among others.Ruth G. Garcia is an associate professor of English and Core Books at CUNY and cocoordinator at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes “Fanny's Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park” in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.An experienced teacher, scholar, and administrator, Sara M. Glasgow has served in higher education for over twenty years. She is currently dean of liberal arts at North Central Michigan College. Prior to coming to North Central, she was professor of political science at the University of Montana Western (UMW), where she was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year for the state of Montana (2013). While at UMW, she taught core courses in American government, theory, international relations and strategy, and political economy, as well as basic and advanced courses in research methodology. She also offered depth learning opportunities in Norse history and culture as part of the university honors program, and majors’ courses in the history and politics of illness, her research focus. She holds a BA in international studies and Spanish from Virginia Tech; an MS in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology; an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University; and an MA and PhD in government and politics from the University of Maryland.Dana Gliserman-Kopans is professor in and chair of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her research centers on the literature and culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, though the pandemic and eighteenth-century epistemologies have been a recent (and necessary) focus. Her teaching interests are far wider, spanning from Gothic literature to the medical humanities. She also serves as the associate editor of The Burney Journal.Eva Sage Gordon teaches writing at Baruch College, CUNY. She has book chapters forthcoming in Innovative Practices in Creative Writing Teaching, edited by Graeme Harper; and Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, edited by Ruth Scobie and Sandra Mayer.Jennifer Horwitz received her PhD in literature from Tufts University and is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research focuses on representations of education in multi-ethnic US literature that help envision and enact the teaching needed in this time of climate crisis.William Kangas returned to college after twenty years as a journalist to complete his MA in English composition and communication at Central Michigan University, while working as a high school substitute teacher and consultant at CMU's Writing Center. He currently is an adjunct instructor candidate for a local community college and will be entering his second year of study for an MA in strategic communication from Michigan State University.Robert Kilgore is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB). He is currently the president of USCB's chapter of the American Association of University Professors.Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, professional communication, and digital rhetoric. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in Pedagogy, Enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.Xiomara Trinidad Perez is a junior studying journalism at Hofstra University, with a minor in fine arts. She hopes to work in the publishing and news industry, as well as in any area that deals with visual media. She finds enjoyment in creative writing, curating visual media, and conducting research.Aidan Pierre was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in film and minoring in history. He has produced, written, and directed numerous short films and is a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Film Production course. He is a part of the Rabinowitz Honors College and has been on the provost's list for two semesters. Outside of class, he enjoys spending his time reading literature and baking bread.Timothy Ponce holds a PhD in English and a certificate in teaching technical writing from the University of North Texas. In addition to serving as an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), he also serves as the coordinator of internships and coordinator of technical writing and professional design in the Department of English.Elizabeth Porter is an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She is a scholar in the fields of eighteenth-century British literature, women's writing, and composition pedagogy. Her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Jody R. Rosen is an associate professor of English and OpenLab codirector at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes the coauthored “Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research” (2020) in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Prameet V. Shah is a sophomore at Hofstra University. He is majoring in pre-medical studies and minoring in biochemistry.Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She teaches a wide range of classes, including composition, STEM communication, science fiction, environmental ethics and STEM, and introduction to humanities; and her writing most often addresses intersections between speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. She is coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features and the environment (2021).Bryan Shawn Wang is an associate teaching professor in biology at Penn State Berks. He has a background in protein engineering and synthetic biology. He has recently published on student choice and learning in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments; on reviving ecologies in South Central Review; and, with Sandy Feinstein and Samantha Kavky, on interdisciplinarity and de-extinction in Comparative Media Arts Journal.Rachael Zeleny is assistant professor of English and integrated arts at the University of Baltimore. Her early research is dedicated to the multimodal rhetoric of the nineteenth-century actress. Her current research explores ways to gamify the classroom using virtual escape rooms and methods of incorporating experiential learning into virtual spaces. She conducts workshops on integrating these methods into the classroom.

AbstractWork as a university teacher post(?)-pandemic must be rethought entirely. Creating better futures—or a future at all—does not mean getting back to some happy place, but it does mean faculty must engage institutions and communities courageously, ethically, and collectively. This essay links conversations about teaching in the pandemic to those about gender, race, class, and disability, and to academic labor and faculty fights for better pay and working conditions, shared governance, and academic freedom.

