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Editor's Introduction, Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2026

Welcome to our second special issue focused on assignments from a single

In response to criminalization, Irish Republican internees in Long Kesh prison began the No Wash protest, smearing shit on cell walls as an anticolonial tactic. This essay offers analysis of the olfactory rhetorics and processes of ruination generated by excrement, utilizing archival documents from the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. While shit is often thought of as discard, excrement is a fundamental signifier of the life form from which it came. Through the excessive use of shit, No Wash protestors rendered their prison internment a failed attempt to contain their liveliness. This analysis traces the institutional management of smell and ruination, showing how protesting prisoners’ strategic use of human waste created a context where prison authorities were forced to participate in the ruination of their own colonial infrastructure via intensive sanitation processes. The effects of the No Wash protest demonstrate the need for attention to waste not just as a byproduct but as a rhetorical resource for resistance and invention.

GPTZero is an AI detection platform that scans written text for statistical signatures of machine generation and returns a probability score estimating whether it was produced by a human or an AI. In higher education, many teachers have turned to AI detection as a first-line response to the integrity crisis triggered by large language models. However, empirical findings on GPTZero’s efficacy are notably mixed. Some studies report strong diagnostic value under controlled conditions, while others document substantial false-negative rates, near-random performance on certain AI-generated essays, and frequent misclassification of AI-translated texts across several languages. Multilingual and L2 writers often bear the greatest cost, as their carefully constructed English is sometimes assigned high AI-likelihood scores because their linguistic profiles may appear less natural to models trained predominantly on standard or formulaic patterns of written English. In developing countries, where students commonly write in English as a second or third language, these limitations represent more than minor technical issues; they raise concerns about equity, potentially placing disproportionate burdens on writers working to meet academic language expectations. This article argues that GPTZero is unsuitable as a definitive tool for high-stakes assessment of writing. Instead, it proposes a shift toward postplagiarism frameworks that recognize responsible AI use. Within this approach, AI detection outputs serve as formative resources for developing critical AI literacy rather than surveillance tools. Flagged content becomes a starting point for metacognitive dialogue, which supports trust-based pedagogies that emphasize student agency and intellectual accountability.

The Developing and Teaching Academic Writing (DATAW) Global Online Course (GOC) is a teacher professional development course for writing educators in diverse contexts. The DATAW GOC was designed to employ a flexible, learner-centered pedagogy that combines Backward Design principles, foundational concepts of academic writing, andragogical strategies, and sheltered English instruction standards to create optimal learning activities for a highly heterogeneous group of adult learners with different language skills and teaching experience. It also integrates modeling and scaffolding of teaching strategies, experiential learning tasks, project-based activities, and application of knowledge to GOC participants’ teaching contexts and their students’ needs. In this reflection article, we make connections between our DATAW course design decisions and our observations from course delivery. Teaching the GOC across 8 terms to 850 participants from 103 countries revealed significant variation in teaching contexts, class size, workload, pedagogical practices, educational systems, and English language proficiency. These insights guided our iterative revisions at the end of each term, which allowed for continued tailoring and improvement of materials and tasks in response to the contextual possibilities and inhibitors in participants’ global contexts. By balancing theory and research-based best practices with participants’ real-life needs, the DATAW GOC provided a flexible, responsive platform for educators to improve their teaching practices, ultimately cascading their pedagogical knowledge to positively impact academic writing instruction in a globalized educational landscape.

The story of digital publishing in Writing Studies is one of innovation, collaboration, and do-it-yourself spirit. The field's digital publication venues emerged alongside the birth of the World Wide Web, and scholars used those venues to experiment with the possibilities of publishing in digital spaces. Visionary editors built journals with just a university server and a call for papers, and that creative spirit expanded the form and possibilities of scholarly communication. This article extends that work through the concept of “reader-choice publishing,” an approach that privileges reader needs and preferences by distributing scholarly texts in multiple open formats: HTML, PDF, and EPUB. Through a reader-choice approach, writers and publishers ask, “How will the reader use this text?” “What affordances do they need?” “What tradeoffs will they accept, and how might a single text be offered in multiple ways to offset those tradeoffs as the reader's needs and contexts change?” This article situates the reader-choice approach alongside a history of digital publishing in the field, acknowledging the past while pointing to a more usable future.

