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Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement?

Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. This book offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern, adding to important conversations happening in writing studies about how to foster empathetic understanding and practices for teachers and students. It offers ways for higher education classrooms to become sites for the cultivation of a critical form of empathy that can help address the most important challenges of our time.

Drawing on the study of empathy in rhetorical theory and related fields, teacher-scholars from a variety of institutions and backgrounds offer pedagogical rationales and approaches for fostering empathetic, inclusive, and antiracist pedagogies centered around five key themes related to empathetic teaching: difference, citizenship, storytelling, assessment, and process. A reflective and critical approach to empathetic teaching—as presented by the authors in this collection—can begin to address forces of social division, particularly in the ways we read and write about others. Teaching grounded in empathetic principles can offer students ways of relating to one another across cultural, religious, class, ethnic, political, and ideological differences.

Empathy and the Other is a companion volume to Enacting Empathy: Stories and Strategies from the Writing Classroom, which features vignettes and praxis pieces focused on classroom experiences and reflections on teaching empathy. The two collections may stand alone or be read together and are of great interest to writing teachers and graduate students invested in social justice in the classroom.

In this groundbreaking book, author Margaret Cantú-Sánchez takes on the U.S. educational system. Cantú-Sánchez introduces the concept of the education/educación conflict, where Latinas navigate the clash between home and school epistemologies under Anglocentric, assimilationist pedagogies.

By analyzing literature, such as Barbara Renaud González’s Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me?, and education testimonios from seminal works like This Bridge Called My Back and Telling to Live, Cantú-Sánchez reveals how Latina/Chicana protagonists and students negotiate this conflict through a mestizaje of epistemologies—blending elements of both home and school cultures within the third space of education.

Cantú-Sánchez utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, deploying critical race theory, Chicana third-space feminism, and other pedagogical theories like sentipensante (a sensing/thinking) pedagogy employed by education scholar Laura Rendon, among others. By providing pivotal insights and strategies, she demonstrates how educators can implement culturally relevant pedagogies in their classrooms from K–12 through higher education, fostering environments where Latina/Chicana students can thrive without forsaking their cultural identities.

Empowering Latina Narratives not only identifies the challenges Latina/Chicana students face but also offers a roadmap for overcoming them, making this book an essential resource for scholars, educators, and students committed to culturally inclusive education.

Featuring vignettes and praxis pieces focused on classroom experiences and reflections on teaching empathy, Enacting Empathy: Stories and Strategies from the Composition Classroom provides inspiration and consideration of how and why teachers might adopt an emphasis on empathy. Contributors locate empathy in the particulars of writing assignments, classroom discussions, responses to students, interpretations of texts, and connections with communities.

The challenges and means of understanding one another—as we encounter one another in words, images, and texts—are a central focus of the writing classroom. Teaching for and about empathy has become only more important as we have experienced increased social division, greater recognition and attention to identity, and an emphasis on attending to personal experiences and stories as part of larger efforts to support social justice. With its possibilities for critical reflection and revision, writing is a key tool for developing empathy. Empathy likewise can make us more present, accountable, and socially engaged in our writing. This collection explores how empathy might best be put into practice in the composition classroom, featuring teaching resources, assignment designs, and reflections on empathy and teaching writing for diverse institutional contexts.

The first edited collection in at least thirty years to present strategies for teaching empathy in composition classrooms, Enacting Empathy is a companion volume to Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing, which focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern. The two volumes may stand alone or be read together and are of great interest to writing teachers and graduate students invested in social justice in the classroom.

Queer Joy in Theory and Practice: Essays on Resistance, Thriving, and Liberation centers queer joy as a radical method of resistance and world-building in the face of rising homophobia, transphobia, and systemic violence. Rather than framing queer and trans lives solely through trauma, this groundbreaking collection explores how joy functions as a site of possibility, solidarity, and social change. This book bridges theory, research, and practice to examine queer joy across classrooms, communities, art, public spaces, and activism. With chapters on education, abolitionist politics, drag, parenting, street art, and festivals, this timely and interdisciplinary volume illuminates joy as a transformative force—one that refuses despair and instead imagines liberatory, life-affirming futures for queer and trans communities worldwide.

Envisioning the next step in the ongoing scholarly movement advocating inclusion of global rhetorics in the composition curriculum, The Inclusive Work of Global Rhetorics demonstrates that the question of why or whether to incorporate tenets of global/non-Western rhetorics into writing is long past. The focus has shifted to how to make this change—and to the best practices of such inclusion.

This book showcases the latest scholarship on rethinking the borders of traditional rhetorical studies, which are typically drawn within Greco-Roman and Euro-American confines, with the objective of incorporating non-Eurocentric rhetorical tenets into rhetoric and composition. This work fosters a spirit of inclusivity in the writing classroom by incorporating the many ways of rhetorical thinking gleaned from global/non-Western communication practices while also reflecting on their situatedness and intersectionalities.

Sitting at the crossroads of theory, methodology, and pedagogy, The Inclusive Work of Global Rhetoric puts in perspective a landmark moment in rhetorical studies, a time when it has become imperative to acknowledge the proliferation of non-Western rhetorical traditions in rhetorical practices and communication. Providing heuristics for creating inclusive composition/rhetoric pedagogy, this book serves students, teachers, scholars, and researchers of rhetoric, writing, and communication as both a classroom guide and a reference at the undergraduate and graduate level