These remarks have been edited lightly for publication here.

This article examines what activism looks like in an age of "deep writing." As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.

In this article, we draw on focus group interviews collected for the Wayfinding Project to explore how university alumni orient themselves as writers while participating in social media after graduation. By looking at alumni's self descriptions of their writing processes across public networks, we are able to trace pathways that recognize the rhetorical and communicative intentions of users, while also acknowledging the roles that serendipity, creativity, and the unexpected play in shaping these literate practices. Specifically, we point to how these alumni describe their experiences as they adapt to addressing audiences across different platforms and confront the “reach” of those platforms for engaging unexpected audiences. Several focus group participants use the term “branding” as a way to describe how they conceive of their writing across multiple social networks. These participants describe their public, networked writing as a form of managing their identities at the same time that they are “branding” themselves to manage the expectations of multiple audiences. In sum, our research shows us how the unexpected audiences generated through social media participation operate in tension with writers’ deliberate shaping of their messages and their self-presentation.

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In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field’s understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each framework privileges a different aspect of the writing process, writing development, and/or writers’ context(s). Building on these approaches, we propose the concept of wayfinding to emphasize how writers navigate their own writing development, skills acquisition, and changing knowledge about writing over time. Wayfinding offers a metaphor that resonates with recent work on lifelong learning and meaningful writing. Among other characteristics, wayfinding emphasizes how writers encounter a continuous potentiality in writing and how they navigate unanticipated challenges and opportunities.

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In their production and uptake, memoirs grapple with the status of the self and subjectivity as evidentiary fodder for social, cultural, and political concerns. The concept of ethos illuminates memoir’s rhetorical potency and its dubious ethics. Personal experience that subtends memoir serves as a form of persuasion, but it can also be used to overly personalize issues in need of systemic critique. We argue that attending to a memoir’s uptake is one way to contend with the ethical challenges this genre poses. This approach places a memoirist’s ethos—her vision, language, modes of rationality, and ideology—as well as memoir’s varied functions, within larger social, cultural, and political debates. It thereby traces memoirs’ rhetorical power while also enabling critique of their ethical grounding in the “self.” Two case studies illustrate our findings: J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

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ost writing assessment at the college level is geared toward “homegrown” or “traditional” students: the ones who start their first year of college education at the same institution from which they later graduate. Assessment at Alexander’s institution was mostly effective for those same students but was less successful for some transfer students, as shown in assessment data. Instead of trying to force those students to learn the “norm” standards, the author, as WPA, began conversations with faculty at the community colleges where these students begin their college careers to determine how to honor the many different writing knowledges that these students bring to the classroom. Looked at through a lens of queer theory, this is the path to “queering” writing assessment.

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In the wake of the influential 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, this article extends the conversation along two related tracks: historical and theoretical. We situate the Framework historically with respect to the philosophies and cultural pressures behind the “habits of mind” structure so central to the text. We then read success against queer theory's recent turn to negative emotion, notably in Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, Berlant's Cruel Optimism, and Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure. Our goal is to think about how the Framework can be understood with respect to a longer social turn in writing studies.

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On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”

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This essay argues that multiculturalism-inflected composition classrooms often “flatten” or efface radical alterities with which students—and teachers—should be encouraged to grapple. The authors demonstrate some of the limitations of such pedagogies, offer examples of provocative texts that celebrate difference—not identity—as a powerful critical and compositional tool for exploring subjectivity and justice, and call for a shift toward acknowledging our potential incommensurability and unknowability as a fruitful way to engage issues of social justice.

