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About the Series
The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition series represents an attempt to foster a nationwide conversation—beginning with journal editors, but expanding to teachers, scholars and workers across the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition—to select essays that showcase the innovative and transformative work now being published in the field's journals. Representing both print and digital journals in the field, the essays in each edition represent a snapshot of the traditional and emergent conversations occurring in our field—from classroom practice to writing in global and digital contexts, from border rhetorics to social justice research. Together, the essays provide readers with a rich understanding of the present and future direction of the field.
Series Editors
Jessica Pauszek, Boston College
Kristi Girdharry, Babson College
Charles Lesh, Auburn University
Contents of Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2022
Associate and Assistant Editors (PDF)
Introduction
"Scholarly Generosity and Humanity: A Year of Challenges and Changes in Rhetoric and Composition" (PDF)
Michael Lyons, Emily Illingworth, and Sam Mikva Pfander
Communication Design Quarterly
"Decolonizing Decoloniality: Considering the (Mis)use of Decolonial Frameworks in TPC Scholarship"
Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Breeanne Matheson
https://sigdoc.acm.org/cdq/decolonizing-decoloniality-considering-the-misuse-of-decolonial-frameworks-in-tpc-scholarship/
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ) is the peer-reviewed research publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC). CDQ is in the ACM Digital Library. Communication Design Quarterly invites work by authors of all ethnicities, colors, faith identifications, genders and sexualities, abilities, and levels of academic and professional expertise. Work will be considered for publication based on its potential value to our readership population, as primarily illustrated by members of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC), and the article's methodological, intellectual, and ethical rigor, as appropriate. Submissions will be assessed by peer-reviewers chosen by the editor based on how potential reviewer's expertise relate to the submitted work's area of focus.
Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Breeanne Matheson's "Decolonizing Decoloniality: Considering the (Mis)use of Decolonial Frameworks in TPC Scholarship."
This article works to "equip our field to use decolonial methodologies respectfully as we work together towards equity, inclusion, and social justice in the future." It does so by using a reflective, powerful methodological lens to really interrogate how we think about decolonialist work, and stands to be a much-cited, highly respected article guaranteed to make folks think about the work they do, how they do it, and how their methods, as well as the end-product, create representations of both the researcher and the researched. The piece was originally published in our Online First format on February 17, 2021.
Community Literacy Journal
"Public Memory as Community-Engaged Writing: Composing Difficult Histories on Campus"
Amy J. Lueck, Matthew V. Kroot, and Lee M. Panich
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy/vol15/iss2/4/
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: The Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists. We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions. It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns. For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used. Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well. Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.
Amy J. Lueck, Matthew V. Kroot, and Lee M. Panich, "Public Memory as Community-Engaged Writing: Composing Difficult Histories on Campus"
Authors Amy J. Lueck, Matthew V. Kroot, and Lee M. Panich dig into how universities can ethically and substantively reckon with settler colonialist and white supremacist legacies. Using their own institution of Santa Clara University as a case study, the authors leverage their positions and resources at the university to center and amplify the perspectives, experiences, and histories of local Native communities to ensure the histories of colonization and Indigenous persistence are accurately reflected in various community-engaged writing projects on campus. Through their partnership with local Ohlone tribal members, Lueck, Root, and Panich demonstrate how community literacy scholars can use digital technologies to compose alternative public representations of their campus space and its history.
Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space
"Constellating with our Foremothers: Stories of Mothers Making Space in Rhetoric and Composition"
Ruth Osorio
https://constell8cr.com/articles/mothers-making-space-rhet-comp/
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: constellations is an online peer-reviewed publishing space focused on cultural rhetorics scholarship, teaching, and practice. The field of cultural rhetorics is anchored in the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural. This belief forms a set of constellating methodologies, theories, and practices that draw attention to the intricate ways meaning emerges in human practices
Ruth Osorio, "Constellating with our Foremothers: Stories of Mothers Making Space in Rhetoric and Composition"
Ruth Osorio interweaves her experiences birthing and raising children as a graduate student and faculty member with those of three fellow mother scholars who mentored her over the years—Jane Donawerth, Shirley Logan, and Malea Powell. Drawing from her interviews with Donawerth, Logan, and Powell, Osorio not only theorizes the arduous balancing act of raising children and supporting fellow mothers while in academia, but she examines the role mothers play in shaping our understanding of what storytelling means and the power it holds to transform our lives and communities. From having to fight for maternity leave in a university that did not have such a policy in place to grading papers in the school pick-up line to organizing babysitting co-ops, Osorio uses her interviewees' emotive stories of love and resilience to craft a multilayered account of motherhood's intersections with academia. The article celebrates how mothers help each other navigate challenges that universities are not set up to acknowledge, let alone tackle. While calling for institutional change, Osorio reminds us of the community building and ingenuity legacies the mothers around us have built for new mothers to draw from as they too support their children and each other.
As the pandemic showed when children had to stay home from school for months on end, parenting is a labor that requires a person's whole attention, a difficult-at-best task to achieve when parents are also trying to hold down full time jobs. Academia, which requires that we juggle many tasks at once while finding moments of deep concentration for research, course design, and grading, comes with its own set of complications. Osorio's piece is vital today because it not only brings those complications to life but it does so from a plurality of voices, covering decades of ingenuity and activism by academic mothers. The article provides us with a sense of the struggles academic mothers experience while also giving us tangible solutions for how to create a more welcoming and supportive experience for mothers in our field and beyond.
Peitho
"The Pepper Manual: Towards Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices"
Efe Franca Plange
https://cfshrc.org/article/the-pepper-manual-towards-situated-non-western-feminist-rhetorical-practices/
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: Peitho is the peer-reviewed journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Published quarterly, Peitho seeks to encourage, advance, and publish original research in the history of rhetoric and composition. We invite article-length submissions on a wide range of topics related to feminist theories and gendered practices, including but not limited to archival scholarship, digital interventions, emerging pedagogies, feminist methodologies, global rhetorics, historical research, indigenous studies, institutional critiques, issues of embodiment, LGBTQ+ studies, minority rhetorics, and rhetorical theory. We also invite shorter submissions for "Recoveries and Reconsiderations," an annual feature of the journal that serves as a forum for sharing innovative perspectives on and application of existing feminist work, as well an incubator for new feminist research projects. As such, each offering of the feature includes work from multiple contributors. Items for "Recoveries and Reconsiderations" might include, but are not limited to preliminary description and feminist analysis of the work of recently recovered historical groups, figures, and practices; preliminary description and feminist analysis of current-day groups, figures, and practices; focused feminist reconsiderations of well-known or established rhetoricians, rhetorical theories, and/or rhetorical practices; descriptions and contextualizations of archival collections/materials of potential interest to Peitho readers; examples and discussions of feminist pedagogical practices for re-visioning rhetorical education
Efe Franca Plange, "The Pepper Manual: Towards Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices"
This article is an outstanding example of global rhetorics. We need much more international work in our field, and this article about feminist activist rhetoric in Ghana is a fascinating start. One member of the nominating committee remarked on the solid explanations of "historical background, linguistic/rhetorical problems surrounding the word "feminist," and examples of current work they are doing to push for change," and she added that the article contains "a good amount of humor and call for change while retaining a very professional look at the feminist movement (and the problems surrounding it) in Ghana. Plange's article is written in a clear and organized way with well-done transitions, and because there is so much foundational work done, her topic is easily accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with feminist work in Ghana."
Praxis
"Naming Ableism in the Writing Center"
J. M. Dembsey
https://www.praxisuwc.com/181-dembsey
Mission: We are a publication devoted to the interests of writing consultants: labor issues, writing center news, training, consultant initiatives, and scholarship.
