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Editor's Introduction, Nicole St. Germaine

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Busy physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators do not have the time to conduct focus groups or in-depth interviews with patients. Researchers in the communication fields, such as the authors whose work is featured in this edition of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, can help fill in these gaps of knowledge and provide insight into some of the best practices and issues that our healthcare professionals need to address to serve these populations more effectively.

Review Of Intercultural Rhetoric In The Writing Classroom. Ulla Connor. Ann Arbor, Mi: The University Of Michigan Press, 2011., Dobson Kate

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

For the better part of its life span, intercultural rhetoric research has been dominated by Ulla Connor. This book is a follow-up to her 1996 book Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second-Language Writing, in which she described the developing research methods for the field at the time. Upon the book’s release, some critics warned that the act of comparing the writing style of one person from a particular national culture to that of someone from another national culture may result in stereotypes. This book is the response to these criticisms by way of redefining the field.

How Change Management Is Influenced By Differences In Professional Discourses: A Conceptualizing Study On The Adoption Of An Ict Tool For Service Engineers In A Global Perspective, Jos Pieterse, Jan Ulijn, Thijs Homan

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

This article describes the process of organizational change due to technological evolutions, suggesting that community-specific differences in discourse may have a considerable influence on its success. The questions for this study focus on: 1) how do we define a technically oriented employee who has to cope with organizational change? 2) Which factors determine the reaction to organizational change projects in which these technically oriented employees are involved? And 3) what are the consequences of these specific characters of technically oriented employees for implementing change programs in the most effective manner? First, while the present studies on professional communication do not …

Does Language Affect Trust In Global Professional Contexts? Perceptions Of International Business Professionals, Jane Kassis Henderson, Leena Louhiala-Salminen

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

A characteristic of trust is that it is more easily built in close-knit communities where common ground and a common language are already established. Building trust is, therefore, a challenge for business professionals who use English as a shared working language in the multilingual environment of multinational companies. In this exploratory article, concepts from trust research and principles from the field of interactional sociolinguistics are used to throw light on the interplay of language and trust. Based on an analysis of survey and interview data from business professionals in globally operating companies in several countries, findings indicate that language related …

State Of The Field: Human Sociality And Our Expanding Circle, Matthew Mccool

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The first part of this essay provides a brief summary of this journal’s first editorial, which examined eight needed developments and eight critical contexts for global inquiry. The second part addresses our expanding circle of ethics, which starts with kin but has gradually increased to include tribes, states, nations, and even the world. It is our expanding circle of ethics that has led to a heightened awareness of equality, the product of a noble goal with origins in recent social justice movements. The aim of this essay is to assert that the field has a promising future by including both …

Review Of Network Power: The Social Dynamics Of Globalization. David Singh Grewal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008., William Carney

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The debate over globalization is often portrayed in both the mainstream media and some segments of academia as one that features two extremes. On one side are the “neoliberals” with a positive yet almost deterministic view of globalization. For them, the growth of an interconnected web of business, nonprofit, and governmental relations will ultimately improve living standards all over the world and the reach of this web has become all but inevitable. On the other side are those who see a nefarious side to globalization. They fear the extinction of cultural differences and ways of life for people powerless to …

In Case You Missed It: Selected Scholarship From The Discipline, Gerald Savage, David Alan Sapp

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

We all tell our undergraduate and graduate students how important it is to keep current in the field. In our professional lives as writers and communicators, that means keeping track of trends in industry and technology; as academics, it means keeping up on our reading—the latest books, recent articles in journals, the proceedings of our major conferences—so that we can contribute to disciplinary conversations, teach our classes with integrity, and advance our own research agendas effectively. As part of this process, we show our appreciation to those who contribute to the knowledge of our field and participate in the process …

Intercultural Rhetoric In The Technical Communication Curriculum: A Review Of The Literature, Jennifer Bracken Scott

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Although many scholars in technical, professional, and business communication have argued for the inclusion of intercultural rhetoric and communication in technical communication curricula, several key tensions have emerged from this effort. These tensions center upon the competencies most necessary for graduates of our programs, as well as approaches for understanding and teaching intercultural communication. This literature review presents a discussion and critique of literature in the field based on articles collected from several major journals as well as book sections in the areas of technical, professional, and business communication; it also offers recommendations for further research and development in this …

