THE BEST OF THE INDEPENDENT RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION JOURNALS 2014 represents the result of 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 independent journals.

CounterStories from the Writing Center gathers emerging scholars of colour and their white accomplices to challenge some of the most cherished lore about the work of writing centres. Writing within an intersectional feminist frame, this volume’s contributors name and critique the dominant role that white, straight, cis-gendered women have played in writing centre administration as well as in the field of writing centre studies. This work will shake the field’s core assumptions about itself. Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory. CounterStories from the Writing Center is a must-read for writing centre directors, scholars, and tutors who are committed to antiracist pedagogy and offers a robust intersectional analysis to those who seek to understand the relationship between the work of writing centres and the problem of racism. Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be and do. Contributors: Dianna Baldwin, Nicole Caswell, Mitzi Ceballos, Romeo Garcia, Neisha-Anne Green, Doug Kern, T. Haltiwanger Morrison, Bernice Olivas, Moira Ozias, Trixie Smith, Willow Trevino

Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference challenges the Eurocentric perspective from which the field of rhetoric is traditionally viewed. Taking a step beyond the creation of alternative rhetorics that maintain the centrality of the European and Greco-Roman tradition, this volume argues on behalf of pluriversal rhetorics that coexist as equally important on their own terms. A timely addition to the respected Landmark Essays series, it will be invaluable to students of history of rhetoric, literacy, composition, and writing studies.

Documents how Asian/Asian American teacher-scholars have emerged within and contributed to a number of areas in rhetoric and composition, as well as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in diverse and substantial ways from the 1960s to contemporary times.

Winner of Honorable Mention for the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award This book examines the history of ethnic minorities particularly Chicano/as and Latino/as--in the field of composition and rhetoric; the connections between composition and major US historical movements toward inclusiveness in education; the ways our histories of that inclusiveness have overlooked Chicano/as; and how this history can inform the teaching of composition and writing to Chicano/a and Latino/a students in the present day. Bridging the gap between Ethnic Studies, Critical History, and Composition Studies, Ruiz creates a new model of the practice of critical historiography and shows how that can be developed into a critical writing pedagogy for students who live in an increasingly multicultural, multilingual society.

Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship: Fifty Years of the Rhetoric Society of America collects essays reflecting on the history of the Rhetoric Society of America and the organization’s 18th Biennial Conference theme, “Reinventing Rhetoric: Celebrating the Past, Building the Future,” on the occasion of the Society’s 50th anniversary. The opening section, “Looking Back: RSA at Fifty” describes the establishment of the organization and includes remembrances from some of the founders. These historical essays consider the transdisciplinary nature of RSA scholarship and pedagogy and offer critical reviews of trends in some of its subfields. The essays in the second section, “Reinventing the Field: Looking Forward,” focus on the future of scholarship and pedagogy in the field, from reinventing scholarship on major figures such as Vico, Burke, and Toulmin, to reconsidering future work on rhetoric and democracy, rhetoric and religion, and rhetoric from both sides of the Atlantic. The authors in the last section, “Rhetorical Interventions,” offer critical interventions on contemporary issues, including food justice, fat studies, indigenous protest, biopolitics, Chinese feminism, and anti-establishment ethos. Together, the essays in Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship offer a Janus-faced portrait of a discipline on the occasion of its golden anniversary: a loving and critical remembrance as well as a robust exploration of possible futures. Contributors include Kristian Bjørkdahl, David Blakesley, Leah Ceccarelli, Catherine Chaput, Rachel Chapman Daugherty, Richard Leo Enos, Joseph Good, Heidi Hamilton, Michelle Iten, Jacob W. Justice, Zornitsa Keremidchieva, Jens E. Kjeldsen, Abby Knoblauch, Laura Leavitt, Andrea A. Lunsford, Paul Lynch, Carolyn R. Miller, James J. Murphy, Shelley Sizemore, Ryan Skinnell, David Stock, Joonna Smitherman Trapp, Victor J. Vitanza, Ron Von Burg, Scott Welsh, Ben Wetherbee, Elizabethada A. Wright, Hui Wu, Richard E. Young, and David Zarefsky.

Mentorship/Methodology brings together emerging and established scholars to consider the relationship between mentoring practices and research methodologies in writing studies and related fields. Each essay in this edited collection produces a new intellectual space from which to theorize the dynamics of combining mentoring and research in institutions and communities of higher education. The contributors consider how methodology informs mentorship, how mentorship activates methodology, and how to locate the future of the field in these moments of intersection. Mentorship, through the research and relationships it nourishes, creates the future of writing studies—or, conversely, reproduces the past. At the juncture where this happens, the contributors inquire, Where have current arrangements of mentorship/methodology taken writing studies? Where do these points of intersection exist in performance and practice, in theory, in research? What images of the field do they produce? How can scholars better articulate and write about these moments or spaces in which mentorship and methodology collide in productive disciplinary work? By making the “slash” more visible, Mentorship/Methodology provides significant opportunities to support and cultivate diverse ways of knowing and being in rhetoric and composition, both locally and globally. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional communication, as well as readers interested in conversations about mentorship and methodology.

This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.

This Bridge We Call Communication: Anzaldúan Approaches to Theory, Method, and Praxis explores contemporary communication research studies, performative writing, poetry, Latina/o studies, and gender studies through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories, methods, and concepts. Utilizing different methodologies and approaches—testimonio, performative writing, and interpretive, rhetorical, and critical methodologies—the contributors provide original research on contexts including healing and pain, woundedness, identity, Chicana and black feminisms, and experiences in academia.