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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 2023
Each essay also includes Supplementary Materials provided by the author(s), consisting of their reflections on its origin, a description of research methods,
findings, and/or pedagogical impact, and discussion questions and, sometimes, classroom activities.
Associate and Assistant Editors (PDF)
Introduction
Persistence and Praxis: Reform, Embodiment, and Activism to Advance Justice (PDF)
Noël Ingram and Angela Muir
College English
“'Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!' Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures"
Carmen Kynard
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: College English is the professional journal for the college scholar-teacher. CE publishes articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, creative writing theory and pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, and professional topics related to the teaching of English. Issues may also include review essays, symposia, and special features.
Carmen Kynard. “'Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!' Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures." College English, vol. 85, no. 4, pp. 318–45.
Rationale: We selected this essay because Kynard employs what she terms a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy,” exposing the violence committed against Black faculty and Black students in our field and leading us to “imagine radical reparative justice, other-curricular-worlds, alternative pedagogical futures, and new affective college writing.” Our reviewers recommended that we accept this work following only one review cycle, with Reviewer One describing it as a “profound, powerful, and engaging essay,” and writing, “I want to assign this in my graduate courses, I want to share it with my colleagues, I want to re-read this a dozen times a year. I want this published.” Reviewer 2 concluded their review by repeating their praise for the work: “As I've noted several times, your manuscript enacts your theory, methodology, and pedagogy as you reach for a Black feminist ideal. You put into practice a critical point you make about reparative justice– that White faculty must ‘put themselves in the role of learning from Black folx.’ Your manuscript makes patently clear why I and my white colleagues everywhere must do so.“ We hope your review committees will recognize this extraordinary work so that we can expand the audience who encounters it. Ultimately, our editorial team hopes this article will catalyze the kinds of conversations and disciplinary transformations required in this moment to achieve Kynard’s vision of “radical reparative justice and . . . future that will finally feel akin to a Black familial home.”
Composition Forum
“Responding for Transfer,” Composition Forum 50, Fall 2022.
Dan Melzer
https://compositionforum.com/issue/50/responding-transfer.php
Supplementary Materials
Mission: Composition Forum is a peer-reviewed journal for scholars and teachers interested in the investigation of composition theory and its relation to the teaching of writing at the post-secondary level. The journal features articles that explore the intersections of composition theory and pedagogy, and that theorize practice in sophisticated and provocative ways.
Composition Studies
“Interrogating the Four Ps: Positionality, Privilege, Power, and Professionalism in the Rhetoric and Composition Job Market”
Chen Chen, Dev K. Bose, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Elizabeth Keller Kirycki, Ruth D. Osorio, and Elliot Tetreault
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: The oldest independent periodical in the field, Composition Studies is an academic journal dedicated to the range of professional practices associated with rhetoric and composition: teaching college writing; theorizing rhetoric and composing; administering writing related programs; preparing the field’s future teacher-scholars. We welcome work that doesn’t fit neatly elsewhere. The goals of Composition Studies are to promote writing, teaching, theory, and research from all perspectives and topics of general interest to the profession and to review major publications in the profession.
Chen Chen, Dev K. Bose, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Elizabeth Keller Kirycki, Ruth D. Osorio, and Elliot Tetreault, “Interrogating the Four Ps: Positionality, Privilege, Power, and Professionalism in the Rhetoric and Composition Job Market,” Composition Studies, vol. 50, no..3, 2022, pp. 20–39.
Rationale: In “Interrogating the Four Ps: Positionality, Privilege, Power, and Professionalism in the Rhetoric and Composition Job Market,” Chen et. al. provide a sharp analysis, based in critical race theory, of the shortcomings of the current rhetoric-composition job market. The work combines scholarly inquiry with narrative counterstories (Martinez) to “[enact] social justice in that [the authors] unsettle unjust ways of framing the academic job market that reinforce the capitalistic, white settler, and ableist nature of higher education” (22). Furthermore, Chen et. al. offer specific practical recommendations for committees to move towards a more equitable hiring process. The editors of Composition Studies selected this piece for inclusion in Best of Rhetoric and Composition Journals because of its relevance to a wide range of readers, from graduate students to tenured faculty members. Those currently or recently on the job market can relate to the narrative experiences featured in this piece, while established scholars may locate direct guidance for leading and serving on socially just hiring committees. Chen et. al. calls hiring committees to radical change in order to re-envision the academic job market as a space of inclusion and access.