Rethinking The Problem Of Linguistic Categorization For Global Search Engines, Matthew Mccool

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The fields of social psychology and neuroscience have known for several decades that culture affects the way people carve up the world. This perceptual difference is often, but not always, aligned with similar differences in linguistics categories. If correct, this problem of linguistic categorization may have considerable impact on search algorithms. This paper examines the relationship between culture and linguistic categorization for global search engines. A total of 43 American and Chinese participants completed two classification tests, one derived from social psychology and neuroscience and the other based on a common classification problem for full-text searching. These data suggest that …

Editor's Introduction To The First Edition: Eight Needed Developments And Eight Critical Contexts For Global Inquiry, Barry Thatcher

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

In this introduction, I articulate critical gaps, needed developments, and opportunities for rhetoric and professional communication in global contexts. My tone is intentionally provocative and personal, laying out my positions and concerns based on almost 20 years of experience working in both rhetoric/professional communication and intercultural/global studies. In this introduction, I also demonstrate the power (and beauty) of intercultural and global inquiry to expose unexamined assumptions and problems in current theory, research, and practice in rhetoric and professional communication. The first section introduces eight needed developments for global theory, research, and practice, based on current approaches in rhetoric and professional …

More Than Mechanisms: Shifting Ideologies For Asset-Based Learning In Engineering Education, Brian E. Gravel, Eli Tucker-Raymond, Aditi Wagh, Susan Klimczak, Naeem Wilson

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Learning spaces, the practices in which people engage, and the representations they use are ideological. Ideologies are coherent constellations of values, beliefs, and practices that impose order on how disciplines like engineering operate. Historically, engineering spaces have been dominated by a relatively technocratic, rationalistic, and exclusionary ideology, but more recent attention to asset-based approaches to engineering education offers transformative promise. Asset-based ideologies can reshape images of legitimized engineering practice, recasting engineering education to disrupt dominant exclusionary ideologies. This paper describes an assets-based learning space, SETC, that recaptures the imagination of engineering for technological and social change. Drawing from extensive ethnographic …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Comparative Cultural Studies

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

The Production Of Epistemic Culture And Agency During A First-Grade Engineering Design Unit In An Urban Emergent School, Heidi B. Carlone, Alison K. Mercier, Salem R. Metzger

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Primary school practices are often bound by traditions that perpetuate compliance and skills-based, decontextualized, rote memorization activities. These histories of practice, prevalent in schools serving mostly Black and Brown children, make it inordinately difficult for students to author themselves as knowledge builders (i.e., with epistemic agency), which is a form of injustice. Engineering is a potentially fertile context to support the creation of epistemic culture, whereby young students’ assets are recognized, named, and leveraged as they create and shape the group’s disciplinary knowledge. The authors investigated this potential. The primary research question was: How do first-grade students in an urban …

Equitable Pre-College Engineering Education: Teaching With Racism In Mind, James Holly Jr

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Engineering educators must consider how the cultural backgrounds of students coincide (or diverge) with the epistemological and ontological formation of an engineer. Hence, this work is presented as an exhortation to engineering educators, particularly in a pre-college context, to critically evaluate how race-conscious pedagogies can be exerted in this field. In this autoethnographic study, I convey my attempt to teach engineering with explicit consideration of the sociopolitical context of the Black male youth I taught. As a Black male, I have an insider perspective into the realities that must be navigated to succeed in a racialized society, where Black males …

Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction, Li Guo

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest.

Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals …

Promoting Equity By Scaling Up Summer Engineering Experiences: A Retrospective Reflection On Tensions And Tradeoffs, Walter C. Lee, David B. Knight, Monica E. Cardella

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

A central challenge in engineering education is providing experiences that are appropriate for and accessible to underserved communities. However, to provide such experiences, we must better understand the process of offering a geographically distributed asset-based out-of-school program. This paper focuses on a collaborative research project that examined the broad implementation of the Summer Engineering Experiences for Kids (SEEK) program organized by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). SEEK is a three-week summer program that engages participants in hands-on, team-based engineering design projects. NSBE’s goal is to make SEEK culturally sustaining, community-connected, and scalable. The purpose of this paper is …

