Results by title

Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods explores multiple antiracist, decolonial forms of study that are relevant to 21st-century knowledge production about language, communication, technology, and culture. The book presents a rare collaboration among scholars representing different racial and ethnic backgrounds, genders, and ranks within the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS). In each chapter, the authors examine the significance of their individual experiences with race and racism across contexts. Their research engages the politics of embodiment, institutional critique, multimodal rhetoric, materiality, and public digital literacies. The book merges impassioned storytelling with unflinching analysis, offering a multi-voiced argument that spotlights the field's troubled history with theorizing about race and epistemology. Although the authors directly address aspiring and current RCWS professionals, they model how a comprehensive consideration of race adds legitimacy and integrity to any subject of study. This co-authored work charts uncommon paths forward, demonstrating reflexive engagement with legacies that are personal and transnational, as well as with technologies that are both dehumanizing and liberating.

Racing Translingualism provides both theoretical and pedagogical reconsiderations of the translingual approach to language diversity by addressing the intersections of race and translingualism.
 
This collection extends the disciplinary conversations about translingualism by foregrounding the role race and racism play in the construction and maintenance of language differences. In doing so, the contributors examine the co-naturalization of race and language in order to theorize a race-conscious translingual praxis. The book begins by offering generative critiques of translingualism, centering on the ways in which the approach’s democratic orientation to language avoids issues of race, language, and power and appeals to colorblind racist tropes of equal opportunity. Following these critiques, contributors demonstrate the important intersections of race and translingualism by drawing upon voices typically marginalized by monolingual language ideologies and pedagogies. Finally, Racing Translingualism concludes by attending to the pedagogical implications of a race-conscious translingual praxis in writing and literacy education.
 
Making the case for race-conscious, rather than colorblind, theories and pedagogies, Racing Translingualism offers a unique take on how translingualism is theorized and practiced and moves the field forward through its direct consideration of the links between language, race, and racism.
 
Contributors: Lindsey Albracht, Steven Alvarez, Bethany Davila, Tom Do, Jaclyn Hilberg, Bruce Horner, Aja Martinez, Esther Milu, Stephanie Mosher, Yasmine Romero, Karen Rowan, Rachael Shapiro, Shawanda Stewart, Brian Stone, Victor Villanueva, Missy Watson

Radical Transparency brings together candid, powerful accounts of what it means to live, work, and labor as a graduate student in writing studies in today’s academy. At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, burnout, widening inequities, and political uncertainty, this collection names, without sanitizing, the emotional, embodied, and institutional realities that shape graduate education.

Blending scholarly analysis with personal narrative, the chapters document graduate student experiences across writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and related fields. Contributors take up issues often rendered invisible in official program materials and institutional discourse, including disability and access, queer and crip temporalities, financial and labor precarity, mentoring breakdowns, emotional labor, care work, grief, and the hidden curricula that govern graduate life. Together, these chapters reveal how graduate students navigate systems that demand resilience while frequently withholding transparency, support, and care. Organized around three intersecting threads—navigating precarity, building networks of care, and reimagining academic work—Radical Transparency also introduces an emotional-labor tagging system that allows readers to trace recurring forms of labor and affective demand as they surface in different institutional contexts.

Whether read cover to cover or approached nonlinearly, the text invites readers to see connections accumulate—and patterns emerge. Radical Transparency is for graduate students who suspect they’re not broken. It is for faculty and administrators willing to sit with discomfort, accountability, and complicity. And it is for anyone who believes that transparency without action is insufficient and that telling the truth, collectively and aloud, is a form of resistance.

What imaginings of the doctoral writer circulate in the talk of doctoral researchers and their supervisors? How do institutional policies and the conventions of particular disciplines shape the ways in which doctoral writing is imagined? Why, and in what ways, has doctoral writing been re-imagined in the twenty-first century? What future imaginings of doctoral writing may be hovering on the horizon? This edited collection has gathered a diverse group of authors—from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the US—to consider these challenging questions during a time in which doctoral education is undergoing enormous transformation. Together, the contributors to this collection explore how the practice of doctoral writing is entangled with broader concerns within doctoral education, including attrition, timeliness, the quality of supervision, the transferability of knowledge and skills to industry settings, research impact, research integrity, and the decolonization of the doctorate.

Reaching All Writers brings together decades of writing studies experience, research, and scholarship to help organize first-year writing courses around inclusive teaching practices and foundational concepts that support disciplinary learning for all college writers, including students who have been excluded from more selective higher-education institutions.
 