In 1996, Stuart Hall published his important essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” Against the one-dimensional critiques of postcolonial studies, Hall (1996) argued that the framing of the “post” in postcolonial studies was neither a temporal reference to a simplistic “before” and “after” colonialism, nor a celebratory argument that colonialism was fully over. Instead, the “post” for Hall referred to the new claims about Western knowledge that had to be addressed in the wake of important scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Building off Hall, Raka Shome would similarly note that “the prefix ‘post’ used in such a theoretical vocabulary [as postcolonial studies] does not mean a final closure, nor does it announce the ‘end’ of that to which it is appended; rather it suggests a thinking through and beyond the problematics of that to which it is appended” (Shome 1998, 204). Even as the work of Western scholars like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida would be important for postcolonial studies, Western thought itself could not remain the same after postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies set an agenda that had yet (and remains) to be adequately addressed in thought.Three years before Hall made this argument about postcolonial studies, another related intellectual gauntlet was thrown down in 1993. In that year, R. A. Judy (1993) published (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. This text marked a shift in African American literary studies, in particular, and Black studies, in general. Judy’s book was arguably overshadowed by the release of Paul Gilroy’s important Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in the same year. But the questions Judy raised in (Dis)Forming would not go anywhere. We might say that Judy set an agenda for Black literary studies (and I argue beyond) in 1993 on par with the earlier agenda setting work of postcolonial studies, though I would argue Judy’s agenda would fracture the very terms of Western thought in ways that postcolonial studies could not fully get to. In many ways, that fracture Judy would initiate in Western thought boils down to one seemingly simple question that I would argue permeates Judy’s writing to this day: Can speech and writing bring Black people into humanity, as such humanity is defined under Western thought? Though with some nuance, an important cohort of African American literary studies scholars largely answered in the affirmative by the middle and latter end of the twentieth century, establishing an African American literary studies canon, by using figures like Frederick Douglass and his writing and speeches as proof of Black humanity on Western terms.Judy returns us to the particular context of this African American literary canonical formation, while forcing us to ask more questions about this canonical formation itself. For example, what language must Black people speak and write in to illustrate humanity? Invariably for this new canon, the answer was North American and European English, suggesting that those enslaved Africans who could speak and write in a variety of other languages, such as Arabic, were less important to canonical thought. What must one say and write in English to prove said humanity? Largely, one must write and speak of one’s capacity to transcend the limitations set on one by racist violence. Thus, Judy suggests that the terms of Black humanity for much of the African American literary canon revolved around similar terms of humanity long laid out in European, liberal, democratic Enlightenment thought: the capacity for nationalistic languages to cohere a people and to assist in their transcendence of hardships. In other words, a particular epistemology and ontology bled into African American literary thought, placing a Black face on liberal humanism. But such English-focused logics do not fully follow the historical record. As scholars like Sylviane Diouf (2013) estimate, 15 to 20 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the New World were Muslims and thus speakers and writers of Arabic. Two decades before Diouf, Judy illustrated that the African American literary canon is disformed when we reconstruct, for example, Arabic and Islam as central to African American literary thought. It is to formerly enslaved Muslims like Ben Ali that Judy turns his attention, not to rewrite Black humanity away from English speaking and writing or to argue that Black humanity is demonstrated via surpassing racist violence, but to show that Black humanity just is in and of itself.Importantly, in its application of liberal Enlightenment concepts of humanity (or the tools someone like Douglass had at his disposal in nineteenth-century North America), this African American literary studies canon of the mid- and late-twentieth century would arguably diverge from some components of the Black studies tradition of the mid-twentieth century. Or, maybe more accurately, this African American literary studies canon would accept some modes of Enlightenment thought as foundational. In contradiction to the radical goals of the late 1960s Black studies movement, the African American literary canon of the late twentieth century largely remade