Abstract In this essay we explicate notions of technology, self, and writing imbricated in new media responses to the Virginia Tech shootings. In our analysis we bring a consideration of affect and the normalization of emotional responses to bear on "aftermath texts" (online commentary on the shootings and on Cho's writing itself). We ultimately argue for a greater awareness of subjectivity and affect in our disciplinary and pedagogical explorations and narrations of technology. Notes 1We thank our RR peer reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Shane Borrowman for their insightful feedback as we worked on this essay. 2It is a sad reality that neither the Virginia Tech tragedy nor the human response to it is unique. Cell phones, texting, and amateur video have played a role in every major disaster since the technologies became readily available. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, for example, documented their plans for Columbine on videotapes, a number of which were found in Harris's bedroom after the massacre, and there are, literally, terabytes of digital archiving and commentary on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the 2005 London subway bombings, and roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our profession and others have responded to trauma and its implications for our work: Witness Shane Borrowman's 2005 collection Trauma and the Teaching of Writing; the 2004 two-volume issue of JAC focused on "Trauma and Rhetoric"; online discussions on the WPA listserv about using writing and the composition class to respond to institution-wide tragedies; and, of course, the burgeoning field of trauma studies. Indeed, the sad, simultaneous proliferation of technology and tragedy has offered much evidence of the epistemelogical power of writing; to write is to make sense, even if what we write about is, finally, senseless. 3See CNN.com for more information about the Columbine shooting and the shooters' use of video and other technology: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/US/12/12/columbine.tapes/index.html 4Dissenting views on the blogsite appeared scattered throughout the postings: 5Certainly, like many of our colleagues in English and writing studies across the country, we sympathized with our colleagues at Virginia Tech and understood that writing and literature courses would be among the primary places—given their size and the humanist content and subjects frequently taught in them—in which students (and faculty) would want to process such a terrifying and tragic experience. We also understood that Cho's status as an English major, and the fact that both his print and video texts were held up as objects of scrutiny and even as "explanations" for his behavior, demanded an accounting of the connections between violence, writing, and subjectivity. We know we are not alone in our continuing horror in response to that April morning in Virginia. We wonder, again, how we as a culture might prevent such violence, and we are keenly aware of the fundamental inability of academic texts to respond to such a tragedy. We thus offer this essay as an exploration of yet another explosive instance of what Lynn Worsham famously called "pedagogic violence." Indeed, such tragedies as the Virginia Tech murders pose seemingly unanswerable questions: Why would someone do such a thing? What kind of person is capable of killing so many others? What must his sense of self, his interior life, have been like? And how have his actions changed the interior and communal lives of others? Such questions cut to the heart of subjectivity, and they were frequently debated through a wide variety of electronic media. At the same time, such questions evoked Worsham's exploration of pedagogic violence in "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." Many of us wanted, as Worsham writes, to "be comforted by the view that violence is the unfortunate result of individual pathology" rather than an outlaw response to regimes of affect that are the "primary and most valuable product" of late consumer capitalism" (219). To some great extent, Cho's behavior up to and including his multiple murders offers us that comfort. It also points to larger issues of systemic violence, to the relative ease of gun possession, to institutional inabilities to prevent violence, and so forth, in ways that removed that comfort for us almost immediately. 6Some of our previous work has touched on this idea; specifically, see Jonathan's Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, which examines students' development of rhetorical savvy in the design of websites for a variety of purposes—personal, communal, and even political.

The article describes and analyzes the exclusion of LGBT content in composition courses by reporting on a study of how queerness is (and is not) incorporated into first-year writing courses. The authors critically examine the presence or absence of LGBT issues in first-year composition readers; offer analyses of how some first-year readers handle issues of queerness; and consider how queerness, when it is included in composition textbooks, is framed rhetorically as a subject for writing. The article concludes with recommendations for those seeking to explore issues of sexuality in ways that are productive for students, other faculty, and our profession. Ultimately, the authors demonstrate that, while some ground has been gained in understanding sexual difference as an important domain for students to explore, there is still much work to be done in creating textbooks that invite students to think critically and usefully about the interconnections among sexuality, literacy, and writing.

This article explores the literacy narratives of two “gamers” to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula. Ultimately, the author argues that we should use complex computer games as primary “texts” in composition courses as a way to explore with our students transformations in what literacy means.

This article surveys and analyzes nearly fifteen years of scholarship, situating itself at the intersection of LGBT/queer studies and composition/rhetoric studies. The authors argue that paying attention to queerness provides unique opportunities to engage with students in challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our lives are densely and intimately wrapped up in larger sociocultural and political narratives that organize desire and condition how we think of ourselves. Three moves in queer composition scholarship are identified “confronting homophobia, becoming inclusive, and queering the homo/hetero binary” and implications of these moves for composition are discussed.

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.