Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

There And Back Again: A Writer's Tale, By A Repeat Student, Mark Ballou

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Mark is an IT Major who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Mark credits his parents for his life-long love of reading, and at a young age he loved writers, like J.R.R. Tolkien and R.A. Salvatore, who “in addition to having abbreviations for their first names, share an affinity for spending pages and pages describing the visuals in their books.” Mark is an Army veteran with nine years of service, and he has spent most of his adult life writing as a Counterintelligence Agent for the US Army, employing his meticulous style into his written work. In this essay for his Composition …

The Insights Of Literacy, Yasmim Alves Da Silva

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

No abstract provided.

Designing Process-Focused Feedback For College Writers Using Genai, Beata Blood, Maissane Aik, Zoey Zaldivar

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

As generative AI tools like ChatGPT become more common in higher education, writing instructors face the challenge of guiding students toward effective and ethical use, particularly in asynchronous environments where immediate feedback is limited. This presentation reports on an exploratory study that addresses this challenge by shifting attention from AI’s outputs to students’ moment-by-moment writing processes. Grounded in applied linguistics approaches to writing research and process-tracing methods, the project employed case studies with both expert and novice users of GenAI. Expert participants, including academics and industry professionals, completed writing tasks while integrating AI into their workflows. Their sessions were recorded …

Dialogic Communication Ethics As A Hopeful Response To Artificial Intelligence, Kristen Haldeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within the past five years, a new technology has dominated modern culture: artificial intelligence. With a multiplicity of ways to respond to this new environment, this dissertation situates a response to artificial intelligence by combining the media ecology and communication ethics perspectives. Media ecology explores historical roots and biases of technology to learn about their influence of humanity. A dialogic communication ethics seeks to find an opening for hope to emerge. Hope, grounded in the works of Jacques Ellul and the Christian tradition, offers a new rhetorical perspective by shifting focus away from technology and to our neighbor.

A Poetic Call For And A Reflection And Commentary On Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, And Compassion, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Finding a published poem I had written as a teenager, titled “The Heavens Weep.” this article uses that poem as the basis for a commentary that reflects on the state of the world today (2026),  As a commentary, the article uses the poetic and metaphoric words in the poem as a relevant "reality check" for what is still going on today.  In essence, the commentary is about a call for Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, and Compassion, or what I call Archetypal Energies, Higher Vibrational Energies that operate deep within our individual and collective psyches to creatively urge us to "see" …

Inbox Impressions: Exploring Trans-Situational Networked Ecology’S Influence On Student-Instructor Emails In Academic Communities Of Practice, Suzanne M. Gut

English Theses & Dissertations

Ineffective email communication has been a topic of debate, it seems, for as long as email has been a mainstream communication tool. This study, situated in linguistics, is one more part of that conversation and aims to address how instructors and students are using email in academic settings, what genre conventions they employ, and what expectations of and attitudes towards email and email users influence email communication. Discourse analysis and thematic analysis were used to identify emergent patterns in the data from 20 authentic emails and six student/faculty focus groups. This study draws from Pokharel’s theory of trans-situational networked ecology …

Transnational Indigenous Environmental Justice: A Distant Comparative Study Of Nepali And U.S. Environmental Policies And Counter-Archives In Technical Communication, Shankar Paudel

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how institutional communication, state bureaucracy, and Indigenous sovereignty intersect within Rhetoric and Writing Studies (RWS) and Technical and Professional Communication (TPC). Current TPC research increasingly focuses on social justice; however, the field still lacks ethical frameworks to deal with the complicated dynamics of transnational Indigenous Environmental Justice Communication (IEJC). This study addresses this gap by examining how two distinct Indigenous communities - the Tharus of Chitwan, Nepal, and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Tigua Indians of El Paso, Texas - communicatively navigate, contest, and resist state environmental policies.

Grounded in decolonial Distant Comparativism, Mestiza Consciousness, Rhetoric of …

The Rhetoric Of Second Language Education, Gilberto A. Capistran

Theses and Dissertations

I argue that second language education in Texas high schools consists of rhetorical constructs which manifest in the forms of labels, curricula and discourses, which negatively impact emergent bilingual students. In this rhetorical investigation, I push back against these rhetorical constructs through analysis of personal narrative, institutional documents and student pláticas. This study is done in hopes to impact the writing and teaching practices found in various classroom levels revolving around second language education across K-12 and university settings.

Empirical Rhetorical Modeling: New Analytical Tools To Evaluate The Intensity Of Rhetoric, August Immel

English Theses & Dissertations

Since 2020, the United States has experienced a surge of incendiary rhetoric in contemporary political discourse, which exacerbates societal polarization and incites violence as evidenced by heightened politically motivated attacks. Numerous actors characterize the impetus of such violence as “extreme rhetoric.” No standard definition exists for such a term, and this gap necessitates the central research question of this dissertation, which interrogates how rhetoric can be systematically evaluated for “extremeness.” I propose that the issue of extreme rhetoric can be fruitfully examined from within the context of rhetorical theory, but instead of attempting to create a new definition of “extreme …

From Prompts To Invitations: Rethinking The Genre Of The Writing Assignment Sheet, Amber Jensen, Annika Peacock

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

In this article, a university-based teacher educator and a first-year middle school ELA teacher examine how their experiences in the writing methods course (as teacher and student) unsettled and expanded their thinking about assignment sheets and about themselves as teacher-writers. The course prompted questions about how ELA teachers might craft assignments that modeled rhetorically-relevant writing while also eliciting rhetorically-relevant writing from student-writers. The authors describe the genre inquiry they conducted that led to developing a heuristic for writing prompts as invitations that they have used to guide their own assignment sheet creation. Finally, they reflect briefly on how reframing this …