Using threshold concepts and transfer as a foundation, the authors provide an invaluable resource for multiple contexts: instructors working off the tenure track and/or at multiple institutions; two-year college programs without a writing program administrator; and writing program graduate teaching assistant training courses. Each chapter includes an overview of a threshold concept, disciplinary background readings, practical teaching strategies, assignment and learning activity ideas, assessment principles, examples from student and instructor perspectives, and questions for reflection and discussion.
 
Reaching All Writers describes effective teaching practices to help all college writing instructors, regardless of their institutional contexts, make changes that support equitable and inclusive learning opportunities—with a focus on teaching students whose backgrounds and learning experiences are different from those with more educational or economic privilege. Both new and experienced teachers adapting first-year college writing courses will find the book’s blend of practical strategies and disciplinary knowledge a useful companion for facilitating new classroom and program needs or designing new teaching assistant training courses.
 

Robert Scholes passed away on December 9, 2016, leaving behind an intellectual legacy focused broadly on textuality. Scholes’s work had a significant impact on a range of fields, including literary studies, composition and rhetoric, education, media studies, and the digital humanities, among others. In Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century contemporary scholars explore and extend the continued relevance of Scholes’s work for those in English and writing studies.
 
In this volume, Scholes’s scholarship is included alongside original essays, providing a resource for those considering everything from the place of the English major in the twenty-first century to best practices for helping students navigate misinformation and disinformation. Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century not only keeps Scholes’s legacy alive but carries it on through a commitment, in Scholes’s (1998) own words, to “offer our students . . . the cultural equipment they are going to need when they leave us.”
 
Contributors:
Angela Christie, Paul T. Corrigan, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Doug Hesse, Alice S. Horning, Emily J. Isaacs, Christopher La Casse, Robert Lestón, Kelsey McNiff, Thomas P. Miller, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christian Smith, Kenny Smith
 

Reconceptualizing Response reframes instructor feedback, one of the most consequential practices in rhetoric and writing studies, as a site of linguistic justice. Instructor response is not merely technical commentary; it is contested terrain where students’ identities, experiences, and language varieties must be named, supported, and celebrated.

Contributors represent a wide range of institutional contexts—including two-year colleges, four-year universities, HBCUs, HSIs, SLACs, and PWIs—and write from diverse positionalities, amplifying current debates and productive tensions in the field. Organized around four key moves—looking back, looking within, looking up, and looking around—the book invites readers to critically examine the ideologies underlying feedback practices; recognize how instructors' positionality, values, and beliefs are communicated through feedback; align feedback with students’ needs; and reconsider the broader classroom ecology required for justice. Bridging linguistic justice and feedback studies, this collection provides concrete tools and frameworks, as well as sample rubrics, course policies, and fresh approaches to assessment.

Ideal for graduate students, writing program administrators, faculty teaching future writing instructors, and anyone seeking to transform classroom practice, Reconceptualizing Response offers guiding questions for reflection and practical strategies for change. This volume reimagines instructor response as a catalyst for equity, consciousness-raising, and transformation, calling instructors not only to comment on writing but also to use feedback to dismantle oppressive logics and foster linguistic justice.

In Reconstructing Response to Student Writing Dan Melzer makes the argument that writing instructors should shift the construct so that peer response and student self-assessment are more central than teacher response.
 
Presenting the results of a national study of teacher and peer response and student self-assessment at institutions of higher education across the United States, Melzer analyzes teacher and peer response to over 1,000 pieces of student writing as well as 128 student portfolio reflection essays. He draws on his analysis and on a comprehensive review of the literature on response to introduce a constructivist heuristic for response aimed at both composition instructors and instructors across disciplines. Melzer argues that teachers and researchers should focus less on teacher response to individual pieces of student writing and more on engaging in dialogue with student self-assessment and peer response, focusing on growth and transfer rather than products and grades.
 
Reconstructing Response to Student Writing, especially when taken together with Melzer’s previous book Assignments across the Curriculum, provides a comprehensive and large-scale view of college writing and responding across the curriculum in the United States.
 

Redefining Roles is the first book to recognize and provide sustained focus on the presence of professional, faculty, and graduate student consultants in writing centers. A significant number of writing centers employ non-peer consultants, yet most major training manuals are geared toward undergraduate tutoring practices or administrators. This collection systematically addresses this gap in the literature while initiating new conversations regarding writing center staffing.
 
Thirty-two authors, consultants, and administrators from diverse centers—from large public four-year institutions to a private, online for-profit university—provide both theoretical frameworks and practical applications in eighteen chapters. Ten chapters focus on graduate consultants and address issues of authority, training, professional development, and mentoring, and eight focus on professional and faculty consultant training as well as specific issues of identity and authority. By sharing these voices, Redefining Roles broadens the very idea of writing centers while opening the door to more dialogue on the important role these practitioners play.
 