Institutions rely on career-ready competencies developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to understand the nationwide job outlook and labor market trends. The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to inform a course redesign process in the business curriculum at a Midwestern university in the United States. Using an adapted NACE survey, we found that while Midwestern employers and alumni valued NACE core competencies and employability attributes similarly, there were certain elements that were overlooked in the previous curriculum. Thus, identification of the locally relevant top competencies and attributes was a leading factor in the course redesign process.

Given the rise in business and technical writing (BTW) courses in writing programs and English departments, there is a need to develop not only a pedagogy for BTW but one that considers BTW’s institutional context. Context is a problematic focus for pedagogy, as we have seen in recent scholarship on student writing, theory of genre, and transferability of skills to other academic disciplines. That scholarship views the uncertain and unclear contexts of academic composition courses and their genres as preventing the full student understanding of genre that is needed for students to develop transferable writing skills. The continuation of that scholarship into BTW regards the instruction of BTW, as inside academia rather than within the workplace, as suffering from similar concerns with context. Rather than viewing BTW as downstream from or supplemental to composition instruction, this article argues that we should examine the genres of BTW as unique in their contingency to the writing process and yet just as able to pursue the goals of composition instruction and liberal arts education as first-year composition (FYC) courses. By focusing on the reader of BTW genres as determinant in the contingency of the writing situation, we see BTW as less problematic than FYC in its support of key composition goals such as the creation of original arguments and effective management of supporting materials. The awareness of readership and argumentation allows for a pedagogy supportive of contingent and part-time faculty as well as full-time composition faculty regardless of their respective professional experience.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

This article explores the scholarly endeavors upon which writing center directors and coordinators must embark to effectively run their centers. Additionally, the authors explore ways to use their contingent statuses as leverage for either tenure or promotion by linking their scholarly work to departmental and university tenure/promotion requirements.

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of antiracist and decolonial work that García calls for that cultivates transformative listening. The article proposes specific types of collaborative training and partnerships that writing centers should invest in to foster decolonial listening and work while addressing the material constraints faced by contingent faculty and staff.

Despite comprising the majority of labor in higher education in general and writing centers more specifically, contingent workers’ voices and experiences have often been overlooked. The contingent voices that have been represented have predominantly been those in director or administrative positions, not the professional tutors who engage in centers’ day-to-day consulting. This lack of representation in the literature perpetuates institutional inequities and belies a larger paradox: that contingent workers attempting to ameliorate the precarity of their situation may jeopardize their livelihood. Because contingent workers’ identities and roles have historically been ignored and marginalized, few research and publication options are available to them. For this reason, this research used autoethnography, one of the only methodologies available to the contingent professional tutor authors that allowed us agency to share our lived experiences and identities as contingent workers. Three themes emerged from our autoethnographies: vital to but not valued by the institution, working to live but destroying the body, and the illusion of choice. After discussing themes, we call for a continuation of what this work begins, particularly that the field of writing center studies should aim for wider representation of contingent and multi-identitied voices in its literature, conferences, and leadership organizations.

We expand the field’s focus on contingent labor to include part-time student employees’ experiences in addition to the experiences of part-time and contingent faculty. This article uses autoethnography and diary studies as frameworks for understanding the experiences of undergraduate tutor labor, particularly as it involves undergraduate research. Further, we show how a faculty mentor and writing center director’s view of a student tutor’s contingency can lead to revised approaches in writing center administration.

Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

This article reports on the working conditions of one hundred faculty who teach first-year composition at two-year colleges across the US.

