4030 books match the query 'Language Arts & Disciplines' and 31 start with v

cover of Vaccine Rhetorics

Vaccine Rhetorics

Heidi Yoston Lawrence

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Finalist, 2021 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine Book Award
Honorable Mention, Conference on College Composition and Communication Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication


Debates over vaccination run rampant in the US—from the pages of medical journals, to news coverage about the latest outbreak, to vehement messages passed back and forth online. From the professional level to the personal one, almost everyone has an opinion on vaccinations—and often conversations around this issue pit supporters of vaccinations against “anti-vaxxers.” In Vaccine Rhetorics, Heidi Yoston Lawrence turns a critical eye toward such conversations—proposing a new approach that moves us beyond divisive rhetoric and seeks to better understand the material conditions underlying the debate.
 
Starting with a key question—If vaccines work, why are they controversial?—and using an approach she calls “material exigence,” Lawrence seeks to understand the material conditions of disease and injury associated with vaccination. Examining four primary motivations—the exigency of disease at the heart of physician views, the desire for eradication from policymakers, concern over injury expressed by parents and patients in online confessionals, and questions about the unknown surrounding potential recipients of the flu vaccine, Lawrence demonstrates the complexity of vaccination skepticism and the need for more nuanced public discourse. In bringing together the voices of those who oppose, question, and support vaccines, Vaccine Rhetorics unearths the material circumstances that lead to differing viewpoints and brings important attention not just to what is said but how and why it is said—providing a useful framework for studying other controversial issues.
 
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cover of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India

Michele Friedner

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. 
 
Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities.  
 
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society. 
 
 
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cover of Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success

Valuing the Community College Library

Impactful Practices for Institutional Success

Terra Jacobson

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2025

Sharing the work of our community college libraries—our efforts, stories, and how we’re advancing the institution—and advocating to our peers and administration can boost the libraries’ role on our unique campuses.
 
Valuing the Community College Library: Impactful Practices for Institutional Success provides a holistic approach to exhibiting community college library value through historical context, practical applications, and future thinking. Through case studies, editorials from administrators, and practical approaches, it addresses why community college libraries exist and should exist, and the nuanced approaches to how library workers situate themselves at their institutions.
 
Community college libraries need to provide access to content, people, space, and technology and offer instruction, but can also serve as an outreach arm in advancing the mission of open enrollment and affordable access to higher education. Valuing the Community College Library can help you be an advocate for your library on campus and in your community.
 
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cover of Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time

Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time

Roman JakobsonKrystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Roman Jakobson, one of the most important thinkers of our century, was bet known for his role in the rise and spread of the structural approach to linguistics and literature. His formative structuralism approach to linguistics and literature. His formative years with the Russian Futurists and subsequent involvement in the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles (which he co-founded) resulted in a lifelong devotion to fundamental change in both literary theory and linguistics. In bringing each to bear upon the other, he enlivened both disciplines; if a literary work was to a him a linguistic fact, it was also a semiotic phenomenon - part of the entire universe of signs; and above all, for both language and literature, time was an integral factor, one that produced momentum and change. Jakobson's books and articles, written in many languages and published around the world, were collected in a monumental seven-volume work, Selected Writings (1962 -1984), which has been available only to a limited readership. Not long before his death in 1982, Jakobson brought together this group of eleven essays—Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time — to serve as an introduction to some of his linguistic theories and especially, to his work in poetics.

Jakobson's introductory article and the editor's preface together suggest the range of his work and provide a context for the essays in this book, which fall into three groups. Those in the first section reflect his preoccupation with the dynamic role of time in language and society. Jakobson challenges Saussure's rigid distinction between language as a static (synchronic) system and its historical (diachronic) development - a false opposition, in his view, since it ignores the role of time in the present moment of language. The essays on time counter the notion that structuralism itself, as heir to Saussure's work, has discarded history; in Jakabson's hands, we see a struggle to integrate the two modes. In central group essays, on poetic theory, he shows how the grammatical categories of everyday speech become the expressive, highly charged language of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns in poetry—areas that are problematic in structural analysis—and provide exemplary readings of Pushkin and Yeats. The last essays, on Mayakovsky and Holderlin, make clear that Jakobson was aware of the essential (and in these instances, tragic) bond between a poet's life and art. The book closes with essays by Linda Waugh, Krystyna Pomorska, and Igor Melchuk that provide a thoughtful perspective on Jakobson's work as a whole.