Redefining Roles is designed for writing center practitioners, scholars, and staff. It is also a necessary addition to help campus administrators in the ongoing struggle to validate the intellectually complex work that such staff performs.
 
Contributors: Fallon N. Allison, Vicki Behrens, Cassie J. Brownell, Matt Burchanoski, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Danielle Clapham, Steffani Dambruch, Elise Dixon, Elizabeth Festa, Will Fitzsimmons, Alex Frissell, Alex Funt, Genie Giaimo, Amanda Gomez, Lisa Lamson, Miriam E. Laufer, Kristin Messuri, Rebecca Nowacek, Kimberly Fahle Peck, Mark Pedretti, Irina Ruppo, Arundhati Sanyal, Anna Scanlon, Matthew Sharkey-Smith, Kelly A. Shea, Anne Shiell, Anna Sicari, Catherine Siemann, Meagan Thompson, Lisa Nicole Tyson, Marcus Weakley, Alex Wulff
 

Reflection-in-Motion considers how reflective practice is embedded in daily course happenings, centering the experiences of students and teachers in Minority Serving Institutions to amplify
underrepresented viewpoints about how reflection works in the writing classroom. Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday examines how its availability is subject to teacher/student power dynamics, the literacies welcomed (or not) in the class, the past and present pedagogies that students are engaging with and attending to, and the interactions among humans, materials, and emotions within the rhetorical context. She adopts an intersectional feminist perspective for an inclusive view of how practitioners name, identify, and practice reflection in the everyday moments of writing classrooms.
 
Fiscus-Cannaday invokes a Black feminist qualitative research method that Venus Evans-Winters calls a “mosaic.” When researchers collect both traditional and nontraditional texts to create a full view of students’ and teachers’ interviews at three institutions (a Hispanic Serving Institution, a Historically Black College and University, and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution), she finds that practitioners often build definitions from past experiences with reflection—and then use those definitions as terministic screens to decide if an activity can be named, identified, and practiced as reflection. These definitions hold different rhetorical effects: reflection-for-introspection, reflection-for-learning, reflection-for-mindfulness, and reflection-for-awareness.
 
Reflection is used for these different rhetorical effects, but because classrooms so often focus on the Westernized view and its emphasis on growth, reflection has the underused and undertheorized potential rhetorical effect of helping students investigate their identities and positionalities, acknowledge deep-rooted ideologies, and consider new perspectives so they can better work across difference. Reflection-in-Motion will inspire teachers and writing program administrators to listen to how students define and practice reflection and why—thus making room for more capacious definitions of reflection and student-centered practices of what reflection can do and be.
 

Reprogrammable Rhetoric offers new inroads for rhetoric and composition scholars’ past and present engagements with critical making. Moving beyond arguments of inclusion and justifications for scholarly legitimacy and past historicizations of the “material turn” in the field, this volume explores what these practices look like with both a theoretical and hands-on “how-to” approach. Chapters function not only as critical illustrations or arguments for the use of reprogrammable circuits but also as pedagogical instructions that enable readers to easily use or modify these compositions for their own ends.

This collection offers nuanced theoretical perspectives on material and cultural rhetorics alongside practical tutorials for students, researchers, and teachers to explore critical making across traditional areas such as wearable sensors, Arduinos, Twitter bots, multimodal pedagogy, Raspberry Pis, and paper circuitry, as well as underexplored areas like play, gaming, text mining, bots, and electronic monuments.

Designed to be taught in upper division undergraduate and graduate classrooms, these tutorials will benefit non-expert and expert critical makers alike. All contributed codes and scripts are also available on Utah State University Press’s companion website to encourage downloading, cloning, and repurposing.
 
 
Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Kendall Gerdes, Kellie Gray, Matthew Halm, Steven Hammer, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, John Jones, M.Bawar Khan, Bree McGregor, Sean Morey, Ryan Omizo, Andrew Pilsch, David Rieder, David Sheridan, Wendi Sierra, Nicholas Van Horn
 

Rethinking Peer Review: Critical Reflections on a Pedagogical Practice interrogates peer review, a foundational practice of writing instruction, from both practical and theoretical perspectives, provoking discussion and re-examination of this practice in light of changing demographics, new technologies, and changing goals and priorities among teachers and institutions. Though long considered an essential element in writing and writing-intensive courses, peer review continues to provoke questions and provide challenges for instructors and students. By questioning and clarifying the goals of peer review, the contributors to this edited collection demonstrate how peer review can inform and enhance student writing and learning. In doing so, Rethinking Peer Review offers a roadmap for revitalizing this critical practice for the 21st century classroom.