J. M. Dembsey, "Naming Ableism in the Writing Center"
Too often, writing center administrators tailor accessibility practices to an impairment instead of to the individual needs of a person, argues J. M. Dembsey in her article entitled "Naming Ableism in the Writing Center" (2020). Published in Volume 18, Number 1 of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, the article confronts writing centers' checkered histories of accessibility (in)access and misinterpretation. The author makes relevant a discussion of accessibility myths and institutional ableism by highlighting the ways in which it took a global pandemic, and the discomfort of a white, privileged, "non-disabled" faction, for us to reconsider what has inadequately passed for accessibility up until now. Dembsey pronounces writing center tendencies to decide what best practices look like without consulting the community these practices deign to serve, highlighting adaptable training for consultants. This training should prepare writing tutors to move beyond a formulaic brand of consulting and the ableist myth of independence, realizing that all writing depends on interactions from others be they editors, advisors, or peer-reviewers. Dembsey elevates discussions of accessibility in the writing center by exposing ablest practices based on the discomfort felt by many faced with writers with diverse needs, rather than asking those very writers how they can best be accommodated.
Present Tense
"An Annotated Bibliography of Global and Non-Western Rhetorics: Sources for Comparative Rhetorical Studies"
Anne Melfi, Nicole Khoury, and Tarez Samra Graban
https://www.presenttensejournal.org/bibliographies/an-annotated-bibliography-of-global-and-non-western-rhetorics-sources-for-comparative-rhetorical-studies/
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy.
Anne Melfi, Nicole Khoury, and Tarez Samra Graban, "An Annotated Bibliography of Global and Non-Western Rhetorics: Sources for Comparative Rhetorical Studies"
This bibliography represents a major contribution to the study of global Non-Western Rhetorics. Divided into 14 categories, these 207 entries begin the important work, as the editors note, of creating "a concise compendium of global rhetorical resources that offered new avenues for studying and teaching communication in postcolonial and decolonial contexts, and around which we could build or revitalize our curriculum.
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
"The Role of Confianza in Community-Engaged Work for Reproductive Justice"
Rachel Bloom-Pojar and Maria Barker
https://reflectionsjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/V20.N2.BloomPojarBarker.pdf
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: Reflections, a peer-reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on public rhetoric, civic writing, service-learning, and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and topics. We welcome materials that emerge from research; showcase community-based and/or student writing; investigate and represent literacy practices in diverse community settings; discuss theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based rhetorical practices; or explore connections among public rhetoric, civic engagement, service learning, and current scholarship in composition studies and related fields.
Rachel Bloom-Pojar and Maria Barker, "The Role of Confianza in Community-Engaged Work for Reproductive Justice"
Bloom-Pojar and Barker's work exemplifies what can happen when academic and community partners come together to shed light on the health and reproductive justice challenges facing marginalized ethnic communities and the complex responses to those challenges. More specifically, Bloom-Pojar and Barker point out that Latinx communities have already been doing the work of reproductive justice for some time and that newcomers are well served by spending time thinking through and developing confianza, or an abiding and reciprocal trust, as they learn how to develop plans for action.
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
"Distributed Feminist Rhetorical Agency after a Rape Accusation"
Kim Hensley Owens
https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/rhm/article/view/815
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Mission: This journal publishes studies of health and medicine that take a rhetorical perspective. Such studies combine rhetorical analysis with any number of other methodologies, including critical/cultural analysis, ethnography, qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine seeks to bring together humanities and social scientific research traditions in a rhetorically focused journal to allow scholars to build new interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and insights that can impact our understanding of health, illness, healing, and wellness.
