Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Dog Whistles And Division: Evolution Of Covert Language In The 2024 Election Cycle, Julia Lavine

CAFE Symposium 2025

This project examines the existing roles of political dog whistles and compares them to how each candidate used them in the 2024 election cycle. It then examines how the candidates' different backgrounds influenced their rhetoric and use of dog whistles, especially through socioeconomic, racial, and gendered lenses.

The Disinformation Vaccine: A Case For Integrating Comprehensive Disinformation Education Into First Year Writing Classes, Benjamin F. Jackson

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Students’ exposure to disinformation and misinformation is far greater than it has ever been. As the ability of generative AI to produce image, video, and audio deepfakes grows more sophisticated, disinformation will become even easier to spread and harder to detect. The rapid spread of social, political, scientific, and medical disinformation has been deadly and its potential is disastrous. Security experts now warn that dis/misinformation is the greatest threat to national security. Americans at large and students in particular have a demonstrated lack of information literacy when it comes to detecting false information, and bad actors nationally and globally are …

Weeding Out Dishonesty: Rhetoric And Information Literacy For The Age Of Disinformation, Victoria M. Tischio

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

We live in what some call a post-fact world where what is presented as true becomes true and circulates widely. Politicians lie because they have calculated that they gain more than they lose, and media outlets repeat those lies because they profit from them (Adair 2024). Fear and suspicion make individuals vulnerable to these lies (Young 2017). Like an invasive species, it is nearly impossible to eradicate these lies once released into the media ecosystem. While fake news is not new (think P.T. Barnum and 17th-century canards), its virulence has reached epidemic proportions, infiltrating all aspects of society. This constitutes …

Teaching The Researched Family Profile Essay As Meaningful Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy And Counterstory, Amy L. Garrett Brown

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

My students have been asked to create a researched narrative about their family history (the definition of “family” is loose and includes families of choice) using personal interviews, artifacts, research and reflection. They will mix the voices of their family members with the voices of scholars and historians from the university library and databases. This is a conversation. In many ways, these are counterstories. In order to focus on using Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Alim and Paris) with this assignment, I thought about several of the tenets of CSP: “Instead of being oppressive, homogenizing forces, CSP asks us to reimagine schools …

Zombie-Auras: Genai And Hybrid Text Production, Joshua Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores the iterative evolutions of textual production and their impact on the “aura” of texts, as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin. The study identifies three key phases of textual production: the natural, the mechanized, and the digitized, each progressively displacing the “cult value” of texts. This cult value is lost through increased ease of creation, reproduction, dissemination, and dislocation of creators and audiences in time and space. The advent of Generative AI (GenAI) marks the latest evolution, transforming the “aura” into a memetic “zombie” form—familiar yet opaque, evoking both the sublime and fear. By examining Benjamin’s notion of “aura” …

Back To The Margins: The Re-Marginalization Of Feedback Research In Composition And Rhetoric, Robert A. Greco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation applies content analysis, both quantitative and thematic, to publications exploring feedback on student writing by analyzing two corpora of texts published from 2000 to 2019: a systematic sample of 114 articles from 5 journals and excerpts from 5 guides for new instructors. For the journals’ corpus, the most significant emergent themes included error; affect, both instructors’ and students’; and technology. In the guides’ corpus, this study focused on guides’ assumptions about their audiences and discussed the “cycle of correction”—a pattern where guides have focused on cultivating and reinforcing core field values about feedback established between the mid-1980s and …

Instruction In Synthesis Writing Can Be Augmented By Giving Students A Generative Ai Prompt, Drew Loewe

Teaching Repository of AI-Infused Learning

This entry describes an AI-augmented strategy to assist students in synthesis writing, specifically in a general education writing course. The approach uses an instructor-created generative AI prompt to give additional in-process feedback on drafts, helping students identify and address common synthesis challenges such as patchwriting and sequential reporting. Preliminary results suggest that students using the AI prompt demonstrated increased confidence and improved synthesis skills, as indicated by both their self-reports and better assignment performance compared to previous semesters.

