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Making Administrative Work Visible brings together voices from graduate students, associated faculty, administrative staff, and tenured and tenure-track faculty at community colleges, regional state universities, liberal arts colleges, private colleges, and research-intensive institutions across the country to speak to the challenges, both named and unnamed, faced by those who do writing program administration work. These authors call explicit attention to this work and examine WPAs’ lived labor experiences and research methodologies to truly understand the scope of lived WPA labor.
 
The collection has three parts, each of which focuses on the most confounding challenges facing WPAs as well as the most compelling sites of their contributions to administration, labor in higher education, and the discipline’s collective obligation to forwarding the goals of social justice and advocacy: Advocating through Representations of WPA Labor, Advocating by Accounting for Time and Labor, and Advocating in and through Complex Institutional Contexts. The chapters use data to share and track the work functions, job titles, grand narratives, program assessments, tenure and promotion, email practices, and more undertaken by WPAs in their administrative capacities. Chapters also surface narratives for future data and studies to be done by other scholars.
 
By taking up and answering questions about the range of WPA work—and the invisibility of much of that work—Making Administrative Work Visible creates avenues toward accounting for and acknowledging the complex activity systems in which WPAs lead the work of the university and advocate for data-driven strategies needed to sustain this foundational area of higher education.
 
Contributors: Kamila Albert, Brooke Anderson, Sheila Carter-Tod, Amy Cicchino, Ana Cortés Lagos, Kristi Murray Costello, Jennifer Cunningham, Ryan Dippre, Kimberly Emmons, Genevieve García de Müeller, Jill Gladstein, Caleb González, Michael Healy, Lyra Hilliard, Kristine Johnson, Seth Kahn, Rita Malenczyk, Troy Mikanovich, Lilian Mina, Angela Mitchell, Greer Murphy, Kate Navickas, Michael Neal, Patti Poblete, Jan Rieman, Heather Robinson, Katelyn Stark, Mary Stewart, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Lizbett Tinoco, Lisa Tremain, Martha Wilson Schaffer
 

Making Progress is an empirical investigation into the strategies and processes first-year composition programs can use to center multimodal work in their curricula. Logan Bearden makes a unique contribution to the field, presenting a series of flexible strategies, evolving considerations, and best practices that can be taken up, adapted, and implemented by programs and directors that want to achieve what Bearden brands “multimodal curricular transformation,” or MCT, at their own institutions.
 
MCT can be achieved at the intersection of program documents and practices. Bearden details ten composition programs that have undergone MCT, offering interview data from the directors who oversaw and/or participated within the processes. He analyzes a corpus of outcomes statements to discover ways we can “make space” for multimodality and gives instructors and programs a broader understanding of the programmatic values for which they should strive if they wish to make space for multimodal composition in curricula. Making Progress also presents how other program documents like syllabi and program websites can bring those outcomes to life and make multimodal composing a meaningful part of first-year composition curricula.
 
First-year composition programs that do not help their students learn to compose multimodal texts are limiting their rhetorical possibilities. The strategies in Making Progress will assist writing program directors and faculty who are interested in using multimodality to align programs with current trends in disciplinary scholarship and deal with resistance to curricular revision to ultimately help students become more effective communicators in a digital-global age.

Mobility Work in Composition explores work in composition from the framework of a mobilities paradigm that takes mobility to be the norm rather than the exception to a norm of stasis and stability.
                  
Both established and up-and-coming scholars bring a diversity of geographic, institutional, and research-based perspectives to the volume, which includes in-depth investigations of specific forms of mobility work in composition, as well as responses to and reflections on those explorations. Eight chapters present specific cases or issues of this work and twelve shorter response chapters follow, identifying key points of intersection and conflict in the arguments and posing new questions and directions to pursue.
 
Addressing matters of knowledge transfer and meaning translation, immigrant literacy practices, design pedagogy, academic career changes, student websites, research methodologies, school literacy programs, and archives, Mobility Work in Composition asks what mobility in composition means and how, why, and for whom it might work. It will be of broad interest to students and scholars in rhetoric and composition.
 
Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Elizabeth Chamberlain, Patrick Danner, Christiane Donahue, Keri Epps, Eli Goldblatt, Rachel Gramer, Timothy Johnson, Jamila Kareem, Carmen Kynard, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Andrea Olinger, John Scenters-Zapico, Khirsten L. Scott, Mary P. Sheridan, Jody Shipka, Ann Shivers-McNair, Scott Wible, Rick Wysocki
 

Multilingual Writing in Entanglement offers deep, behind-the-scenes insight into multilingual writing processes through ethnographically constructed case studies of two Chinese international students navigating first-year writing assignments. Drawing on fungi studies to develop ecology-informed metaphors, Xiqiao Wang traces how these students’ writing unfolds alongside multilingual living, revealing the thickets of relationships with both human participants (peers, teachers, writing consultants) and nonhuman elements (trees, rivers, digital texts, writing technologies) that create opportunities for negotiating across differences.

This longitudinal qualitative study follows Morgan and Leo through their undergraduate careers, collecting rich ethnographic data across private, academic, and digital spaces. The resulting theoretical framework conceptualizes multilingual writing as simultaneously strategic, agentive, creative, diffused, contingent, and messy—a phenomenon shaped by dynamic interplay between ephemeral encounters and established practices. Employing chronotopic figuring as a methodological tool, Wang illuminates aspects of multilingual writing often elided in research: fleeting encounters that energize composition, reciprocal relationships that distribute writing labor, unexpected detours that redirect the writing process, and the layering of writing and identity practices across multiple historical trajectories. This approach moves beyond examining writing in isolated moments to trace how meaning emerges across languages, modes, and spacetimes.

Multilingual Writing in Entanglement offers crucial insights into how international students strategically and improvisationally reconfigure their semiotic and rhetorical repertoires to write multilingual lives into meaning. This work is influential for scholars and educators in composition, literacy studies, multilingual education, ESL, and linguistics.

Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer explores transfer across various contexts of multimodal composing, extending the early conversations connecting multimodality to writing. Contributors address how writing transfer theories intersect with multimodal composing and present methods for facilitating transfer across modes and media, offering insight into how writers can learn to compose when they encounter familiar modes in new contexts.
 
Over the past two decades the concepts of multimodal composing and writing transfer have grown and reshaped the nature of writing studies, but rarely have the ways in which these areas overlap been studied. This collection shows how this shift in writing studies has been mutually informative, covering a wider range of contexts for multimodality and writing transfer than just in first-year composition courses. It places composition teaching practices and multimodal research in conversation with learning transfer theory to provide an in-depth examination of how they influence one another.
 
Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer develops these intersections to connect multimodal composition and writing practices across a wide array of fields and contexts. Scholars across disciplines, postsecondary writing teachers, writing program administrators, writing center directors, and graduate students will find this collection indispensable.