Kim Hensley Owens, "Distributed Feminist Rhetorical Agency after a Rape Accusation"
Journal of Basic Writing
"Basic Writing Reform as an Opportunity to Rethink First-Year Composition: New Evidence from an Accelerated Learning Program"
Rachel Ihara
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/jbw/v39n2/ihara.pdf
Supplemental Materials (PDF)
Kim Hensley Owens frames rape as a public health issue in contrast to various discourses that situate rape, instead, as a criminal offender issue. Doing so highlights survivors and undercuts dubious claims that rape is falsely reported. Foregrounding the experiences of the survivor and the complexities of reporting a rape, the article makes novel use of rhetorical theories and concepts—rhetorical agency and rhetorical listening—with rich data from interviews of a survivor and related constituents to offer concrete suggestions for how various stakeholders can better support survivors' fraught attempts at achieving justice via distributing agency in ways that work to combat the insidious effects of rape culture on discourses surrounding a rape accusation. The specificity of advice for how to use rhetorical concepts to assist survivors make this article a must read. The article takes a novel methodological approach to show the importance of n=1 studies to match theoretical frameworks that provide not only new methodological approaches for rhetoric, but also extend the findings of previous research (such as agency).
Mission: Journal of Basic Writing is a refereed print journal founded in 1975 by Mina Shaughnessy and is published twice a year with support from the Office of Academic Affairs of the City University of New York. Basic Writing, a contested term, refers to the field concerned with teaching writing to students not yet deemed ready for first-year composition. Originally, these students were part of the wave of Open Admissions students who poured into universities as a result of the social unrest and demand for equal access of the 1960s and the resulting reforms. As scholars and educators continue to debate the gains and harms of Basic Writing programs, "basic writer" as a category of college writer persists. JBW is dedicated to ensuring the visibility of students for whom the typical supports for college writing are insufficient, whether or not these supports exist inside of so-called Basic Writing programs. Articles that explore the social, political, and pedagogical questions related to educational access and equity, especially as these concern students new to college writing, are the core of JBW's history and mission.
Rachel Ihara, "Basic Writing Reform as an Opportunity to Rethink First-Year Composition: New Evidence from an Accelerated Learning Program"
National trends to speed time toward graduation and/or provide better, more just, writing options, often by shrinking or eliminating remedial tracks, have sparked mainstreaming and corequisite writing programs on many campuses. These changes, however, may be bringing their own disparate impacts, requiring new perspectives on how exactly to weigh the benefits of accelerated writing and which student cohorts stand to benefit least and most. In this article, data collected over several semesters at a large urban community college reveal a disparity of success; in particular, students needing to take corequisite writing in an accelerated learning program often do better than their nondevelopmental peers according to an identical end term assessment. These observations reopen questions around the ways students acquire remedial designations in the first place, how course protocols and pedagogies sustain or void those designations, and the kind of attention to writing all students, regardless of status, may need. At a time of heightened corequisite interest and innovation, this article reveals the challenges and opportunities inherent in efforts to blur the line between "developmental" and "college-level" writer.
Writers: Craft & Context
"It Doesn't Have to Protest: A Review of Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics"
Shenita Denson
https://journals.shareok.org/writersccjournal/article/view/53/22
Mission: Writers: Craft & Context is an open-access interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide array of material focused on writers: the work they do, the contexts in which they compose and circulate their work, how they are impacted by policies and pedagogies (broadly conceived) and how they develop across the lifespan. We invite contributions from a range of academic fields such as writing studies, cultural studies, education, psychology, sociology, literature and modern languages as well as from community experts outside academia, including program leaders, activists, volunteers, artists, and others who see, support, and do the work of writing in non-academic contexts. We are eager to publish traditional and creative genres including research articles, reflections on methodology, pedagogy pieces, collaborative or multi-voice works, collages, essays, creative nonfiction, interviews and more. We welcome work on writers that doesn't fit neatly elsewhere.
Shenita Denson, "It Doesn't Have to Protest: A Review of Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics"
Not only does this new book receive extensive attention but the writer is right in there with it. The writer really pushes the boundaries, even in writing the abstract itself (below) by resisting the traditional format, language, and stance of a book review(er).