What's Their Story? To Help Save The Humanities, Let's Listen To English Majors, Kevin T. Caffrey

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

Amid declining enrollment in humanities programs throughout the United States, the English major has been hit the hardest. This article gives voice to current English majors about why they choose to enroll in a program that often receives criticism pertaining to its value and worth. This study provides a literature review of the history of higher education in the United States, an examination of the humanities backlash that has evolved over the past half-century, and an exploration of the value of a degree in English. In addition, it provides survey results from a small group of English majors currently enrolled …

Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …

Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …

Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …

The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …

Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …

Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …

Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature, Ashjan Ajour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become …

Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity, Basil Farraj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article discusses writings by Palestinian political prisoners and the broader body of prison literature situating them as practices of ‘smuggling freedom’ from Israel’s carceral regime, shedding light onto their political and social meaning. Through discussing writings by prisoners, the article points to a long history through which Palestinian prisoners confronted the Israeli regime’s torture and violent practices, and its broader project of eliminating the political nature of captivity. The article argues that prisoners’ writings reveal much about the dynamics of carceral power and violence, and the logic behind the confrontation practices used by prisoners in Palestine and beyond. These …

New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Expendable To Essential: Conceptualizing The Rhetorical Othering Of Frontline Workers, Sarah Sexton

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

As my article discusses, Over the course of the pandemic, there has been a social shift in the way certain workers are represented within American society. Everyday workers such as grocery store clerks, baristas, and retail managers were deemed “essential workers” as COVID-19 created a global healthcare crisis. Although these workers were declared as essential to the wellbeing of American society during the pandemic, there is evident dissent between the collective experience of frontline employees and those outside of this community. The rhetoric produced by members of the essential community, including myself, alongside statistical findings reflect an ongoing instance of …

Exploring Students’ Feedback Literacy Through Asynchronous Writing Center Tutoring Sessions: A Mixed-Methods Study, Bobby Pelphrey

Theses and Dissertations

MLLs face linguistic and cultural complexities when engaging with writing feedback; however, writing center practices often follow monolingual models. This study examines how MLLs develop and apply feedback literacy—the ability to seek, interpret, and use feedback—compared to their non-MLL peers in asynchronous writing center consultations. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study integrates survey data from the Feedback Literacy Behavior Scale (FLBS) (N = 532; n = 146 MLLs, n = 386 non-MLLs) with qualitative case studies. The survey measured feedback-seeking behaviors, sense-making strategies, emotional regulation, and feedback application, while case studies used think-aloud protocols, semi-structured interviews, and revision analysis. …

Neither Without Both: Confronting Oppression And Trauma In Universities – Community Rhetorics Toward Abolitionist Critical Literacy Practices, Jennifer Lebowitz Patel

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores pathways to addressing student suffering at the intersection of mental health and academic performance in Higher Education. I argue that Learning Specialist roles offer spaces to practice trauma-informed, anti-oppression approaches to academic support through liberatory, healing rhetorical and literacy practices. This study uses James Berlin’s theory of social epistemic rhetoric and bell hooks’ concept of theory as liberatory praxis to perform rhetorical analyses of the foundational texts guiding specific anti-oppression and/or mental health recovery organizations. By identifying rhetorical strategies in grassroots community organizations' texts, this project yields implications for naming and practicing a critical literacy framework I …

The Problem With “More Is Better”: An Assessment Of The “New” Contract Grading, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

In this article I discuss some of the issues that scholars are and aren’t writing about in relation to the recent resurgence in contract grading, and reflect on my own experience using contract grading in composition and other classes. I come to the topic as a scholar and university teacher in rhetoric and composition, though my discussion certainly is relevant to teachers in many disciplines and institution types. My aim is to offer an analysis of the benefits and drawback of the “new” contract grading, with special attention to what I call the “more is better” mantra that informs many …