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cover of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online

Verified

How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online

Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet. With this illustrated tool kit, you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.
 
This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to
•     Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)
•     Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack
•     Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible
•     Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking
•     Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised
•     Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government
•     Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps. 

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cover of Very Like a Whale: The Assessment of Writing Programs

Very Like a Whale

The Assessment of Writing Programs

Edward M. White

Utah State University Press, 2015

Winner of the 2015 CPTSC Award for Excellence in Program Assessment


Written for those who design, redesign, and assess writing programs, Very Like a Whale is an intensive discussion of writing program assessment issues. Taking its title from Hamlet, the book explores the multifaceted forces that shape writing programs and the central role these programs can and should play in defining college education.

Given the new era of assessment in higher education, writing programs must provide valid evidence that they are serving students, instructors, administrators, alumni, accreditors, and policymakers. This book introduces new conceptualizations associated with assessment, making them clear and available to those in the profession of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. It also offers strategies that aid in gathering information about the relative success of a writing program in achieving its identified goals.

Philosophically and historically aligned with quantitative approaches, White, Elliot, and Peckham use case study and best-practice scholarship to demonstrate the applicability of their innovative approach, termed Design for Assessment (DFA). Well grounded in assessment theory, Very Like a Whale will be of practical use to new and seasoned writing program administrators alike, as well as to any educator involved with the accreditation process.


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cover of Vicente Ximenes, LBJ's Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric

Vicente Ximenes, LBJ's Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric

Michelle Hall Kells, with a foreword by Juan C. Guerra

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Beginning as a grassroots organizer in the 1950s, Vicente Ximenes was at the forefront of the movement for Mexican American civil rights through three presidential administrations, joining Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and later emerging as one of the highest-ranking appointees in Johnson’s administration. Ximenes succeeded largely because he could adapt his rhetoric for different audiences in his speeches and writings. Michelle Hall Kells elucidates Ximenes’s achievements through a rhetorical history of his career as an activist.
 
Kells draws on Ximenes’s extensive archive of speeches, reports, articles, and oral interviews to present the activist’s rhetorical history. After a discussion of Ximenes’s early life, the author focuses on his career as an activist, examining Ximenes’s leadership in several key civil rights events, including the historic 1967 White House Cabinet Committee Hearings on Mexican American Affairs. Also highlighted is his role in advancing Mexican Americans and Latinos from social marginalization to greater representation in national politics.
 
This book shows us a remarkable man who dedicated the majority of his life to public service, using rhetoric to mobilize activists for change to secure civil rights advances for his fellow Mexican Americans.
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cover of Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences

Victorian Popularizers of Science

Designing Nature for New Audiences

Bernard Lightman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.
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cover of Video Relay Service Interpreters: Intricacies of Sign Language Access

Video Relay Service Interpreters

Intricacies of Sign Language Access

Jeremy L. Brunson

Gallaudet University Press, 2011

“Signed language interpreting is about access,” states author Jeremy L. Brunson at the outset of his new book, and no manifestation of access for deaf people can be considered more complex than video relay services (VRS). In Video Relay Service Interpreters: Intricacies of Sign Language Access, Brunson delineates exactly how complicated the service can be, first by analyzing sign language interpreting as a profession and its relation to both hearing and deaf clients. He describes how sign language interpreters function in Deaf communities and how regulatory processes imposed by VRS providers can constrain communication access based on each individual’s needs.