With its emphasis on both rhetoric and reflection, Rethinking Your Writing foregrounds the inquiry and decision-making processes that help writers succeed in today's writing task—and transfer that learning to the next one. Students are invited to move beyond “just do it” writing to more deliberately predict, problem-solve, and reflect throughout their process.

Created from the start as an online book, Rethinking also helps support instructors as they engage students with many kinds of writing tasks, from typical first-year assignments like narratives and research-based arguments to writing that happens in response to more complex rhetorical situations, such as community-based writing, writing in multiple genres, and writing across disciplines:

• The modular, cross-linked design helps faculty assign and students locate information needed for any writing situation.
• In-depth, student-friendly sections guide students’ thinking on vital but less visible elements of writing, such as threshold concepts, rhetorical analysis, reflective practice, peer review, writers’ dispositions, critical reading, research processes, and questions of equity.
• A book-wide focus on how writers choose their approaches based on their goals, resources, and constraints supports learners who are exploring new genres and audiences, and lays the groundwork for discussion of how writers use tools like Generative AI.
• More than 70 innovative writing exercises help writers explore and practice relevant strategies.

In Rethinking Your Writing, E. Shelley Reid provides a versatile guide that can be tailored to the needs of almost any course or classroom. Whether you select a single module to supplement your current resources or use the text throughout your course, this book is designed to help you engage your students and deepen their understanding of how writers learn and succeed in school, their careers, and beyond.

Revision sometimes seems more metaphor than real, having been variously described as a stage, an act of goal setting, a method of correction, a process of discovery, a form of resistance. Revising Moves makes a significant contribution to writing theory by collecting stories of revision that honor revision’s vitality and immerse readers in rooms, life circumstances, and scenes where revision comes to life.
 
In these narrative-driven essays written by a wide range of writing professionals, Revising Moves describes revision as a messy, generative, and often collaborative act. These meditations reveal how revision is both a micro practice tracked by textual change and a macro phenomenon rooted in family life, institutional culture, identity commitments, and political and social upheaval. Contributors depict revision as a holistic undertaking and a radically contextualized, distributed practice that showcases its relationality to everything else. Authors share their revision processes when creating scholarly works, institutional and self-promoting documents, and creative projects. Through narrative the volume opens a window to what is often unseen in a finished text: months or years of work, life events that disrupt or alter writing plans, multiple draft changes, questions about writerly identity and positionality, layers of (sometimes contradictory) feedback, and much more.

Winner of the IARSLCE 2021 Publication of the Year Award and the Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award.

Community members are rarely tapped for their insights on engaged teaching and research, but without these perspectives, it is difficult to create ethical and effective practices. Rewriting Partnerships calls for a radical reorientation to the knowledges of community partners. Emphasizing the voices of community members themselves—the adult literacy learners, secondary students, and youth activists who work with college students—the book introduces Critical Community-Based Epistemologies, a deeply practical approach to knowledge construction that centers the perspectives of marginalized participants.
 
Drawing on interviews with over eighty community members, Rewriting Partnerships features community knowledges in three common types of community-engaged learning: youth working with college students in a writing exchange program, nonprofit staff who serve as clients for student projects, and community members who work with graduate students. Interviewees from each type of partnership offer practical strategies for creating more ethical collaborations, including how programs are built, how projects are introduced to partners, and how graduate students are educated. The book also explores three approaches to partnership design that create space for community voices at the structural level: advisory boards, participatory evaluation, and community grading.
 
Immediately applicable to teachers, researchers, community partners, and administrators involved in community engagement, Rewriting Partnerships offers concrete strategies for creating more community-responsive partnerships at the classroom level as well as at the level of program and research design. But most provocatively, the book challenges common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning, demonstrating that community partners have the potential to contribute significantly to community engagement scholarship and program decision-making.

Because of its centrality to the professional identity of any communications-focused discipline, the workplace has for decades been a focus of practice and scholarship in technical and professional communication. The contributors to Rewriting Workexamine workplace writing through the lenses of identity and changing communication practices, arguing that place can be viewed as a productive frame for understanding how technical and professional communication has changed over the last two decades. The result is a timely set of chapters that approach workplace writing through two key questions: How do we fit in? How do we adapt? The answers to these questions provide insights into the primary factors that have shaped the practices and identities of technical and professional communicators in the 21st century.