Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Why You Always So Political?”: A Counterstory About Educational-Environmental Racism At A Predominantly White University, Martín Alberto Gonzalez

Chicano/Latino Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using critical race counterstorytelling, I tell a story about the experiences of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) undergraduate students at private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race and space and racism in higher education, I argue that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. Through narrated dialogue, Aurora (a composite character) and I delve into a critical conversation about how educational-environmental racism is experienced by MMAX students through a racialized landscape in the …

Special Issue Introduction: Writing Infrastructure, Sarah Read, Jordan Frith

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is the introduction to the second of two Communication and Design Quarterly special issues focused on conceptualizations of infrastructure. While there are more continuities than differences between the themes and methodologies of articles in the first and second issues, this second issue leans towards articles that have taken up infrastructure as it pertains to writing and rhetoric. This introduction frames the value of infrastructure as a metaphor for making visible how writing and rhetoric structure and enact much of our world, especially for writing pedagogy. In addition, this article concludes by introducing the six contributions in this issue.

This Ain't Yo' Mama's Composition Class: Addressing Anti-Blackness By Implementing Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Sharanna B. Brown

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Kyoko Kishimoto writes that those who practice anti-racist pedagogical practices are not only required to teach about race, but instead "teach about race and racism in a way that fosters critical analytical skills, which reveal the power relations behind racism and how race has been institutionalized in U.S. society to create and justify inequalities" (541). This is the work. And I have chosen to do it.

Steeped in anti-racist pedagogy “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Composition Course” aims to explore the ways that writing classrooms can affirm students’ autonomy while simultaneously equipping them with skills that equate to “cultural capital.” Anti-racist …

Empoword: A Student-Centered Anthology & Handbook For College Writers, Shane Abrams

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

EmpoWord is a reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class.

Through both creative and traditional activities, readers are encouraged to explore a variety of rhetorical situations to become more critical agents of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all facets of their lives. Straightforward and readable instruction sections introduce key vocabulary, concepts, and strategies. Three culminating assignments (Descriptive Personal Narrative; Text-Wrestling Analysis; Persuasive Research Essay) give students a chance to …

Book Review: Information Literacy And Writing Studies In Conversation: Reenvisioning Library-Writing Program Connections, Jacqulyn Ann Williams

Communications in Information Literacy

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Extended Instruction On Passive Voice, Reduced Relative Clauses, And Modal Would In The Academic Writing Of Advanced English Language Learners, Audrey Bailey

Dissertations and Theses

As more international students who are not expert users of English come to the United States to study at university, the field of teaching English for Academic Purposes grows. There are many important skills these international students must learn to become successful university students in America, but writing for academic purposes is of particular importance for these students to join the academic conversation in their respective disciplines. Corpus research has identified the grammatical features which are frequently found in different registers, and from this work it is known which structures are important in different types of academic writing. Grammatical structures …

Ignoring Ethics With Style: Writing Sentences For "Non U.S. Persons", Ryan Smith Madan

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Ignoring Ethics with Style: Writing Sentences for "Non U.S. Persons" argues for the importance of understanding the ethical dimensions of sentence writing. To illustrate, I cite the stylistic features of a recent public exchange about the legality of government surveillance between Director of Intelligence James Clapper and U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. I also discuss my own experience teaching writing to college students in order to reflect on need for a new generation of writers to recognize the relationship between clarity and ethics.

Deconstructing Trailheads: Six Frames For Wilderness And A Rhetorical Intervention For Ecology, Casey R. Schmitt

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This essay applies rhetorical analysis to the semantically loaded locations at trailheads, parks, and nature preserve entryways. Using the trailhead markers of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore as a field-based case study, I identify six common rhetorical frames in the trailhead -- location distinction, danger, sacrifice, stewardship, prescribed activity, and tactical disruption -- and discuss how each perpetuates a problematic everyday nature-culture divide. In analyzing the rhetorical functions of physical places, I advocate for embodied critical methods and revisions to the rhetorics of nature preserves and conservancies.

The original "webtext" can be viewed on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

From Product Reviews To Political Commentary: Performances In Amazon.Com Reviews, Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Meredith A. Love

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Do you want products or politics? Or BOTH?!

