Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Emotions In Academic Writing/Care-Work In Academia: Notes Towards A Repositioning Of Academic Labor In India (& Beyond), Anuj Gupta

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (2017-2022 archives)

In this article I seek to reflect on a rupture that happened in my college-level writing classroom in India when a student chose to write about her experience of rape and accompanying life-long trauma in a literacy narrative assignment. This rupture, and the ways in which I struggled to engage with it, were initially discomforting but eventually led to strong convictions about the need to reposition academic writing and labor in Indian universities in a manner that sees the epistemic value of emotions in academic writing and the ethical value of care-work in academia as essential ingredients required to create …

Studenting And Teaching With Chronic Pain: Accessibility At The Intersection Of Contingency And Disability, Beth Greene

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry (2017-2022 archives)

While much attention is given to undergraduate students with disabilities, far less is devoted to graduate students, particularly those who also act as faculty: Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs). This article discusses issues of accessibility encountered by these contingent faculty members, specifically GTAs who have invisible disabilities, and how approaching discussions of contingency and disability with an ethos of transparent vulnerability—a level of transparency that necessarily leads to vulnerability—can help combat the stigma that continues to surround contingency and disability in higher education.

Mental Illness Diagnosis And The Construction Of Stigma, Katie Lynn Walkup

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how mental health legislation and related policy documents contribute to identification, diagnosis, and stigmatization. Using a mixed methods approach including content and stylometric text analysis with R as a heuristic for close and critical reading, I demonstrate how these documents normalize mental health concerns as a public threat. To do this work, I analyze how the Florida Mental Health Act (Chapter 394) and the Florida Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act (SB 7026) circulate and sustain dominant narratives about mental illness. I trace where these narratives are distributed into Florida school districts’ mandatory mental health …

Bad Grades, Making Bank, And Hating Piano: The Divergent Trajectories Of Two Creative Writers’ Semiotic Becomings, Jon Udelson

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article challenges lore-based conceptions of creative writers’ becomings by showing how creative writers establish their literate and disciplinary identities not only through modes of learning characterized by curricular-based advancement in their field, but also through complex social and material negotiations with communities, institutions, and engagements outside of the disciplinary domain of creative writing. Drawing primarily from case study interview data, this article argues for a theoretical and empirical approach to studying creative writers’ “semiotic becomings” in order to further inform creative writing studies research, creative writing pedagogy, and the disciplinary benefits of validating creative writers’ extra-literate and extra-disciplinary experiences.

Writing To Transgress: Autobiographies And Family Trees As Multimodal And Culturally Sustaining Writing Pedagogy, John Wesley White, Cynthia Lynn Sumner

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Engaging today's students in writing often requires more than formulas and prompts; it requires the use of culturally sustaining genres and modalities that speak to students' lived experiences and what they know best. This paper chronicles an urban teacher's attempt to create and use a writing prompt and a genre that would speak to and engage students who had previously experienced discouragement surrounding their academic writing. More specifically, we examine how the teacher used family trees, student-led interviews with family members, and family artifacts to engage his students in telling their own stories and, subsequently, how changes in this teacher's …

“Can I Write About What Happened To Me?”: A Narrative Inquiry Into The Audience And Purpose Of Students’ And Their Teachers’ Writing In An Age Of Accountability And Unrest, Kate Sjostrom

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Many teachers and administrators, feeling the pressure to produce high standardized test scores and meet state standards, have narrowed the variety of genres taught and resorted to prescriptive writing formulas, effectively stunting the writing and thinking development of students and future teachers, and foreclosing the opportunity for writing to do important personal and interpersonal work in a time of racial reckoning, alienation, and violence. In this context, the study’s author and a pre-service teacher participating in the author’s research study on writing teacher identity development grapple with just what the audience and purpose of students’—and teachers’—writing should and could be. …

07. Songs, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes his work as a song writer and publisher: 75 stand-alone songs, approximately 40 booklets of his songs, and 18 books he published with his own songs and those of other artists. There are also approximately 420 song books (336 unique titles) from other publishers, 23 of which contain at least one of Cummings' songs. Information about each of these songs--295 in all--is provided in the User Guide.

All of these songs, along with the relevant front- and backmatter in the books, are posted here as a single PDF. It is nearly 140 MB; to make …

08. Correspondence, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 39 complete or partial letters to or from Cummings; many of his drafts are typed on the back of his sermon manuscripts. All of the letters are posted here as a single PDF; information about each one is provided in the User Guide.

13. Poems Not By Cummings, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 26 poems that were among the donated materials but turned out to be definitely or probably not by Cummings. They are posted here as a single PDF; information about each poem, including authorship when available, is provided in the User Guide.