Brunson proceeds by acclimating readers to the environment of VRS and how the layout of the typical physical plant alters the practice of interpreting. The focus then falls upon intended VRS users, providing insights into their expectations. Interpreters shared their experiences with Brunson in 21 formal interviews and discussions. Many remarked on the differences between face-to-face interpreting and VRS training, which often runs counter to the concept of relating informally with deaf clients as a way to expand access. This thoughtful, sociological study outlines texts that originate between users and interpreters and how they can be used to develop VRS access. Video Relay Service Interpreters concludes with the implications of VRS interpreting for sign language interpreting in general and suggests where scholarship will lead in the future.

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cover of Violence in the Work of Composition: Recognizing, Intervening, Ameliorating

Violence in the Work of Composition

Recognizing, Intervening, Ameliorating

edited by Scott Gage and Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Utah State University Press, 2022

Focusing on overt and covert violence and bringing attention to the many ways violence inflects and infects the teaching, administration, and scholarship of composition, Violence in the Work of Composition examines both forms of violence and the reciprocal relationships uniting them across the discipline. Addressing a range of spaces, the collection features chapters on classroom practices, writing centers, and writing program administration, examining the complicated ways writing instruction is interwoven with violence, as well as the equally complicated ways writing teachers may recognize and resist the presence and influence of violence in their work.
 
This book provides a focused, nuanced, and systematic discussion of violence and its presence and influence across pedagogical and administrative sites. Violence in the Work of Composition offers a close look at the nature of violence as it emerges in the work of composition; provides strategies for identifying violence, especially covert violence, addressing its impact and preventing its eruption across many sites; and invites readers to reflect on both the presence of violence and the hope for its cessation. Contributors consider, first, how compositionists can recognize the ways their work inadvertently enacts and/or perpetuates violence and, second, how they can intervene and mitigate that violence.
 
Rich with the voices of myriad stakeholders, Violence in the Work of Composition initiates an essential conversation about violence and literacy education at a time when violence in its many forms continues to shape our culture, communities, and educational systems.
 
Contributors: Kerry Banazek, Katherine Bridgman, Eric Camarillo, Elizabeth Chilbert Powers, Joshua Daniel, Lisa Dooley, Allison Hargreaves, Jamila Kareem, Lynn C. Lewis, Trevor Meyer, Cathryn Molloy, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ellen Skirvin, Krista Speicher Sarraf, Thomas Sura, James Zimmerman
 
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cover of Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics

Violent Exceptions

Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics

Wendy S. Hesford

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children’s human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional—erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.
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cover of Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics

Violent Exceptions

Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics

Wendy S. Hesford

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children’s human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional—erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.
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cover of Violent Histories, Livable Futures: Forging the Power of the People

Violent Histories, Livable Futures

Forging the Power of the People

Eric King Watts

Michigan State University Press, 2026

Our political landscape is crowded with competing voices—claims, demands, grievances, and even acts of violence—all made in the name of some idea of “the people.” This powerful concept has been wielded both to assert democratic sovereignty and to justify exclusion and control. Violent Histories, Livable Futures unpacks this complex dynamic through compelling historical case studies, spanning sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s, post–World War II Guatemala, and the United States in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. By tracing how societies have contended over which people matter and which do not, this book offers a deeply relevant exploration of power, representation, and the struggle for justice, all in pursuit of a more livable future.

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cover of Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation

Virgin Crossing Borders

Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation

Emek Ergun

University of Illinois Press, 2023

The Turkish-language release of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History is a politically engaged translation aimed at disrupting Turkey’s heteropatriarchal virginity codes. In Virgin Crossing Borders, Emek Ergun maps how she crafted her rendering of the text and draws on her experience and the book’s impact to investigate the interventionist power of feminist translation.

Ergun’s comparative framework reveals translation’s potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational feminist solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation’s role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings.

Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation’s vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge.

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cover of Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States

Virtual Homelands

Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States

Madhavi Mallapragada

University of Illinois Press, 2014

The internet has transformed the idea of home for Indians and Indian Americans. In Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States, Madhavi Mallapragada analyzes home pages and other online communities organized by diasporic and immigrant Indians from the late 1990s through the social media period. Engaging the shifting aspects of belonging, immigrant politics, and cultural citizenship by linking the home page, household, and homeland as key sites, Mallapragada illuminates the contours of belonging and reveals how Indian American struggles over it trace back to the web's active mediation in representing, negotiating, and reimagining "home."

