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Becoming Writers draws on phenomenological and lifespan approaches to writing research, reframing writing as a lived process shaped by social contexts, evolving technologies, and a writer’s own sense of self and agency. It moves beyond familiar binaries and offers a more holistic account of what it means to become a writer today.

Bringing together scholars from across the fields of writing studies and rhetoric/composition to consider the ways “writing” is changing in the twenty-first century, this collection tracks how and why people talk about the various forms of writing they do. Contributors address how younger generations understand the role and place of writing in their lives, particularly amid increasing and dramatic economic, social, and political change, as well as the ever-evolving role of writing in what it means to be human.

Becoming Writers builds on the Wayfinding Project (https://thewayfindingproject.com), a multiyear study of writing development focused on college graduates. Rather than focusing solely on the classroom, Becoming Writers investigates how writing functions in people’s professional, civic, personal, and digital lives. By centering lived experiences across domains, it provides a model of the empirical depth and different methodological approaches being used by scholars interested in writing development across the lifespan.

Until now there has been little consideration of the intellectual and historical impact editors have had on the young and ever-evolving field of writing studies. Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing provides new and seasoned scholars with behind-the-scenes explorations and expositions of the history of scholarly editing and the role of the scholarly editor from the perspectives of current and former editors from important publications within the field.
 
Each chapter in the collection examines the unique experiences and individual contributions of its authors during their time as editors, offering advice to scholars and potential editors on how to navigate the publication process and understand editorial roles. The contributors provide multiple perspectives on the growth, transformation, and, in some cases, founding of some of the most influential publishing venues in writing studies.
 
The personal and historical narratives, along with the unique perspectives and insightful analyses of the individual authors in Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing, offer needed transparency and context to what has historically been an opaque, yet inevitable and consequential, part of academic life. This volume will help researchers in the field understand the publishing process.
 
Contributors: Cheryl Ball, David Bartholomae, Charles Bazerman, Jean Ferguson Carr, Douglas Eyman, Muriel Harris, Byron Hawk, Alice Horning, Paul Kei Matsuda, Laura Micciche, Mike Palmquist, Michael Pemberton, Malea Powell, Kelly Ritter, Victor Villanueva, Victor Vitanza, Kathleen Blake Yancey
 

Featuring a range of better practices related to online writing instruction (OWI) and assessment, this edited collection offers instructors and writing program administrators theoretically grounded approaches from teacher-scholars of online writing. First, the contributors highlight what instructors have been doing in online and hybrid writing classrooms, pointing to innovative theoretical trends in the scholarship of online writing studies and related position statements. Second, they provide access to instructional materials that can be immediately adapted for local contexts, offering a starting point for enacting better practices in OWI. Third, they offer writing program administrators useful perspectives on professional development and curriculum design. Better Practices expands the conversation about online learning and writing studies, providing an opening for educators to come together to explore what it means to teach writing in ways that involve online real-time, online anytime, and hybrid writing courses.

Collaboration was an important area of study in writing for many years, but interest faded as scholars began to assume that those working within writing studies already “got it.” In Beyond Conversation, William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration.
 
While interrogating the institutional politics that circulate around debates about collaboration, this book offers a concise history of collaborative writing theory while proposing a new set of commonplaces for understanding the labor of coauthorship. Specifically, Beyond Conversation outlines an interactionist theory that explains collaboration as the rhetorical capacity that manifests in the discursive engagements coauthors enter into with the objects of their writing.
Drawing on new materialist philosophies, post-qualitative inquiry, and interactionist rhetorical theory, Beyond Conversation challenges writing and literacy educators to recognize the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing in the work they do both as writers and as teachers of writing. The book will reinvigorate how teachers, scholars, and administrators advocate for the importance of collaborative writing in their work.

In Beyond Productivity, a wide range of contributors share honest narratives of the sometimes-impossible conditions that scholars face when completing writing projects. The essays provide backstage views of the authors' varying approaches to moving forward when the desire to produce wanes, when deciding a project is not working, when working within and around and redefining academic productivity expectations, and when writing with ever-changing bodies that do not always function as expected. 

This collection positions scholarly writers' ways of writing as a form of flexible, evolving knowledge. By exhibiting what is lost and gained through successive rounds of transformation and adaptation over time, the contributors offer a sustainable understanding and practice of process—one that looks beyond productivity as the primary measure of success. Each presents a fluid understanding of the writing process, illustrating its deeply personal nature and revealing how fragmented and disjointed methods and experiences can highlight what is precious about writing. 