Transnational Latinx Youths’ Workplace Funds Of Knowledge And Implications For Assets-Based, Equity-Oriented Engineering Education, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Jorge Acosta-Feliz

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Due to economic inequality in society, millions of Latinx high school youth work after-school jobs and summer jobs in order to provide additional income for their families. The purpose of this qualitative study, conducted with transnational Latinx youth, was to identify the engineering-related skills and bodies of knowledge they developed and applied while in different workplaces. This study is framed in complementary theories of funds of knowledge, Vygotskian theories of mediated action, and theories of resistant capital. Specifically, this study is based in the premise that youth can develop engineering-related funds of knowledge through tool-mediated, goal-directed activities jointly conducted with …

The Ingenuity Of Everyday Practice: A Framework For Justice-Centered Identity Work In Engineering In The Middle Grades, Angela M. Calabrese Barton, Kathleen Schenkel, Edna Tan

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Inequities in opportunities to learn and become in engineering, especially for minoritized youth, are enduring and systemic. How students experience engineering education, through curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher/student interactions, all shape opportunities for identity development. In this paper we draw upon cultural studies and critical ethnography to explore how and why students engage in engineering for sustainable communities and its relationship to their identity work. We ground our work in a justice-centered asset-based stance that centers how people’s lived lives and community wisdom yield powerful forms of cultural knowledge/practice relevant to learning and engaging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We …

Elementary Teacher Adaptations To Engineering Curricula To Leverage Student And Community Resources, Jennifer L. Chiu, Sarah J. Fick, Kevin W. Mcelhaney, Nonye Alozie, Reina Fujii

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This paper addresses an important consideration for promoting equitable engineering instruction: understanding how teachers contextualize curricular materials to draw upon student and community resources. We present a descriptive case study of two 5th grade teachers who co-designed a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular unit that integrated science, engineering, and computational modeling. The five-week project challenged students to redesign their school grounds to reduce water runoff and increase accessibility for students with disabilities. The teachers implemented the project with one Grade 5 class with a large proportion of students having individualized learning plans and cultural backgrounds minoritized in science, technology, …

Equitizing Engineering Education By Valuing Children’S Assets: Including Empathy And An Ethic Of Care When Considering Trade-Offs After Design Failures, Pamela S. Lottero-Perdue, John Settlage

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The broad case being made in this paper is that recognizing student assets—rather than focusing on deficits—is essential for making engineering education more equitable. The paper begins with our exploration of an epistemic practice of engineering, ‘‘making trade-offs,’’ as enacted by kindergartners after experiencing design failure and during redesign. We then acknowledge through a reexamination of data that our understanding of children’s grappling about a trade-off was incomplete without considering another asset that children brought to the design experience: ‘‘enacting empathy and an ethic of care.’’ We argue for the inclusion of this asset as an epistemic practice of engineering. …

Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are on the rise globally after the financial crisis of 2008. This reactionary trend has widely channeled anxieties created by neoliberal insecurities into cultural and nationalistic backlash against the ostensible enemies of “Western” values (e.g., immigrants, racial and sexual minorities, feminists, and leftists). President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” are the most conspicuous examples of the resurgence of a populist reactionary right in the Americas. This continental trend promotes ultra-nationalism and more coercive neoliberalization processes combined with a reactionary authoritarianism that celebrates essentialized “Western” values, …

Impaired Audiovisual Representation Of Phonemes In Children With Developmental Language Disorder, Natalya Kaganovich, Jennifer Schumaker, Sharon L. Christ

Purdue Center for Early Learning Faculty and Staff Publications

We examined whether children with developmental language disorder (DLD) differed from their peers with typical development (TD) in the degree to which they encode information about a talker’s mouth shape into long-term phonemic representations. Children watched a talker’s face and listened to rare changes from [i] to [u] or the reverse. In the neutral condition, the talker’s face had a closed mouth throughout. In the audiovisual violation condition, the mouth shape always matched the frequent vowel, even when the rare vowel was played. We hypothesized that in the neutral condition no long-term audiovisual memory traces for speech sounds would be …

To Let See. The Shocking Picture As A Social Mobilization Weapon, Beatriz Martínez Sosa