As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of "India" and "America."

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cover of Virtual Reference Training: The Complete Guide to Providing Anytime, Anywhere Answers

Virtual Reference Training

The Complete Guide to Providing Anytime, Anywhere Answers

American Library Association, 2004

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cover of Virtually Embedded: The Librarian In An Online Env.

Virtually Embedded

The Librarian In An Online Env.

Elizabeth Leonard

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2014

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cover of Virtually Embedded: The Librarian in an Online Environment

Virtually Embedded

The Librarian in an Online Environment

Elizabeth Leonard

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2014

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cover of Visible Librarian

Visible Librarian

Judith A. Siess

American Library Association, 2003

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cover of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom

Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it.

 The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action.  To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class.  The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies.

In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.

 

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cover of Visions and Revisions: Continuity and Change in Rhetoric and Composition

Visions and Revisions

Continuity and Change in Rhetoric and Composition

Edited by James D. Williams

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

A history of contemporary rhetoric, Visions and Revisions: Continuity and Change in Rhetoric and Composition examines the discipline’s emergence and development from the rise of new rhetoric in the late 1960s through the present. Editor James D. Williams has assembled nine essays from leading scholars to trace the origins of new rhetoric and examine current applications of genre studies, the rhetoric of science, the rhetoric of information, and the influence of liberal democracy on rhetoric in society.

Given the field’s diversity, a historical sketch cannot adopt a single perspective. Part one of Visions and Revisions therefore offers the detailed reminiscences of four pioneers in new rhetoric, while the essays in part two reflect on a variety of issues that have influenced (and continue to influence) current theory and practice. In light of the recent shift in focus of scholarly investigation toward theory, Williams’s collection contextualizes the underlying tension between theory and practice while stressing instruction of students as the most important dimension of rhetoric and composition today. Together, these chapters from some of the most influential scholars in the field provide a range of perspectives on the state of rhetoric and composition and illuminate the discipline’s development over the course of the last forty years.

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cover of Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination

Visions of Poverty

Welfare Policy and Political Imagination

Robert Asen

Michigan State University Press, 2002

Images of poverty shape the debate surrounding it. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform legislation repealing the principal federal program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). With the president's signature this originally non-controversial program became the only title of the 1935 Social Security Act to be repealed. The legislation culminated a retrenchment era in welfare policy beginning in the early 1980s.
     To understand completely the welfare policy debates of the last half of the 20th Century, the various images of poor people that were present must be considered. Visions of Poverty explores these images and the policy debates of the retrenchment era, recounting the ways in which images of the poor appeared in these debates, relaying shifts in images that took place over time, and revealing how images functioned in policy debates to advantage some positions and disadvantage others. Looking to the future, Visions of Poverty demonstrates that any future policy agenda must first come to terms with the vivid, disabling images of the poor that continue to circulate. In debating future reforms, participants-whose ranks should include potential recipients-ought to imagine poor people anew.
     This ground breaking study in policymaking and cultural imagination will be of particular interest to scholars in rhetorical studies, political science, history, and public policy.
 
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cover of Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950

Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950

Mark Hampton

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing historical understandings of the press and its proper role in British society.

In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton argues that qualities expected of the contemporary British press--lively writing, speed, impartiality, depth, and the ability to topple corrupt governments by informing readers--are not obvious attributes of journalism but derive from more than a century of debate. He analyzes the various historical conceptions of the British press that helped to create its modern role, and demonstrates that these conceptions were intimately involved in the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. The resulting blend of cultural history and media sociology demonstrates how once optimistic visions of the press have given way to more pessimistic contemporary views about the power of the mass media.

With clarity and panache, this book shows that many competing conceptions continued to influence twentieth-century understandings of the press but did not remain satisfactory in new political, cultural, and media environments. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 provides a rich tapestry against which to understand the contemporary realities of journalism, democracy, and mass media.

