This article explores how knowledge of institutional ecologies can help build connections across departments of large universities without direct communication. The authors, an instructor and a writing center tutor, consider "inventive collaboration"--impromptu work mediated by student writing--as a way to improve a multilingual…

This article develops a pedagogical approach to increase students' ability to locate and (re-)create publics for the issues about which they care most. By drawing Rhetorical Genre Studies into public sphere theories, this approach blurs the boundaries between widely-dispersed genres (those with large readerships across communities) and…

This essay argues that "place" and "space" are a critical conceptual framework in the online writing classroom and leads students to have meaningful writing experiences. Drawing on what Eodice et al. describe as "personal connection" for writing students, the author invites online writing instructors to pay attention…

The concept 'literacy crisis' has framed ChatGPT's popularity, its rapid evolution, and its seemingly sophisticated language and knowledge performance. The concept helps scholars and teachers easily enter conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) text generation technologies and how they transform the notions of authorship, research, labor,…

I investigate here the personal and professional significance of "literate dwelling"--that is, processes whereby individuals learn to acquire and use literacy within initial spaces and times of comfort in order both to move beyond such comfort and to promote productive change in the larger world. Such significance became especially clear…

As the rhetorical performances of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work continue to proliferate and sell a movement towards more equitable institutions, the authors challenge this rhetoric as merely a new mode of epistemological and territorial expropriation. Instead, the authors put forth the concept of shadow work, which happens as a…

A chief aim of the U.S. Army is ensuring warfighting function. Army doctrinal publications dictate that soldiers achieve this aim through integration and synchronization, both of which point to ensuring that the necessary people and things arrive on time. This article takes up circulation as an analytical lens to trace how a U.S. Army major…

While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on…

This article uses a combination of speech act theory and research on microaggressions to analyze statements made by scholars in the fields of literature and creative writing towards their colleagues in composition. We argue that framing these interactions as "hierarchical microaggressions," a term coined by Kathryn Young et al., helps…

The transnational literacy practices, transnational feminist pedagogies, and other critical frameworks developed thus far have enabled visualization of how the circulation and exchange of texts and artifacts in transnational spaces can alter assumptions about rhetorical argument, audience, and situation. They have helped consideration of how…

This article argues for greater attention to the embodied experiences and material practices of single mothers in the academy. Using critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch) to analyze how texts in the field have represented single motherhood, I identify three patterns of how mothers complete work, or what I term survivalist strategies to resist…

This article takes up Black critical geography, Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), and trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP) to argue that preventing rhetorical violence in our classrooms cannot be accomplished without ensuring students feel safe bringing their whole selves into the classroom. Specifically, Black theorizations of space and genre systems…

This study examines the popularity of "intellectual risk-taking," a pedagogical term that typically describes when a student attempts a new way to learn and risks receiving a lower grade or being perceived as less competent by a teacher (Beghetto), risks facing public criticism by peers (Foster), or risks losing a personal belief or…

To speak to diverse audiences about how people learn to write and how writing works inside and outside the academy, we must conduct research across geographical, institutional, and cultural contexts as well as research that enables comparison when appropriate. Large-scale empirical research is useful for both of these moves; however, we must…

As the future of the WPA Listserv (WPA-L) remains uncertain, this article reflects on the ways the WPA-L has functioned as an important site of disciplinary knowledge-making and emotion work for the field of composition studies. It examines the potential of the listserv format for democratizing participation in the enterprise of disciplinary…