On the wall of a large lecture hall at Indiana University, Bloomington hangs a painting that includes in its background a depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally, complete with a burning cross and hooded Klansmen. The painting, titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press,” is one of twenty-two mural panels depicting Indiana history that were created by Thomas Hart Benton for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and later installed in three locations across the university campus. In the most recent debate about the panel, defenders argued that removal would amount to censorship and, furthermore, would mean the destruction of the painting due to its material fragility. Critics argued that it should be removed because hateful imagery has no place in learning spaces, and classrooms must be welcoming to all students. Ultimately, IU administration decided to leave the panel on display but to convert the lecture hall “to other uses beginning in the spring semester of 2018.” They argued that “repurposing the room is the best accommodation of the multiple factors that the murals raise: our obligation to be a welcoming community to all of our students and facilitate their learning; our stewardship of this priceless art; and our obligation to stand firm in defense of artistic expression.”1 As the outcome of the administration's compromise, “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press” hangs in a largely unoccupied room as a depiction of a hate-filled chapter of Indiana's past, hidden, as it were, in plain sight.IU's Benton mural is one local instantiation of national debates around what to do with representations of and homages to racism in the United States: one side argues for the value of historical and cultural significance; the other argues against honoring representations of racism and hate. While physical sites are often central to the public conversation around what to do with the symbolism of the United States’ racist history, Stephen M. Monroe smartly demonstrates in his excellent new book Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (2021) how unexamined semiotic traditions can covertly sustain racist hegemony within the discursive practices of our institutions.Examining the discursive practices of his own local community at the University of Mississippi, Monroe asks how we can persuade more white people in the silent majority to become educated and engage in conversations about racial equality and justice (220, 221). In answer, he recognizes that we probably need both radical activism and reconciliation. However, he also insists that scholars of language and rhetoric have a responsibility to respond and act from within their local communities. His intention is “to push readers firmly away from passive acceptance of semiotic traditions and toward purposeful consideration and confrontation of those semiotic traditions” (13). Indeed, this book makes an important contribution to a vision of rhetorical scholarship that aims at producing legitimate cultural change. Monroe's intervention is multidisciplinary, targeting the fields of both rhetoric and Southern studies, and his contribution is triple-layered. He brings the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric to bear on the interdisciplinary field of Southern studies; he brings a thorough example of archival work in institutional history to the field of rhetoric; and he models the kind of locally-situated rhetorical intervention he imagines in his call for readers to interrogate our communities’ stakes in the perpetuation of racism across the nation.The central theoretical thread of Monroe's argument—a thread that applies beyond the confines of racism—is that history, language and symbols, and communal identity are interdependent. Combining methods of critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, and archival research, he argues that Old South rhetoric, or “confederate rhetoric,” continues to circulate and sustain racist communal identities across the US South, specifically at the region's universities. Because the semiotic traditions of confederate rhetoric “often create stasis or even reversion,” he explains, institutions’ abilities to achieve racial progress is slowed (13). In other words, confederate rhetoric and racism sustain themselves and each other by hiding in plain sight: in university nicknames and yearbooks, in the guise of school spirit, in Southern collegiate traditions, and, in IU's case, depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.A significant strength of Monroe's project, in fact, is his archive. Over the course of the book's seven chapters, he examines university nicknames, yearbooks, cheers, and historical figures, demonstrating how such semiotic traditions constitute an archive of racist hegemony. He begins, for example, by tracing the history of The University of Mississippi's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to its appropriation from a term used by enslaved Black people to refer to the wife of a plantation owner. He follows the evolution of the name through yearbooks from 1897 to the present day to illustrate how the term covertly sustains racist attitudes. Reading the circulation and solidification of “Ole Miss” through the lens of Laurie Gries's work on virility, Monroe argues that “the term grew in vitality and consequentiality throughout most of the twentieth century, but it did not transform in any substantial sense. Instead, after being appropriated and going viral in the late nineteenth century, ‘Ole Miss’ became and still remains a force for ideological stabilization and stasis” (37).2 Because the term has not been interrogated by the larger university community, as analysis of the archive demonstrates, year after year its racist connotations remain palpable but easily disregarded by that community.Keeping his archival focus on his own institution, Monroe next examines the tradition of the “Hotty Toddy” cheer at the University of Mississippi, explaining how “indexicality is a semiotic phenomenon always at work” (66). “Indexing makes certain meanings always available,” he writes, “or when viewed from another angle, always unavoidable” (66). Thus, for example, the confederate rhetoric within the “Hotty Toddy” cheer is stabilized with each discursive use, indexing a racist agenda. As Monroe puts it, “When white people at the University of Mississippi hurl a