The Implications Of Generative-Ai User Prompt Engineering Shaping The Absent Presence Of Latino Women Textual Rhetoric In Llms, Angely C. Suarez Dejesus

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This article examines how large language models (LLMs) generate text that affects underrepresented groups, particularly Latino women, due to limited cultural, contextual, and abstraction training rooted in biases. The research draws on Brock’s (2018) CTDA theory, White et al.’s (2023) prompt engineering framework, Klein’s (2015) computational spatiality, and Anzaldua’s (1987) concepts of cultural, emotional, and gendered borderlands to analyze the outputs. Using narrative prompt experiments, Chat GPT 3.5, 5, Claude AI, Gemini, and Microsoft Co-Pilot produced changes in their textual outputs as evidence of further algorithmic designs. Nevertheless, continual biases embedded in the algorithms’ linguistic representation and misrepresentation through the …

Connected/Disconnected, Emery Beckman

ELO (un)supervised 2026

With the rise of AI, scholars are grappling with how it fits into their field and determining how authorship plays a role in the assistance of these tools. I argue that AI can be deemed a digital companion to creative and interactive design. Anthropic has recently launched Claude Code, a coding assistant for various projects. This talk explores how agentic AI can offer digital assistance while advocating for human thought to remain at the forefront. This talk will analyze and demo an interactive site and explore a collection of AI-assisted poems built alongside Claude Code titled "Connected/Disconnected." It will explore …

Social Justice Strategies For Teaching During The ‘Anxiety Crisis’, Maggie Mang, Kerry Smith-Saxman

Feminist Pedagogy

These authors describe their teaching strategies for accounting for anxiety in pedagogy. The instructors describe creating space for students' affective experiences when writing and countering ableism in course instruction.

Subscribe, Follow, Save: Podcast Preservation In The Platform Era, Ben Pettis, Jeremy Morris

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Podcasting has produced a glut of cultural content. Collecting and saving these sounds for future study, however, remains challenging. This article asks: “How are recent developments in the platformization of podcasting threatening the ability of users and researchers to save, study, and sustain podcasts and the cultural insights they offer?” To answer, we focus on a podcast preservation project, PodcastRE.org, and discuss strategies for creating an (un)stable repository for future studies of podcasting. While new developments challenge preservation efforts, they also offer archivists opportunities to prioritize the cultural significance of podcasts, rather than the economic motives of the podcast industry …

Phenomenological Analysis Of Trust In Science For The Design Of Ai-Based Health And Social Policies, Kochav Koren

All Duquesne Faculty Scholarship

The promises of artificial intelligence (AI) as a solution to challenges facing health systems increasingly link technological innovation with improvements in efficiency and access. However, the legitimacy of AI-supported health policies depends not only on scientific competence but also on public trust in scientific institutions. Using data from the international Trust in Science Project (71,922 respondents across 68 countries), this study analyses multidimensional trust and communication ecologies to reconstruct relational configurations of trust, termed ‘Figures of Relevance’. Findings reveal that whilst scientific competence is widely recognised, perceptions of institutional openness vary markedly, shaping heterogeneity in trust. The study identifies four …

Syllabus: Engl 1010 English Composition I, Sarah C. Bonanno

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for English Composition I (ENGL 1010 FYSA) taught at Brooklyn College during the Fall 2026 semester. This course teaches students concrete and transferable writing skills through the genres of literacy narrative, argumentative essays, and comparative writing.

Collecting Data Amid Resistance: Earning Faculty Trust While Revising Writing Program Assessment Practices, Carl Schlachte, Gregory Bruno

Publications and Research

This article examines the process one community college first-year writing program used to revise its exit criteria for the first-semester composition course. The authors reflect on the complexities of revising program policies through shared decision-making practices without pausing the operation or offering of courses. This article, which we imagine will be useful for writing program administrators, department chairs, and committee members tasked with the work of revising writing program curricula or assessment practices, is particularly pointed toward those seeking to cultivate confidence with institutional research in their faculty and colleagues, and to view both data and change initiatives as tools …

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that …

A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on …

An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …

Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Who We Are, How We Teach: Writing Teacher Identity In The Secondary Ela Classroom, Danielle Alexander

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The journal submission guidelines stated not to include an abstract.

Cognitive Autonomy In The Age Of Ai: A First-Year University Writing Teacher’S Case For Embodied Learning, Rachel M. Terry

Essays in Education

Cognitive autonomy in the age of AI is becoming an urgent concern in higher education. This article argues that first-year writing instruction should recover cognitive autonomy and embodied learning as correctives to technocratic habits shaped by generative AI, digital convenience, and an overreliance on optimization. Drawing on the author’s positionality as a first-year university writing teacher, it examines how students increasingly treat knowledge as detachable information rather than as something formed through disciplined engagement. The article includes examples of handwritten note-taking and annotation as embodied learning that slows thought, deepens synthesis, and supports student agency. It concludes that education should …

Bringing Clarity To Tutors' Work: Designing An Effective Writing Center Staff Handbook, Maria Bunting

ETDs from 2020-2029

Writing center literature often focuses on the documents used to justify a center’s role in the larger institution while largely ignoring internal documents that aid in training. By also answering Babcock & Thonus (2012) and Driscoll & Perdue (2014)’s call for more replicable, aggregable, and data-based (RAD) research in writing centers, this study addresses this literature gap by conducting a qualitative study about a newly-implemented handbook at a public R1 university. The author first includes a description of the collaborative document creation process before describing the empirical methods used to assess the handbook’s effectiveness. The findings illustrate how effective handbooks …

Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism , Paul R. Patton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'

Substantialism, David Janzen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'

Style, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'

Spectrality, Marlon Lieber

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'