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This book provides case studies on the strategies used by African governments in monitoring and controlling digital and social media, as well as the implications of such actions for claims about media freedom and freedom of expression.

Further, the book examines the human rights challenges posed by state control and monitoring of digital and social media forms of communication. In the context of a digital surveillance state, it questions how digital and social media can possibly enhance the democratisation of both the communicative and political spaces.

The book focuses on questions of censorship and control of digital and social media in ‘supposedly’ democratic societies. It discusses regulation and how governments have imposed their state power by ‘switching off’ the internet and blocking social media sites under the guise of national security and order maintenance.

This volume is a compilation of revised versions of papers presented at a conference held in spring 1994 at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany.

Call center employees once blended skill and emotional intelligence to solve customer problems while the workplace itself encouraged camaraderie and job satisfaction. Ten years after telecom industry deregulation, management had isolated the largely female workforce in cubicles, imposed quotas to sell products, and installed surveillance systems that tracked every call and keystroke.

Debbie J. Goldman explores how call center employees and their union fought for good, humane jobs in the face of degraded working conditions and lowered wages. As the workforce coalesced to resist the changes, it demanded the Communications Workers of America (CWA) fight for safe and secure good-paying jobs. But trends in technology, capitalism, and corporate governance--combined with the decline of unions--narrowed the negotiating options for workers. Goldman describes how the actions of workers, management, and policymakers shaped the social impact of the new digital technologies and gave new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change.

Perceptive and nuanced, Disconnected tells an overlooked story of service workers in a time of change.

Discover Romanian's thorough treatment of both language and culture makes it an effective learning tool in classroom and individualized settings.

This comprehensive introduction to Romanian for English-speaking students emphasizes communication with a complete treatment of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a focus on the four major language skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Cultural information, an integral part of the textbook, is presented both formally, in sections on culture and civilization, and informally, as the setting for dialogues and exercises. Tables of verb conjugations and a glossary round out the book's primary materials.

Straightforward and accessible, Discover Romanian is an essential textbook for all those teaching and learning the language and provides important information for those seeking to understand Romanian culture.

A critical exploration of how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse, revealing the rhetorical forces behind our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control.

Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption unearths the darkness behind modern obsessions with food, health, and bodily optimization. In this provocative and richly interdisciplinary work, Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena argue that contemporary discourses around food, medicine, and the body are steeped in Gothic rhetoric—where the promise of purity and control is shadowed by monstrosity, abjection, and the uncanny.

From Soylent and nootropics to probiotics and lab-grown meat, Tirrell and Maddalena show how wellness discourse is haunted by Gothic tropes: body horror, hybridity, and existential dread. Wellness culture, they argue, is not merely pseudoscience or fraud but a complex, persuasive rhetoric that blurs science and myth, purity and decay, medicine and mysticism.

Disgustatory! offers a fresh framework: a “Gothic rhetoric of consumption” that explains why we are drawn to weird diets, digital detoxes, and miracle cures. Through case studies of strange substances and stranger practices—Reddit fasting rituals, magic dirt supplements, fecal transplants— Tirrell and Maddalena reveal how fear, fascination, and the fantasy of bodily control animate our health choices. Each chapter explores a rhetorical element—quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation—to show how food becomes a site of cultural anxiety and existential longing. This book will appeal to rhetoricians, scholars of science and technology studies, cultural theorists, and anyone interested in the strange intersections of health, horror, and persuasion.

A compelling inquiry into the rhetorical and aesthetic techniques that subvert contemporary regimes of digital surveillance, embodiment, and control.

The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data mining, biometric scans, and other instruments ensnare the individual in a web of surveillance. In Disobedient Aesthetics, Anthony Stagliano exposes the use of human lives as sites of data exploitation and outlines paths of resistance. From the thermal-vision systems used on military drones, which use human body heat itself as a media object, to facial recognition platforms that use human faces as data mines, and from law enforcement tools of DNA analysis to data-driven urban governance, the realm of algorithmic surveillance and control is wide and subtle.

Disobedient Aesthetics outlines interventions into the technical systems subtending data-driven surveillance and control. Stagliano maps not only the surveillant regimes afforded by recent networked technologies, but also the inventive, artistic research into ways of undermining, upending, or redirecting such technologies. The concluding chapter examines creative, critical, and collective efforts to democratize access to the technology that undergirds such scrutiny and enables ways to detect and contest its power.

In a fascinating epilogue, Stagliano revisits current theories of control and offers an alternative reading of Gilles Deleuze’s oft-cited thesis on control societies: namely that it is not a matter of “finding new weapons” to undermine control but developing new techniques, new designs, new prototypes, and new modes of creative escape.
 

The first book-length rhetorical history and analysis of the legal and moral questions behind the insanity defense.