beloved cheer against Black classmates, the cheer itself fuels and performs punitive cultural work and redefines itself in ways that are not easily revised or redacted” (66). This quality of the linguistic markers points to an evolving thread in the book's argument: discourse serves the purposes of emergent identity constitution. Each time members of the community cheer “Hotty Toddy,” they “are not simply reflecting identities previously assumed but are reiterating publicly and socially a collective identity that emerges and strengthens again and again with every interactive performance” (68). Because of indexicality, to utter the nickname “Ole Miss” or to cheer “Hotty Toddy” can serve at once to demonstrate membership in the (white) UM community and to exclude others.Even as performances like the “Hotty Toddy” cheer constitute and strengthen communal identity, Monroe expertly emphasizes a more sinister function: historically indexed acts of racism enable those in positions of power and privilege to deny its systemic nature by arguing that such events are isolated. To illustrate, he analyzes a six-year period (2010–2016) in which a series of racist events and protests took place at the University of Missouri. In recounting these incidences, Monroe highlights how university administrators minimized the string of events as isolated and unreflective of the larger university community's values. Likewise, he returns to the controversy over UM's nickname, “Ole Miss,” to show how confederate rhetoric is “naturalized within discourse communities, turned into common sense, and thereby protected from controversy” (112).Monroe analyzes two additional traditions at the University of Mississippi—Blind Jim Ivey and the flying of the Confederate battle flag—to illustrate that the indexicality of racist events cannot be minimized without symbolic and material consequences. He argues that “[w]ithin a community that reveres tradition, one way to shelter a problematic word or symbol is to place it beneath the protective notion of tradition” (143). When Blind Jim Ivey and flying the Confederate battle flag are synchronized into a false sense of historical continuity with other traditions, rather than the truths of their histories confronted and eliminated, they continue to serve as racist ideological symbols. Confederate rhetoric itself, in fact, becomes a tool for synchronization that elides the power that white people continue to wield in the South and the United States at large. “Rather than providing voice and agency to minorities,” Monroe writes, “‘synchronization elides all kinds of possible voices’; it creates undemocratic absences. It silences” (165).While confederate rhetoric certainly silences, Monroe skillfully uses his archive to reveal the complexity of how such rhetoric sustains itself. By returning to yearbooks as archival records of a university's culture and pointing out how racist images in yearbooks are reflective of a culture that openly encourages racist displays, Monroe is able to argue that institutions scapegoat individuals while, in reality, racist acts have long been sanctioned by the larger community. Thus, individuals who face repercussions today for past racist acts “were not sources of discordant messages of hate and exclusion, but were, instead, conveyors of conformist messages” (169). Even so, he characterizes personal interactions as potential sites of redemption and transformation: “Moments of white realization and conversion,” which occur most effectively at the interpersonal level, “must be multiplied within southern communities if the region's long traditions of confederate rhetoric are to be substantially weakened or eliminated” (183, 184). We must recognize that racism is institutionally sustained while acting on the progressive potential of interpersonal engagement.In the final chapter, Monroe turns the book's focus back on himself. Recognizing his “layered levels of privilege and power” as a “white male, cishet, tenure-track scholar who has held multiple administrative positions at a research university,” he asks: “what will I do with that privilege and power?” (189). Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities is an attempt to begin that difficult and indispensable work. He calls upon other scholars of language to perform similar tasks, arguing that white people have the power to change confederate rhetoric and language scholars should advocate for that (201). Through his archival analysis of Southern collegiate history and traditions, Stephen Monroe offers a valuable model of situated scholarship for rhetoricians hoping to effect cultural change at their own institutions.

In the summer of 1881, a group of Black women formed The Washing Society of Atlanta by deploying extraorganizational technical communication to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages. In this article, we illuminate the ways that Black women operated in a world dominated by an established order of racial hierarchy. We argue that the Washerwomen manifested a particular form of Black technical communication rooted in agency and advocacy.

Understanding the expectations of employers contributes to the relevancy of business and professional communication (BPC) courses. Studies that bridge the gap between course content and workplace expectations support this process. This article presents findings from a scale development procedure to analyze BPC skills using a multimodal perspective. Employers ( N = 260) were asked what skills they perceive to be communication and how proficient they expect a recent college graduate to be to better understand the expectations that graduates face when entering the job market. The findings have implications for course design, curriculum selection, and program organization.

Abstract Faculty and students in English and other humanities disciplines engage in undergraduate research and scholarship. Administrative support ensures institutional practices, policies such as those focused on tenure and promotion, and rewards are in place to encourage students as scholars, mentored by faculty. Such administrative leadership demonstrates an inclusive recognition that all disciplines engage in undergraduate scholarship; contributes to recruitment and retention efforts; positively impacts on student learning; and effectively promotes the institution, faculty, and students.

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.