Constellations
“Articulating and Interrogating Black Embodied Resistance: Using Performative Symbolic Resistance as a Tactical, Analytical Tool”
Alicia K. Hatcher
https://constell8cr.com/articles/articulating-and-interrogating-black-embodied-resistance-using-performative-symbolic-resistance-as-a-tactical-analytical-tool/
Supplementary Materials
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.
Alicia K. Hatcher, “Articulating and Interrogating Black Embodied Resistance: Using Performative Symbolic Resistance as a Tactical, Analytical Tool,” Constellations, issue 6, 2023.
Rationale: In “Articulating and Interrogating Black Embodied Resistance,” Alicia K. Hatcher develops an analytic system to describe and interpret the work of Black activists. Performance Symbolic Resistance (PSR) involves a physical act (the body performing a gesture or movement) that unfolds within a public space and delivers a message of resistance to those who witness it. Hatcher analyzes NFL (National Football League) quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s act of kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression of Black people in the US through PSR categories—Who, What, How, When, Where, and Why. Using her adaptable model, Hatcher breaks down Kaepernick’s actions and pinpoints why they had such a significant impact on our culture. She invites readers to use the model to analyze other protests and develop and organize protests of their own. Understanding how these acts work can help us not only parse out the resistance we have already witnessed but articulate our own resistance in ways that are impactful and have long-lasting effects on our culture and discourse. Hatcher’s work is not only impressive in its innovative and in-depth approach to understanding the power of activism, but it is a hopeful article about a topic (Black oppression) that is hard to address with positivity. By providing the PRS model as a tool for analysis and invention, Hatcher is opening doors for readers to respond by seeing the world anew and, we hope, by transforming it.
Journal of Basic Writing
“‘Admission to One. . . Admission to All’: The (End of the) Radical Dream of Open Admissions in the Post-Desegregation South”
Annie S. Mendenhall
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Supplementary Materials
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.
Annie S. Mendenhall, “‘Admission to One. . . Admission to All’: The (End of the) Radical Dream of Open Admissions in the Post-Desegregation South,” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 42, no. 1, 2023, pp. 11–34.
Rationale: Annie S. Mendenhall describes the bedrock of tensions surrounding efforts to desegregate postsecondary education under access mandates in the South starting in the 1960s under Civil Rights. The article offers a comparative study of access movement in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Georgia, exposing both baseline efforts and diversionary, in-name-only tactics to respond to the new legislation. In this context, remediation programs and their ability to shape the discourse of standards helped to construct new divisions across state institutions and within institutions themselves, effectively limiting access in its name. The lead article in a special issue on Democracy and Basic Writing, “’Admission to One. . . Admission to All’” exemplifies, from a Southern angle, what the issue’s guest editors Lynn Reid and Jack Morales call the “competing versions of what Open Admissions means to the public and what it means to an ever-increasing cadre of specialists in BW.” Resonating the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision essentially overturning the use of affirmative action in college admissions, this article confirms the increasing difficulty of ascribing beneficence, simply, to Basic Writing programs and perspectives, in spite of long ties to Open Admissions, and the currency of a field’s impetus to redefine itself for the future.
Journal of Response to Writing
“Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading”
Sarah Klotz and Kristina Reardon
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/vol8/iss2/5/
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: The Journal of Response to Writing is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes papers based on research, theory, and/or practice that meaningfully contribute to an understanding of how response practices lead to better writing. Articles contribute to first, second, and foreign language writing, teaching, and response practices in order to provide a venue for theorizing and reporting ground-breaking research on response to writing; invite writing theorists, researchers, and practitioners to a venue to share their work with one another and colleagues in adjacent fields, most notably Rhetoric and Composition, Applied Linguistics, and Foreign Language teaching vis à vis L1 and L2 writing; and provide new or experienced teachers with immediate suggestions for use in giving, encouraging, or managing responses to their students’ writing
Sarah Klotz and Kristina Reardon, “Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading,” vol. 8, iss. 2, article 5, 2022.