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cover of Visual Futures: Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice

Visual Futures

Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice

Edited by Tracey Bowen and Brett Caraway

Intellect Books, 2021

A collection of thoughtful and incisive examinations of how we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments. 

In our everyday lives, we navigate a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet we rarely consider systematically how or why we derive meaning from this sea of the visual. Nor do we typically contemplate the effect it has on our motivations and actions as individuals and collectives. Visual Futures provides a new lens through which to analyze and challenge established perspectives, norms, and practices surrounding the visual. 

This edited collection ruminates on how visuality and the visual provoke a new kind of cultural exchange and explores the relationships, intersections, and collisions between visuality and visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection, educative practices, civic development, and social development. 
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cover of Visual Literacy for Libraries: A Practical, Standards-Based Guide

Visual Literacy for Libraries

A Practical, Standards-Based Guide

Nicole E. Brown

American Library Association, 2016

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cover of Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene

Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene

Amy D. Propen

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

How do we understand the lives of nonhuman animals and our relationship with and responsibilities to them? What are the artifacts or things that help configure such perceived responsibility? And what does it mean to practice conservation in the Anthropocene? Amy D. Propen seeks to answer these questions in Visualizing Posthuman Conservation in the Age of the Anthropocene, which brings a visual-material rhetorical approach into conversation with material feminisms and environmental humanities to describe how technologies, environments, bodies, and matter work together to shape and reshape how we coexist with our nonhuman kin.

Through case studies in which visual technologies and science play a prominent role in arguments to protect threatened marine species—from photographs showing the impact of ocean plastics on vulnerable sea birds, to debates about seismic testing and its impact on marine species, to maps created from GPS tracking projects—Propen advances a notion of posthuman environmental conservation that decenters the human enough to consider ideas about the material world from the vantage point of the nonhuman animal. In so bringing together work in environmental humanities, animal studies, human geography, and visual-material rhetoric, Propen further shows how interdisciplinary ways of knowing can further shape and illuminate our various lived and embodied experiences.
 
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cover of Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Vocabulary Myths

Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching

Keith S. Folse

University of Michigan Press, 2004


In Vocabulary Myths, Keith S. Folse breaks down the teaching of second language vocabulary into eight commonly held myths. In debunking each myth, he introduces the myth with a story based on his 25 years of teaching experience (in the United States and abroad), continues with a presentation of what empirical research has shown on the topic, and finishes with a list of what teachers can do in their classrooms to facilitate true vocabulary acquisition.

The goal of Vocabulary Myths is to foster a paradigm shift that correctly views vocabulary as fundamental in any second language learning process and demonstrates that research supports this goal-that in fact there is a wealth of empirical evidence to support these views. In addition, an important theme is that teachers have overestimated how much vocabulary students really understand, and as a result, the so-called "comprehensible input" is neither comprehensible nor input.

The second language vocabulary acquisition myths reexamined in this book are:
*In learning another language, vocabulary is not as important as grammar or other areas.
*Using word lists to learn L2 vocabulary is unproductive.
*Presenting new vocabulary in semantic sets facilitates learning.
*The use of translations to learn new vocabulary should be discouraged.
*Guessing words from context is an excellent strategy for learning L2 vocabulary.
*The best vocabulary learners make use of one or two really specific vocabulary learning strategies.
*The best dictionary for L2 learners is a monolingual dictionary.
*Teachers, textbooks, and curricula cover L2 vocabulary adequately.
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cover of Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian Languages

Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian Languages

Edited by Peter K. Austin and Simon Musgrave

CSLI, 2005

This volume explores various problems in the syntax of Austronesian languages, which are found primarily in Malaysia and the Polynesian islands. Using the framework of constraint-based theories of syntax, contributors discuss the nature of these voice systems, the function of their verbal morphology, valence, verbal diathesis and transitivity in such languages, and the nature of their lexical categories. Each analysis is presented within the frameworks of lexical-functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.
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cover of Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Voices in Exile

Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Jean D'Costa

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Recovering the voices that shaped Jamaica's language, literature, and identity.

Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries is a landmark anthology that brings together a rich collection of historical documents illuminating the origins and development of Jamaican language, culture, and identity. Edited by renowned scholars Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla, the volume gathers songs, sermons, folk narratives, eyewitness accounts, personal testimonies, and other primary materials that reveal the complex social and cultural world of Jamaica during the colonial and post-emancipation eras.

Spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the collection traces the emergence of a distinctive Jamaican society forged through the interaction of African, European, and Caribbean peoples. The selected texts capture the realities of plantation life, slavery, resistance, religious expression, language development, and everyday experience while showcasing the creativity and resilience of communities whose voices have often been marginalized in traditional historical narratives.

Particularly valuable for its documentation of Jamaican Creole and evolving linguistic practices, the anthology provides readers with direct access to the words and perspectives of individuals living through profound social transformation. Materials from the periods before emancipation, during apprenticeship, and after emancipation illustrate how language and culture adapted to changing political and economic conditions.

More than a collection of historical texts, Voices in Exile serves as a window into the formation of Jamaican identity and the broader cultural history of the Caribbean. By preserving and contextualizing these remarkable documents, D'Costa and Lalla offer an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Caribbean studies, literature, linguistics, history, postcolonial studies, and the African diaspora. The result is a compelling archive of voices that continue to resonate across centuries and enrich our understanding of Jamaica's cultural heritage.

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cover of Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric

Voices in the Wilderness

Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric

Patricia Roberts-Miller

University of Alabama Press, 1999

What has gone wrong with discourse and deliberation in the United States? It remains monologic, argues Patricia Roberts-Miller in Voices in the Wilderness, which traces America’s dominant form of argumentation back to its roots in the rhetorical tradition of 17th-century American Puritans. A work of composition theory, rhetorical theory, and cultural criticism, this volume ultimately provides not only new approaches to argumentation and the teaching of rhetoric, composition, and communication but also an original perspective on the current debate over public discourse

Both Jürgen Habermas and Wayne Booth—two of the most influential theorists in the domain of public discourse and good citizenry—argue for an inclusive public deliberation that involves people who are willing to listen to one another, to identify points of agreement and disagreement, and to make good faith attempts to validate any disputed claims. The Puritan voice crying in the wilderness, Roberts-Miller shows, does none of these things. To this individual of conscience engaged in a ceaseless battle of right and wrong against greedy philistines, all inclusion, mediation, and reciprocity are seen as evil, corrupting, and unnecessary. Hence, the voice in the wilderness does not in any real sense participate in public deliberation, only in public pronouncement.

Arguing that our culture’s continuing affection for the ethos of the voice crying in the wilderness is one of our more troubling inheritances from the early American ambivalence to public discourse—including the Puritan denigration of rhetoric—Roberts-Miller contends that the monologic discourse of the Puritans in fact contains within it arguments for dialogism. Thus, the history of rhetoric can provide much richer fields for reimagining discourse than heretofore credited. Roberts-Miller concludes by extending her findings into their practical applications for argumentation in the public sphere and in the composition classroom.
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cover of Vote and Voice: Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915-1930

Vote and Voice

Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915-1930

Wendy B. Sharer

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Wendy B. Sharer explores the rhetorical and pedagogical practices through which two prominent postsuffrage organizations—the League of Women Voters and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—challenged the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women as powerful rhetors.

Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and speaking practices of members of women’s political organizations in the decade after the suffrage movement. During those years, women still did not have power within deliberative and administrative organs of politics, despite their recent enfranchisement. Because they were largely absent from diplomatic circles and political parties, post-suffrage women’s organizations developed rhetorical practices of public discourse to push for reform within traditional politics.

Vote and Voice is historically significant as well as pedagogically beneficial for instructors who connect rhetorical education with public participation by integrating writing and speaking skills into a curriculum that aims to prepare educated students and active citizens.
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