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper analyses the role that Emmett Till’s postmortem pictures had in the emergence of the modern civil rights movement. When they circulated in magazines, newspapers, and television in 1955, African Americans mobilized all over the U.S., so the pictures worked as a mobilization weapon. I intend to develop some hypotheses to explain this effect. To this end, the paper comprises four parts: an outline of the murder case; an analysis of the pictures’ formal and semantic features as well as the discourses and context where they were released; an examination of Till’s figure as a martyr through the effects …

Extensive And Intensive Iconography. Goethe’S Faust Outlined, Evanghelia Stead

Artl@s Bulletin

Drawing on a corpus of printed items between countries, compared first-hand, the article examines the mark left by Moritz Retzsch’s 26 outline etchings after Goethe’s Faust (1816) using the distinction between extensive and intensive iconography. In extensive iconography, copied or imitated images build a collective imagination, devaluing the original work, albeit contributing to the play’s aura. That view challenges Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). In intensive iconography, inventive artists, inspired by Retzsch, rework images, granting a particular scene genuine reinterpretation. How then should we value multiples, copies and genuine …

Review Of The Journey To The West, Vol. 1, Translated And Edited By Anthony C. Yu, Radovan Škultéty

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This is a critical review of volume 1 of the 2012 revised translation of the classical Chinese vernacular novel Xiyou ji (The Journey to the West) by the late Dr. Anthony Yu (1938 - 2015), former Professor Emeritus in Humanities and in the Divinity School at The University of Chicago. It represents the first of four volumes of a thorough overhaul of the first edition, published originally from 1977 to 1983; this complete edition in 4 volumes and almost 1,900 pages (including extensive introduction, endnotes and index) appeared simultaneously on December 17, 2012. It is a result of …

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’S La Deuxième Mort De Toussaint Louverture, Mariana F. Past

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him …

Speculative Epistemologies Of Resistance In Hombres De Maíz And Bandarshah, Haifa S. Alfaisal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his two-part “The literary history of world-systems” Matthew Eatough utilizes world systems theory to examine literary studies. He makes use of Baucom’s “speculative epistemologies” to explore the connection between the global economy speculative financial instruments and the rise of the novel in 18th century. But Eatough is interested in tracing the history of literary studies and world systems theory. In this paper, I use speculative epistemologies to indicate ways of knowing that are speculated in fiction. My starting point is the decolonial critique of world system theory, which I use to formulate border reading; a reading strategy that is …

Hanay Geiogamah’S Body Indian And Foghorn As “Plays With A Purpose”, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian and Foghorn as ‘Plays with a Purpose,’” written against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, Danica Čerče discusses how Geiogamah’s theatrical rhetoric intervenes in the assumptions about whiteness as a static, privilege-granting category and system of dominance. By focusing on various techniques and strategies mobilized to define and affirm Native Americans’ authentic rather than imposed identities, the article shows that humor is one of the prime textual devices in Geiogamah’s plays to renegotiate what Walter Mignolo calls “the racist structure of power.”

Politics Of Evasion And Tales Of Abjection: Postmodern Demythologization In Angela Carter And Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar, Hoda Niknezhad-Ferdos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh as the prophetesses of postmodern fairy tales in British and Persian literature re-narrativize these tales as a loophole from socio-political stagnation and cultural paralysis. Evading direct contact with the political jargons of their eras, they seek gender generativity via the fairy tale machine. Alizadeh finds refuge in modernizing Persian fairy tales. Carter chants her frustration at Thatcherism through gender subversion. Carter’s and Alizadeh’s revulsion at the politics of gender in their eras can be read via the duet between the abject and the chora in Kristeva’s thought. It is through the encounter with the external …

Strategies Of (In)Visibility And Resilience: Women Writers In A Digital Era, Miriam Borham-Puyal, Daniel Escandell-Montiel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Women’s presence in literary history has been particularly conditioned by their place in society and by the limited spheres in which their production was expected to appear (e.g. the sentimental novel, romances or children’s literature). In today’s digital, open and connected society, women continue to face visibility problems in the publishing industry and in the online spaces that grant presence and agency. Their role in cultural creations is still hindered by vertical powers that operate as main censors. This circumstance takes place even in a rhizomatic and decentralized virtual space, where dissident discourses have highlighted it, although without enough discursive …