Rationale: The editors of Journal of Response to Writing selected the teaching article “Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading” by Sarah Klotz and Kristina Reardon for its timely discussion of contract grading and its immediate applicability to readers. With the momentum of accessible assessment practices like a labor-based contract, new forms of response have taken shape in both the writing classroom and the writing center. Klotz and Reardon discuss how response actors like embedded writing tutors can facilitate first year students’ confidence in their writing, as well as their “willingness to seek, receive, and value feedback” as they navigate being new college students (p. 106). The authors find that embedded, sustained response to students’ writing can help forge long-term relationships with their peers in class, as well as with the writing center, across their time in college. These intentional relationships build student metacognition and self-assurance as writers, responders to writing, and developing scholars.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
“The Rhetoric of Description: Embodiment, Power, and Playfulness in Representations of the Visual”
Margaret Price and Erin Kathleen Bahl
https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/26.2/topoi/price-bahl/index.html
Supplementary Materials
Mission: Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Since its first issue in January of 1996, the mission of Kairos has been to publish scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.
Margaret Price and Erin Kathleen Bahl, “The Rhetoric of Description: Embodiment, Power, and Playfulness in Representations of the Visual,” Kairos, vol. 26, no. 2
Rationale: “The Rhetoric of Description” makes important contributions to the literature of access in rhetoric and writing studies, moving well beyond a technical accessibility checklist approach to present a rich and multi-layered conception of access, embodiment, and visual description. The webtext clearly explains and theorizes possibilities for different levels of description, ranging from short and simple (alt text) to more detailed and moving beyond the literal frame of the image (which they term “interpretive description”). The webtext enlivens its claims in every aspect of its design; its original vector art images demonstrate multiple levels of description; every image is described, every text passage is accompanied by an audio file that presents the same text aurally; the webtext is technically excellent as a piece of computers and writing scholarship and brings together theory, practice, and pedagogy as the best composition scholarship must. This webtext, published in Kairos's Spring 2022 issue (26.2), also received the 2023 Kairos Best Webtext Award.
Literacy in Composition Studies
“Does Every Lesbian Have a Superpower That Makes Them Out and Not Dead by Suicide?: A Poetics Against Standardizing Literacy Narratives”
Shelagh Wilson Patterson
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: Literacy in Composition Studies (LiCS) is a refereed open access online journal that sponsors activity at the nexus of literacy and composition studies. We publish long-form scholarly articles and short-form pieces including book reviews, interviews, symposium essays, and work in new and emerging genres. Given its ideological nature, literacy is a particularly fluid and contextual term. It can name a range of activities from fundamental knowledge about how to decode text to interpretive and communicative acts. Literacies are linked to know-how, to insider knowledge, and to social and cultural groups. Literacy is often a metaphor for the ability to navigate systems, cultures, and situations. Literacy is linked to interpretation—to reading the social environment and engaging and remaking that environment through communication. At its heart, literacy is situated within sociocultural contexts and is connected to power and inequality. The term composition studies points to the range of writing courses at the college level, including FYC, WAC/WID, writing studies, and professional writing, even as it signals the institutional, disciplinary, and historically problematic nature of the field.
Shelagh Wilson Patterson, “Does Every Lesbian Have a Superpower That Makes Them Out and Not Dead by Suicide?: A Poetics Against Standardizing Literacy Narratives”. Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Mar. 2022, pp. 1-27, doi:10.21623/1.9.2.2.
Rationale: Shelagh Patterson’s article was published in a special issue, Working Toward a Definition of Queer Literacies, guest edited by Collin Craig, Wilfredo Flores, and Zarah C. Moeggenberg. In this piece, Patterson offers readers a completely original exploration of identity, meaning making, and genre in what Patterson describes as “a performance if US third world praxis.” This tour de force piece of writing takes readers through a first person literacy narrative about Brooklyn, love, and leaving for graduate school; an exploration of the significance and erasure of third world feminist praxis for and in Composition Studies; a “poetics against standardizing literacy narratives” constructed by Patterson through her engagement with archives of four teachers in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge program at City College, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Finally, Patterson ends by calling “for all of us with social justice and anti-racist agendas (in word and action) to historicize our composition pedagogies within: economic policies of free tuition, student stipends, small classes, polyphonic cohorts of full-time instructors with contracts that can resist budgetary whims of corporate consulting companies, manageable course loads, and curricula that allow our students to change our perspectives as we continue to change theirs.”
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine
"The Rhetorical Infrastructure of Sexual Misconduct in Michigan State University’s Abuse Scandal"
Amy Koerber
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Supplementary Materials
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.
Amy Koerber, “The Rhetorical Infrastructure of Sexual Misconduct in Michigan State University’s Abuse Scandal,” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, vol. 5, no. 3, 2022, pp. 250–279, DOI: 10.5744/rhm.2022.50013.