By LoveHelm on May 1, 2016

If you’ve been searching for an article that combines rhetoric, politics, and shopping… this is it! The authors address the rhetorical and political nature of Amazon.com product reviews. More specifically, they focus on Amazon reviews circulating shortly after Mitt Romney talked about his “binders full of women” during the 2012 Presidential Campaign (who says that?!), and reviews written after Texas State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered for 11-hours in her sassy pink Mizuno running shoes in summer 2013 (I seriously want those shoes!). The authors argue that …

Dear Parents Of The Child Who Yelled Hey Runner At Me, Andrew Rihn

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

An epistle, this open letter considers ways in which we read and write a body by way of public harassment, sexuality, and homophobia.

Editors' Letter: Call For Solutions, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

Writing In The Moment: Social Media, Digital Identity, And Networked Publics, Jacob Babb

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This article examines the impact of social media on digital identity. Social media reaffirms the values of communities through the repetition and reflection of those communities. The article addresses different examples of social media usage, such as the recent Internet outrage regarding Cecil the Lion, to explore the complexities of developing and maintaining digital identities.

Inside Voices: Collaborative Writing In A Prison Environment, Alexandra J Cavallaro, Melissa K Forbes, Larry Barrett, Robert Garite, Chris Harrison, Reginald Jones, Igor Kazakovs, Otilio Rosas, Luis Saucedo, Tobias Thurman, Agustin Torres, Antonio Walker

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This article and accompanying audio files explore how notions of collaboration in the writing classroom are challenged and altered when that classroom is located in a medium-security prison. Based on a for-credit multimodal writing course co-taught by the lead authors, this text (itself a collaboration between the instructors and ten of our incarcerated students) unpacks the processes and practices through which communication is regulated by the institutional authority of the prison (collectively termed the Carceral Communication Framework, or CCF) and places them in conversation with the innovations demanded by the prison's technological constraints. Contending that collaboration in a prison setting …

Shorts

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This is the entirety of the WordPress blog that accompanied Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion. SHORTS was a blog that began July 7, 2007 and ended December 21, 2015.

"All The Lovely Ladies" And "Celestarium", Danika Paige Myers

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

These poems are part of a larger manuscript that explores the poet's lifelong engagement with knitting and sewing-- and with the usually woman-centered communities that form around these crafts. The poems also respond to the cultural treatment of craft knowledge as frivolous or simple, highlighting the highly technical nature of such work and the mathematical, structural, and geometric knowledge required to successfully execute textile crafts. Densely referential, these poems invite the reader to play within their sounds and associations, making her own leaps and connections as she reads.

The "Hatting" Of The Clock: Crafting Juniata's Knitting Community Through Yarn Bombing The Clock Tower, Hannah Bellwoar, Scarlett Berrones

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This piece explores how knitting creates community. We've found that the materiality of knitting, by which we mean the physical making of knitted objects, creates a feeling of community that connects people across physical and digital spaces. We discuss how the authors' personal knitting experiences with a college knitting club and yarn bombing the clock tower on campus relate to theory about the materiality of making knitted things. We argue that crafted rhetorical actions such as the yarn bomb enable knitters and non-knitters to connect more broadly around central community spaces.

Related videos on YouTube:
Connecting through Craft
Juanita College …

The Biopower Of Zombies: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Horde, Mary Hedengren

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

I like zombies. I really like zombies. But I'm not the only one: why do so many of us seem to be enjoying a zombie moment? What does it say about our fears of a decentralized government and the power of human bodies? And what is that faintly discernable groaning sound? In this article, I draw on the theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as Foucault's "biopower" concept to examine our collective fascination with a collective threat.

Beer, Blogs, And Bitches, Lauren Murray

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Beer has been branded as a product that is available to men; we see this in popular advertisements online and on television. The heteronormatively-masculine image that is created presents a complicated rhetorical situation for women interested in beer. When searching the online community for female beer bloggers, I came across blogs that seemed to be addressing women who are alienated in the beer community with hyper-feminine rhetoric. This stark contrast to the rhetoric that we typically see in beer advertisements did not appeal to me either. I've been referred to as "the girlfriend with great taste in beer" and intercepted …

Crafting Change: Practicing Activism In Contemporary Australia, Tal Fitzpatrick, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This article brings together thoughts and practices of two Melbourne-based women working across the fields of craftivism, practice-led research and contemporary art history. While introducing and analysing Australian craft(ivist) projects, this article also suggests new concepts useful in tackling the contemporary phenomenon of craft activism.