Beyond Productivity determines anew the use and value of scholarly writing and the processes that produce it, both within and beyond the context of the losses, constraints, and adaptations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 
 

Makerspaces—local workshops that offer access to and training on fabrication technologies, often with a focus on creativity, education, and entrepreneurship—proliferated in the 2010s, popping up in cities across the world. Beyond the Makerspace is a longitudinal, ethnographically informed study of a particular Seattle makerspace that begins in 2015 and ends with the closing of the space in 2018. Examining acts of making with objects, tools, words, and relationships, Beyond the Makerspace reads making as a kind of rhetoric, or meaning-making work, and argues that acts of making things are rhetorical in the sense that they are culturally situated and that they mark boundaries of what counts as making and who counts as maker. By focusing on a particular makerspace over time, Shivers-McNair attends to a changing cohort of makerspace regulars as they face challenges of bringing their vision of inclusivity and diversity to fruition, and offers an examination of how makers are made (and unmade, and remade) in a makerspace.

Beyond the Makerspace contributes not only to our understanding of making and makerspaces, but also to our understanding of how to study making—and meaning making, more broadly—in ways that examine and intervene in the marking of difference. Thus, the book examines what (and whose) values and practices we are taking up when we identify as makers or when we turn a writing classroom or a library space into a makerspace.

Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against ideas of difference in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Centering Blackness in frameworks for antiracist agency through interdisciplinary Black feminist lenses, Black or Right asks how those racially signifying “diversity” in US higher education (and beyond) make meaning in the everyday.
 
Offering four Black rhetorics as antiracist means for rhetorical reclamation—autoethnography, hashtagging, inter(con)textual reading, and reconceptualized disruption—the book uses Black feminist relationality via an African indigenous approach. Maraj examines fluid, quotidian ways Black folk engage anti/racism at historically white institutions in the United States in response to violent campus spaces, educational structures, protest movements, and policy practice. Black or Right’s experimental, creative style strives to undiscipline knowledge from academic confinement. Exercising different vantage points in each chapter—autoethnographer, digital media scholar/pedagogue, cultural rhetorician, and critical discourse analyst—Maraj challenges readers to ecologically understand shifting, multiple meanings of Blackness in knowledge-making. Black or Right’s expressive form, organization, narratives, and poetics intimately interweave with its argument that Black folk must continuously invent “otherwise” in reiterative escape from oppressive white spaces.
 
In centering Black experiences, Black theory, and diasporic Blackness, Black or Right mobilizes generative approaches to destabilizing institutional whiteness, as opposed to reparative attempts to “fix racism,” which often paradoxically center whiteness. It will be of interest to both academic and general readers and significant for specialists in cultural rhetorics, Black studies, and critical theory.
 

Bodies of Knowledge challenges homogenizing (mis)understandings of knowledge construction and provides a complex discussion of what happens when we do not attend to embodied rhetorical theories and practices. Because language is always a reflection of culture, to attempt to erase language and knowledge practices that reflect minoritized and historically excluded cultural experiences obscures th­e legitimacy of such experiences both within and outside the academy.
 
The pieces in Bodies of Knowledge draw explicit attention to the impact of the body on text, the impact of the body in text, the impact of the body as text, and the impact of the body upon textual production. The contributors investigate embodied rhetorics through the lenses of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, disability and pain, technologies and ecologies, clothing and performance, and scent, silence, and touch. In doing so, they challenge the (false) notion that academic knowledge—that is, “real” knowledge—is disembodied and therefore presumed white, middle class, cis-het, able-bodied, and male. This collection lays bare how myriad bodies invent, construct, deliver, and experience the processes of knowledge building.
 
Experts in the field of writing studies provide the necessary theoretical frameworks to better understand productive (and unproductive) uses of embodied rhetorics within the academy and in the larger social realm. To help meet the theoretical and pedagogical needs of the discipline, Bodies of Knowledge addresses embodied rhetorics and embodied writing more broadly though a rich, varied, and intersectional approach. These authors address larger questions around embodiment while considering the various impacts of the body on theories and practices of rhetoric and composition.
 
Contributors: Scot Barnett, Margaret Booker, Katherine Bridgman, Sara DiCaglio, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Vyshali Manivannan, Temptaous Mckoy, Julie Myatt, Julie Nelson, Ruth Osorio, Kate Pantelides, Caleb Pendygraft, Nadya Pittendrigh, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Anthony Stagliano, Megan Strom
 

Rooted in contemporary understandings of social action, informed by up-to-date research on writing program administration, and attentive to the needs of value-driven decision-making, Burnin’ Daylight enables writing program administrators (WPAs) to shape writing programs that help people create the lives they envision. This book guides WPAs through the rough terrain of running a writing program during a period of sustained social and economic upheaval—and through the process of making their programs more principle-driven and sustainable along the way.
 
WPAs face a range of challenges on a regular basis: organizing class schedules, leading professional learning events, conducting program assessments, responding to student needs, meeting with deans and provosts, and more. Additionally, WPAs need to learn about and direct their programs strategically when considering the kind of program they currently have, the sort of program they envision, and how they can transition from one to another. Burnin’ Daylight acts as a roadmap for IRB-approved research and provides WPAs—specifically, new and returning WPAs—with a detailed yet flexible plan for understanding the inner workings of a writing program and how to develop a future trajectory for it.
 
Burnin’ Daylight is for writing program administrators of all experience levels and other administrators interested in taking a “principled practices” approach to their work.