06. Poems, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes approximately 45 stand-alone poems, 9 booklets of poems, and An Earth Wayfarer, a 111-page spiral-bound book. Everything is posted here as a single PDF; information about individual poems, including each selection in the booklets and Earth Wayfarer, is provided in the User Guide.

09. Literary And Bible Training School, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes items pertaining to his time at the Literary and Bible Training School (now Trevecca Nazarene University) in Nashville, Tennessee, from which he graduated in 1909. There are examination papers he wrote on homiletics and theology, along with the catalog for the 1909-10 academic year. All items are posted here as a single PDF; additional information is provided in the User Guide.

04. Radio Addresses, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 35 addresses delivered over the radio. Most aired on station WMON in Montgomery, West Virginia; a few were broadcast over WLW in Cincinnati. They are posted here as a single PDF, and combined with the sermons in a single tab in the User Guide.

12. Newspaper Articles By And About Cummings And His Family, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes some 120 newspaper clippings by and about Cummings and his family; many of Cummings' pieces are short poems published as Corner Couplets or maxims from "Josh Hayseed." All of the clippings are posted here as a single PDF; additional information is provided in the User Guide.

10. Mccrum Slavonic Training School, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 2 publications by the McCrum Slavonic Training School in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. They date to 1912, the year Mary Kacmar graduated from the school, and 1918, the year she and Cummings married. They are posted here as a single PDF; additional information is provided in the User Guide.

05. Newspaper Columns, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 66 columns written for various newspapers. They were published under 4 headlines: "Clergyman Chatter," "Our Weekly Message," "Our Weekly Visit," and "The Parson Writes." In some of the clippings, only the words "Our Weekly" are visible, so we cannot be sure which category they belong to.

All 66 columns are posted here as s single PDF. There are also supplemental files for "Clergyman Chatter," "Our Weekly Message/Visit," and "The Parson Writes."

The columns do not have individual titles, but they often have section headings; for ease of navigation, the first heading in each column is included …

11. Miscellaneous Items, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes 34 miscellaneous items, ranging from his drivers licenses to a document entitled "End Alien Control of the United States." All items are posted here as a single PDF; additional information is provided in the User Guide.

03. Sermons, Melville Homer Cummings, Robert H. Ellison

Cummings, Melville Homer, 1890-1978

The Cummings collection includes approximately 100 typed and handwritten sermons, sermons printed or summarized in the newspaper, and some "sermons in rhyme." The sermons and radio addresses have been combined in a single tab in the User Guide.

The master PDF of the sermons is nearly 150MB in size; to make things somewhat more manageable, the contents of each folder in the physical collection have been upload as supplemental files.

The Writing For Healing And Transformation Project, Heather Elizabeth Osborn

Education Doctorate Dissertations

As a qualitative action research study, the purpose of The Writing for Healing and Transformation Project was to facilitate more inclusive writing strategies and to promote individual and collective healing on issues of social suffering and oppression (Kleinman, Das, & Lock, 1997; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016) for diverse students at a community college located in the northeastern United States. The 18 participants in the study included students in my English II literature and composition course. The theoretical framework encompassed Pennebaker’s (2016) “writing for healing” paradigm, advocating the use of expressivist writing and “social suffering theory,” examining how power structures affect …

Journaling On The Transition To College: Foucauldian Approaches In The First-Year Writing Classroom, Daniel J. Metzger

Education Doctorate Dissertations

Utilizing the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self, this qualitative action research study explored how power dynamics inherent in higher education can be recognized and resisted as first-year writing students journal on the transition to college (JTC). Conducted in a suburban community college in the Mid-Atlantic United States during the Spring 2020 semester, the study investigated how college is a feature of governmentality, how writing instructors’ actions interrupt or reinforce college as governmentality, and if journaling on the transition to college acts as a technology of the self, in light of the ways college governs. Journal prompts …

Intimate Rhetorics Of Networked Motherhood, Katie Nelson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Fundamentally pregnant bodies are understood, similarly to women’s bodies, as necessitating discipline. However, new networked forums have emerged where pregnancy is understood as affirming and having the capacity to challenge a silenced subject position. Using three case studies, the #IHadAMiscarriage Instagram page, the #TakeBackPostpartum Instagram page, and mediatized discourses surrounding Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy, this dissertation writes intimate publicity into these mediatized transgressions of pregnancy and postpartum. I argue discourses about pregnancy and postpartum in these networked spaces constitute intimate publics through the cultivation of shared affected investments and divestments in embodied experiences. These investments in the embodied experiences are crafted …