Super Mom In A Box, Lindsey Harding

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Super Mom in a Box examines how Pinterest influences identity formation in mothers who interact with the site. In the essay, I use my own extensive interactions on Pinterest to investigate how the site's postfeminist content and interaction design create a hypermaternal identity for maternal interactors. This piece suggests that the celebration of domesticity and femininity on Pinterest validates a mother's home-oriented interests and reinforces her commitment to family; at the same time, this celebration contributes to a limited online identity for mothers, which can produce stress and alienation in real-world experiences of motherhood. In other words, because I've scrolled …

The Suicide Survivor's Guide To Crafts, Joshua Adair

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Written as a personal narrative, this essay explores the possibility of crafting as a coping mechanism of mourning by examining the relationship between the author and his mother-in-law aftet the suicide of his partner. Ultimately refusing to valorize crafting as a transformative or life-saving endeavor while still acknowledging its worth as a mode of living in times of trauma and otherwise, the author engages dark humor and sarcasm to look at how we craft our lives despite terrible loss.

Under The Mask: Creative Dis/Possessions Of Borderlands Remembrance Practices, Lizzy Bentley, Joanna Sanchez-Avila

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Each November, thousands of people gather in the small downtown of Tucson, Arizona, for a ritualistic and participatory event known as the All Souls Procession. While the Procession has drawn criticism for the cultural appropriation embedded in many of its crafting practices, its stakeholders are hesitant to acknowledge a meaningful connection to Dia de los Muertos as they frame the procession as an “authentic" multicultural event. Rather than flattening our engagement with the All Souls Procession into an either/or binary by solely condemning its problematic dimensions or praising its creativity, we choose to embrace the event's complexity by continuing a …

On Rage, Shame, "Realness," And Accountability To Survivors, Kathleen Ann Livingston

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This essay examines the rhetorical moves made on all sides of the recent conversation on trigger warnings. Calling for accountability to survivors, it positions trigger warnings as one practice of consent. Though in practice trigger warnings bring up issues of censorship, they can be understood as a way for survivors to take their power back by telling a bit of their trauma narrative and requesting accommodations and accountability. Unpacking the histories and the language of trigger warnings reveals how our culture thinks of survivors and how far anti-violence movements have to go.

Emoji, Emoji, What For Art Thou?, Lisa Lebduska

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This essay provides a history and context for emoji as a way of re-materializing composing while simultaneously arguing that emoji do not threaten alphabetic literacy and instead provide a means of creative graphic expression. The essay acknowledges that n some instances emoji do help to clarify the intent or tone of alphabetic writing, but it notes that emoji, like alphabetic writing, is culturally and contextually bound. Emoji expand expression and doing so open themselves to re-appropriation, intepretation and even misinterpretation, along with the affirming possibilities of artistic creation.

Buy-It-Yourself: How Diy Got Consumerized, Elizabeth Chamberlain

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Looking at do-it-yourself (DIY) fashion blogs as a test case, 'Buy-It-Yourself' considers some of the consumerizing pressures that can turn an anti-consumption movement into another tool of the corporate machine. I examine the punk roots of the DIY movement, the recent flurry of maker activity, and a sampling of DIY fashion blogs from their 2009 heyday through the present. Ultimately, I suggest that online activists consider DIY fashion blogs as a warning tale: as a counterculture movement begins to pick up steam, it can morph into something that betrays its original goals.

Harlot's Growing Community, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

#Definerhetoric 2014 Results, Harlot Editors

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

Call For Submissions: Craft Rhetorics, Amber Buck, Megan Condis, Kristen Prins, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Martha Althea Webber

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.

Encomium On The Overlord, Kt Torrey

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

As a new fan of the CW's paranormal series, Supernatural, I paid little attention to actor Misha Collins outside the omnipresent trenchcoat of his character, Castiel until a kairotic question from a fellow conference panelist pointed me in the direction of Collins' Twitter feed. I was struck by Collins' 140-character shots of performative trolling, Tweets that sang to me in shades, gleeful rhetorical waves, of the sophists, particularly because of the actor's interest in, and unique definition of, social change. Building on that sophistic seed, I argue here that Collins' construction of a megalomaniacal Twitter persona known as the Overlord …

Doing It Our (Dang) Selves: Making, Experimenting, And Becoming Through Craft, Amber Buck, Megan Condis, Kristin Prins, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Martha Webber

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

No abstract provided.