Rationale: Amy Koerber’s essay does the important work of showing how the protection of abusers is codified in institutional policies and procedures. She does so by presenting the case of Dr. Larry Nassar’s sexual abuses, which were infamously perpetuated under the guise of “medically appropriate” care. Rhetorical analyses of a report of Nassar’s abuse expose how Nassar benefitted from a rhetorical infrastructure that was designed to offer him institutional protection as an expert in medical techniques, in his case, techniques that he claimed required extensive touching of patients. Koerber’s argument uses the case of Nassar to show how seemingly benign discourses surrounding medical expertise, described in various institutional documents, allow abusers to use their positions to violate patients at their most vulnerable. In the use of this case, Koerber argues that as long as rhetorical infrastructures exist to protect the accused and punish the victims who come forward to report abuse, these infrastructures will forever continue to encourage ongoing, systemic abuse and harassment. Thus, she calls on readers to examine such documents and to do the activist work of advocating for their revisions. Providing the idea of “rhetorical infrastructures” that help or harm specific populations is a tremendously valuable contribution to the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) specifically and rhetorical studies more generally.
Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC)
“Teaching Reading as Raciolinguistic Justice: (Re)Centering Reading Strategies for Antiracist Reading”
Emily K. Suh
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC), the journal of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), is a peer-reviewed journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The mission of the journal is to publish theoretical and practical articles across the range of English studies in two-year colleges and access-intensive institutions. This range includes composition and rhetoric, developmental education, technical and business communication, reading and literacy, literature, creative writing, language, dual and concurrent enrollment, as well as professional issues.
Emily K. Suh, “Teaching Reading as Raciolinguistic Justice: (Re)Centering Reading Strategies for Antiracist Reading, TETYC, vol. 50, no. 2, 2022, pp. 116–131.
Rationale: Suh's article is an important contribution to literacy studies and race. Her loving critique of theory without practice as well as her insightful examination of a more equitable and racially aware praxis is vital reading for the field.
WPA: Writing Program Administration
“WPAing as a Postpedagogical Practice”
Jeremy Cushman
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: WPA: Writing Program Administration publishes empirical and theoretical research on issues in writing program administration. We publish a wide range of research in various formats, research that not only helps both titled and untitled administrators of writing programs do their jobs, but also helps our discipline advance academically, institutionally, and nationally.
Jeremy Cushman, “WPAing as Postpedagogical Process.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 43–61.
Rationale: Cushman’s piece makes a complex theoretical notion – postpedagogy – accessible and useful for WPAs without reducing its complexity and ambiguity. An Editorial Board member praised the piece, saying “I found Cushman’s rhetorical argumentation engaging, as they step in-and-out of loving postpedagogy. As I read, my mind was actively rethinking and rewriting my plans for the big ‘first fall faculty meeting.’ … [T]his is a piece I will return to, and it taught me more about postpedgogy in an interesting way, rather than just dumping it on me in a lit review.”
Written Communication
“Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student's Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice”
Eunjeong Lee
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Supplementary Materials
Mission: Since 1984, Written Communication has been a leading journal for empirical research on writing as both systems of inscriptions and activities of meaning-making across multiple modes and contexts. Written Communication sponsors a broad and interdisciplinary view of what writing is, how writing gets done, and what writing does in the world. Each issue of the journal encompasses a wide range of topics and its pages consistently provide readers with new research findings, new theoretical concepts, and new ways of understanding how writing is practiced. Written Communication welcomes studies of writing practices in and across pursuits, international borders, and cultures, and at all levels of scope.
Eunjeong Lee, "Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice," Written Communication, vol. 40, no. 1, 2022, pp. 59–89.
Rationale: Lee’s study offers a timely and multi-layered exploration of critical themes in writing studies, drawing attention issues of decoloniality, multilingual writing (and writers), and the work of translingual activism while highlighting student composition as a valuable component of the field’s empirical knowledge base. The article’s focus on multimodality is both familiar and new, showcasing diverse composing processes and demonstrating how a bilingual student’s multimodal art piece “centers and transforms her lived experiences of racialization, language heterogeneity, and colonial standards of meaning making, while contesting English-only, monolingual, and raciolinguistic ideologies.” Lee’s article provides a model case of engaged scholarship that is methodologically focused and widely applicable. It is work that we believe will get taken up and cited by other researchers, and just as important, it is work that will help scholar educators develop approaches to teaching that begins to realize the goals, and the promise, of translingual activism and justice for our students and our communities.