The insanity defense is considered one of the most controversial, most misunderstood, and least straightforward subjects in the American legal system. Disorder in the Court: Morality, Myth, and the Insanity Defense traces the US legal standards for the insanity defense as they have evolved from 1843, when they were first codified in England, to 1984, when the US government attempted to revise them through the Insanity Defense Reform Act. Throughout this period “insanity” existed primarily as a legal term rather than a medical one; yet the testimony of psychiatric experts is required in cases in which an insanity defense is raised.

The adjudication of such cases by courtroom practice is caught between two different but overlapping discourses, the legal and the medical, both of which have historically sought to assert and maintain firm disciplinary boundaries. Both expert and lay audiences have struggled to understand and apply commonplace definitions of sanity, and the portrayal of the insanity defense in popular culture has only served to further frustrate such understandings.

Andrea L. Alden argues that the problems with understanding the insanity defense are, at their foundation, rhetorical. The legal concept of what constitutes insanity and, therefore, an abdication of responsibility for one’s actions does not map neatly onto the mental health professions’ understandings of mental illness and how that affects an individual’s ability to understand or control his or her actions. Additionally, there are multiple layers of persuasion involved in any effort to convince a judge, jury—or a public, for that matter—that a defendant is or is not responsible for his or her actions at a particular moment in time.

Alden examines landmark court cases such as the trial of Daniel McNaughtan, Durham v. United States, and the trial of John Hinckley Jr. that signal the major shifts in the legal definitions of the insanity defense. Combining archival, textual, and rhetorical analysis, Alden offers a close reading of texts including trial transcripts, appellate court opinions, and relevant medical literature from the time period. She contextualizes these analyses through popular texts—for example, newspaper articles and editorials—showing that while all societies have maintained some version of mental illness as a mitigating factor in their penal systems, the insanity defense has always been fraught with controversy.

Strategic partnership offers writing centers a framework for responding to disruptive innovations in higher education. Through partnership, writing centers can simultaneously secure resources and support the practice of tutoring writing in ways that enable moments of resistance, where writing consultants and students can tactically challenge the corporate university through their methods of practice. Disrupting the Center explicates, analyzes, and critiques one particular writing center’s partnership approach to collaboration with disciplinary faculty and upper administrators across the curriculum.
 
Using on-site research and critical ethnographic study from one university writing center, Rebecca Hallman Martini establishes an innovative, cross-disciplinary partnership approach to writing instruction in which peer tutoring plays an integral curricular role. Case studies detail three partnerships that respond directly to existing or potential disruptive innovations in higher education and showcase important concepts: mapping mutual benefit and stakeholder engagement in an online studio/hybrid first-year writing program partnership in response to online education, creating negotiated space to work through ethical issues involved when working with a public-private partnership to develop a required extracurricular portfolio project in a business school, and building transformational partnerships through establishing a writing-in-the-professions curriculum in the College of Engineering in response to career readiness initiatives.
 
Disrupting the Center uses interviews, observations, focus groups, analysis of consultations, meetings, and shared documents such as annual reports, budgets, assessment data, assignments, and syllabi to generate a wide view of how systems work. Writing centers are flexible university-wide service spaces where students go for one-on-one and group writing support that can become dynamic spaces for writing pedagogy by disrupting, revitalizing, and reinventing the epistemic foundations of current rhetoric and composition landscapes and traditional approaches to writing.
 

The school-to-prison pipeline impacts communities across the country; often, this system and families impacted by it remain invisible. But librarians, educators, and others who work with youth know first-hand that libraries and reading can be life-altering for youth impacted by incarceration. Written by public librarians who have supported youth before, during, and after incarceration, this book draws from their own experiences while showcasing insights from other library workers, researchers, educators, people who work in the juvenile justice fields, and mental health professionals. Designed to empower libraries and their staff to provide children and teens with information, visibility, knowledge and skills, recreation, and role models, it shares practical strategies for helping youth avoid the school-to-prison pipeline or contend with it. Readers will discover

• a concise explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline, including statistics on how and why it disproportionately impacts LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled youth;
• concrete, proven strategies for disrupting youth incarceration pathways by giving young people the tools and support they need to avoid incarceration;
• steps for bolstering youth engagement during out of school time;
• guidance on how to align disciplinary approaches with trauma-informed practices when dealing with rowdy youth and other disruptive behavior;
• an overview of what libraries are doing to provide programs and services inside a youth facility, including literacy support, high school equivalency/GED programs, and televisiting;
• strategies for combatting the isolation of children of incarcerated parents by creating inclusive and welcoming library environments;
• information about the complex and difficult process of reentry for incarcerated youth, with adaptable ideas and lessons from the work being done in libraries for reentering adults; and
• an inspiring vision, extrapolating from work in adjacent fields, of what libraries can do to overcome barriers to bringing more youth into the library.