Breath, Body, And The Blank Page: An Autoethnographic Approach To Embodied Writing Practices In First-Year Writing, Kristen Garramone Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how somatic awareness and trauma-informed pedagogies can be integrated into the teaching of writing. Drawing from autoethnography and pedagogical theory, it proposes that writing is not a purely cognitive act but a deeply embodied process, one shaped by the physiological and psychological dimensions of lived experience. Using autoethnography as both method and praxis, the study centers the author’s experiences of trauma, grief, and healing to investigate how body-based practices such as breathwork, visualization, and mindfulness can support writing, particularly for students navigating stress, anxiety, or disconnection from their academic identities. Chapter One situates the research within literature …

Sonic Futures: Exploring Podcasting, Artificial Intelligence, And The Evolving Landscape Of Composition, Grant David Crawford

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates podcasting and audio projects as multimodal practices in composition, analyzing how audio-based assignments both challenge and reproduce traditional writing norms. Drawing from personal teaching experience and a dataset of publicly accessible assignment prompts, rubrics, and instructional guides, the study examines how podcast projects are framed, assessed, and implemented in higher education. While often promoted as creative and accessible alternatives to essays, these assignments frequently replicate the same thesis-driven, rubric-centered, and exclusionary structures that define conventional academic writing. Through a cross-textual analysis of fifteen podcast rubrics and fifteen assignment prompts, this project identifies recurring patterns, including paradoxical expectations …

Threading The Needle: Teaching Critical Reading And Writing In The Age Of Ai, Emily A. Durham, Andrea A. Berta

Humanities

All instructors--but particularly instructors who must teach students specific disciplinary ways of reading and writing--face a difficult position with AI. Students will need to use AI in collegiate and professional writing, but using AI for assignments can hinder critical thinking skills crucial to analyzing and correcting AI output. This presentation demonstrates three practices from our developmental English classrooms: a critical reading and writing summary assignment, AI-resistant rubrics, and an exercise to help students evaluate AI-generated suggestions on how to review their work. These activities are designed to help students develop crucial AI-literacy skills to help them succeed in an increasingly …

Partners In Death: Introducing An Ethic Of Care To Online Funeral Home Rhetoric, Lindsay Catherine Gagnon

Dissertations and Theses

The funeral industry has become a staple in American death culture over the last century and a half. The professionalization of end-of-life and funeral practices has distanced the average American further from the realities of death, creating a dependent relationship on the funeral home to navigate the complexities of the death process. The experience of grief creates a need for a care that prioritizes the dead and their loved ones. This study calls for an application of care ethics to the rhetoric being promoted by funeral home websites. I first conduct an ideograph analysis of the ideographs and to assess …

“The New Force”: The Rhetoric Behind Nana Kwame Bediako's Masked Campaign, Emmanuella Ama Gyamfi

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines Nana Kwame Bediako’s unconventional masked campaign in Ghana’s 2024 presidential election using Norman Fairclough’s three- dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The research analyzes how Bediako employed anonymity through a masked persona on billboards before revealing his identity as a strategic political innovation. The study examines two key moments: Bediako’s unveiling speech after the government of Ghana cancelled his planned convention event, and his subsequent televised interview with JoyNews. The analysis reveals how the mask functioned as a complex symbol that generated public curiosity, challenged Ghana’s NPP- NDC political duopoly, and connected pan-African identity. Through the textual, discursive …

Curated Bricolage: Questions Of Agency, Accuracy, And Complicity In Munich Holocaust Memorialization, Jamie Downing

Academic Affairs

As the birthplace of the Nazi movement, Munich has long struggled to reckon with its legacy from World War II and the Holocaust. While some museums in Munich document the rise of the Nazis, the war, and the Holocaust, unlike other European cities, Munich lacks a centralized Holocaust museum or memorial. Instead, across the city there are dozens of mini-monuments—plaques, sculptures, cobblestone markings—that reference different figures and events related to Munich's Nazi history. These sites comprise a decentralized, bricolage approach to memorialization, leaving individuals to happen upon these mini-memorials and make sense of them without much context.

While this approach …