Disruptive Stories uses an activist editing method to select and publish authors that have been marginalized in scholarly conversations and enrich the understanding of lived writing center experiences that have been underrepresented in writing center scholarship. These chapters explore how marginality affects writing centers, the people who work in them, and the scholarship generated from them by examining the consequences—both positive and negative—of marginalization through a mix of narratives and research. Contributors provide unique perspectives ranging across status, role, nationality, race, and ability.
 
While US tenure-track writing center administrators (WCAs) do not make up the majority of those who hold WCA positions in writing centers, they are more likely to be the storytellers of the writing center grand narrative. They publish more, present more conference papers, edit more journals, and participate more in organizational leadership. This collection complicates that narrative by adding marginalized voices and experiences in three thematic categories: structural marginalization, globalization and marginalization, and embodied marginalization.
 
Disruptive Stories spurs further conversations about ways to improve the review process in writing center scholarship so that it more accurately reflects the growing diversity of its administrators and practitioners.
 

In Distant Readings of Disciplinarity, Benjamin Miller brings a big data approach to the study of disciplinarity in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS) by developing scalable maps of the methods and topics of several thousand RCWS dissertations from 2001 to 2015. Combining charts and figures with engaging and even playful prose, Miller offers an accessible model of how large-scale data-driven research can advance disciplinary understanding—both answering and amplifying the call to add replicable data analysis and visualization to the mix of methods regularly employed in the field.

Writing studies has long been marked by a multitude of methods and interlocking purposes, partaking of not just humanities approaches but also social scientific ones, with data drawn from interviews and surveys alongside historical and philosophical arguments and with corpus analytics in large-scale collections jostling against small-scale case studies of individuals. These areas of study aren’t always cleanly separable; shifting modes mark the discipline as open and welcoming to many different angles of research. The field needs to embrace that vantage point and generate new degrees of familiarity with methods beyond those of any individual scholar.
 
Not only a training genre and not only a knowledge-making genre, the dissertation is also a discipline-producing genre. Illustrating what the field has been studying, and how, Distant Readings of Disciplinarity supports more fruitful collaborations within and across research areas and methods.
 

Developed from presentations at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, this collection documents a key moment in the history of WAC, foregrounding connection and diversity as keys to the sustainability of the WAC movement in the face of new and long-standing challenges. Contributors reflect on the history and ongoing evolution of WAC, honoring grassroots efforts while establishing a more unified structure of collaborative leadership and mentorship. The chapters in this collection offer a rich variety of practices, pedagogies, mindsets, and methodologies for readers who are invested in using writing in a wide range of institutional and disciplinary contexts. Boldly engaging such pressing topics as translingualism, anti-racism, emotional labor, and learning analytics, the eighteen chapters collected here testify to WAC's durability, persistence, and resilience in an ever-changing educational landscape.

All too often, in a hurried attempt to “catch up,” diversity training can create division among staff or place undue burdens on a handful of employees. Instead, academic libraries need approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that position these priorities as ongoing institutional and professional goals. This book’s model programs will help academic libraries do exactly that, sharing a variety of initiatives that possess clear goals, demonstrable outcomes, and reproducible strategies. Librarians, administrators, and directors will all benefit from the programs detailed inside, which include such topics as

• a university library’s community of practice for interactions and learning around DEI;
• cultural competency training to create more welcoming instruction spaces;
• student workshops on literature searches that mitigate bias;
• overcoming the historic tendency to marginalize LGBTQ+ representation in archives;
• a curriculum and design workshop that moved from discussing social values to embedding them in actions;
• the founding of a library-led LGBT club for students at a rural community college;
• a liberal arts college’s retention-boosting program for first-generation students;
• tailoring a collection and library services to the unique needs of student veterans; and
• a framework for moving from diversity to equity and inclusion, toward a goal of social justice.

In early 2012, the global scientific community erupted with news that the elusive Higgs boson had likely been found, providing potent validation for the Standard Model of how the universe works. Scientists from more than one hundred countries contributed to this discovery—proving, beyond any doubt, that a new era in science had arrived, an era of multinationalism and cooperative reach. Globalization, the Internet, and digital technology all play a role in making this new era possible, but something more fundamental is also at work. In all scientific endeavors lies the ancient drive for sharing ideas and knowledge, and now this can be accomplished in a single tongue— English. But is this a good thing?

In Does Science Need a Global Language?, Scott L. Montgomery seeks to answer this question by investigating the phenomenon of global English in science, how and why it came about, the forms in which it appears, what advantages and disadvantages it brings, and what its future might be. He also examines the consequences of a global tongue, considering especially emerging and developing nations, where research is still at a relatively early stage and English is not yet firmly established.

Throughout the book, he includes important insights from a broad range of perspectives in linguistics, history, education, geopolitics, and more. Each chapter includes striking and revealing anecdotes from the front-line experiences of today’s scientists, some of whom have struggled with the reality of global scientific English. He explores topics such as student mobility, publication trends, world Englishes, language endangerment, and second language learning, among many others. What he uncovers will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the direction of contemporary science, as well as its future. 

Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.
 
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
 
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
 

In 1980, Katina Strauch started the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues shared by the three groups. The meeting has continued annually and boasts over 3,000 attendees in person and virtually. This memoir is Katina’s diary and story of the Charleston Conference and its development concurrently with her career as a professional librarian. Over the last 45 years, there have been massive changes in scholarly communication, changes that Katina has been at the heart of. Where and what will the library and publishing professions develop next? The sky’s the limit to reimagining! Let’s go.

In 1980, Katina Strauch started the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues shared by the three groups. The meeting has continued annually and boasts over 3,000 attendees in person and virtually. This memoir is Katina’s diary and story of the Charleston Conference and its development concurrently with her career as a professional librarian. Over the last 45 years, there have been massive changes in scholarly communication, changes that Katina has been at the heart of. Where and what will the library and publishing professions develop next? The sky’s the limit to reimagining! Let’s go.

Who was Dorothy Richardson? Dorothy Richardson pioneered the modern psychological novel with her great work Pilgrimage. More than 45 years ago—before Joyce, before Virginia Woolf—she explored the new narrative technique that we know now as stream-of-consciousness writing.Her subject was woman: every facet of what it meant to be a rebelling feminine spirit in Victorian England. With great beauty and aesthetic insight she portrayed the moment-to-moment quality of feminine reality. The effect is dramatic and immediate, making Pilgrimage a landmark in the history of modern literature.Author Warren E. Blake's reading of Pilgrimage explains the exhaustive brilliance of Richardson’s performance and brings to the foreground the conflict resulting when a logical mind denies itself. Now, shortly after her death, a book is needed to supplement the revival of interest in Dorothy Richardson. Blake leads the way with his brilliant study.

As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts.

Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent expectations and open new possibilities within and outside of the game. Throughout the book, Cox explores the intersection of race and gender against the backdrop of the WNBA, NCAA, and other leagues within the United States and around the world.  Blending interviews and participant observation with content analysis, she charts how athletes and advocates of women’s hoops illuminate new forms of navigating the global sports-media complex.

Timely and original, Double Crossover takes readers into the lived world of women’s basketball to shed light on the struggles, triumphs, and contributions of today’s players and those around them.

Solemnly or frivolously, the men and women of Donne's poetry argue the question: What are we to do? Should we weep? Should we make love? They confront a central moral dilemma of the human condition: the contrary demands of the laws of God, nature, or man set against the demands of the unique situation in which the speakers find themselves.Donne's poetry, then, is a poetry of argument—a fact that has been noted by other critics. The brilliance of Cathcart's study lies in its identification and close analysis of the particular kind of argument encountered in the poetry. Donne's speakers, wanting to be in harmony with the general order but stymied because that order is unclear and not reflected in the unique situation, need a particular instrument to reconcile the conflict. That instrument, long familiar to students of moral theology, is casuistry: a method of reasoning and a habit of thought aimed at the resolution of a doubting conscience.By considering Donne's Songs and Sonnets in light of the methods of 16th- and 17th-century casuists, Cathcart demonstrates that, more clearly than any other collection of poems from the Renaissance, these are poems whose motive, subject, structure, setting, tone, and premises are those of moral argument. Not only does this approach relate Donne's thought to the major lines of post-Reformation and post-Tridentine casuistry, it also illuminates the special force of Donne's images and metaphors, the special tone and private ironies embedded in his poetry. Explicating his subject with consistent lucidity and wit, Cathcart has provided an essential work for the study of John Donne and his era.

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically—in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youth

Dreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex sociopolitical landscape to advocate for immigrant rights and empower undocumented youth to proudly represent their lives and identities, all while under the ever-present threat of detention and deportation. Contributing to rhetorical studies of social movements, immigration, and minoritized rhetorics, Ribero argues that even though Dreamer rhetorics were reflective of the discursive limits of the neoliberal milieu, they also worked to disrupt neoliberal constraints through activism that troubled the primacy of the nation-state and citizenship, refused to adhere to respectability politics, forwarded embodied identity and transnational belonging, and looked for liberation in community—not solely in legislative action.

Each chapter presents a different rhetorical situation within the US “crisis” of immigration and the rhetoric that Dreamers used to respond to it. Organized chronologically, the chapters document Dreamer activism during the Obama presidency, from the 2010 hunger strikes advocating for the DREAM Act to undocuqueer “artivism” responding to Trump’s presidential campaign. The author draws not only on the methods and theories of rhetorical studies but also on women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, critical theory, and queer theory. In this way, the book looks across disciplines to illustrate the rhetorical savvy of one of the most important US social movements of our time.