Blackness as reactionary: Blackness becomes largely a response to white supremacy, an attempt to prove humanity on white terms.Twenty-seven years later, in Judy’s latest book, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black, we are given yet another masterful move beyond reactions to Euro-American white supremacy. To say “beyond,” here, we must again invoke the “post” concept that Hall and Shome outlined for us in the beginning, as Judy’s work assumes neither a simplistic end of white supremacy nor a refusal to engage in Euro-American white supremacist thought, as though it is irrelevant to our current context. Here, white supremacy does not refer to white people’s violence against nonwhite people, per se, but, as Judy notes in an interview that Fred Moten conducted with him, white supremacy is about the preservation of “the place of that transcendent subject and filling it with a different color, or a different ethnicity” (Judy and Moten 2020, para. 66). Thus, white supremacy is the replication of Western man beyond himself, the presumed universality of Western being, as though it is applicable to Black and Brown people. Sentient Flesh pulls in Arabic and Black studies thought, while also deeply engaging in Euro-American thought to illustrate its white supremacist limits and residue for some components of contemporary African American studies. If we accept Judy’s definition, then we are met with another difficult, yet related, question (if not multiple) at the start of Sentient Flesh: What happens if we do not reduce Blackness to questions of essence or existentialism (different iterations of Western being), but we reconsider Blackness in relation to poiesis, or creative motion and emergence? Sentient Flesh picks up where (Dis)Forming left off, in the sense of pushing beyond one mode of epistemology or ontology. Further, the questions Judy asks are difficult to answer because to do so would be to force many positions to be rethought. We would have to begin again.For the audience of Philosophy & Rhetoric, a journal that historically connected the scholarship of rhetoricians and philosophers (Oliver 1997), these assumptions outlined by Judy in both 1993 and 2020 remain critically relevant. Speech and writing, of course, remain central aspects of study under the journal, and, in a highly rhetorical and philosophical fashion, Judy points us less to the content of speech and writing and more to their form. Further, Judy guides us toward criticism of problematic assumptions that many make about what it means to be Black, an answer that scholars continue to reduce to geographic borders, linguistic patterns, and white supremacist thought, under Judy’s definition of white supremacy. Put differently, there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship on Blackness and rhetoric that positions Blackness as merely a response to Euro-American geography, Euro-American language, and Euro-American being. But Judy argues that Blackness must be (and always is) much more than reaction. In the process, Judy illustrates that his discussion is not merely about Black people, but about Western forms of thought and humanity themselves, which, if he were taken seriously, would cause a reckoning within a multiplicity of academic disciplines.In many ways, Judy’s problematization of essence and existentialism in Sentient Flesh points to a problem of assumed purity in Western thought in general. In other words, this is not a problem solely associated with conservative or progressive thinkers—we find problems in both Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, though from different perspectives. Unlike the logic of transcendence, what Judy is positing is that there is no pure Black subject, lost to slavery, ready to be awoken and returned to via their mastery of Western forms of writing and speech. Likewise, there are no pure subjects alienated from themselves as selves based on the fabrication of an essence, and if we could just do away with all essences, we could all return back to a time when we were just humans, all as one. In some ways, to hold such positions is to accept Euro-American ontology and epistemology as organizing principles for all humanity, which is again Judy’s definition of white supremacy. But rather than simply refuse this position, there is a concern with the para throughout Sentient Flesh, building to and away from the work of Nahum Dimitri Chandler (2013), or a concern with thinking with or alongside of Western ontology and epistemology to understand that they are not all-encompassing and other forms of thought and life exist. This leads to what Judy calls poiesis in Black, or the fostering of “the formation of certain ways of thinking and conceiving, indeed perceiving the world—let us say imagining the world” (Judy 2020, 16). More specifically, it appears as a “thinking-in-disorder,” or the rejection of thinking as merely the mediating relationship between experience and knowledge (Western consciousness).By my reading of Sentient Flesh, Judy’s Poiesis in Black takes seriously the trouble of Euro-American humanism—as soon as the Negro is introduced into Euro-American epistemological and ontological frames, the universality of these frames is found wanting. However, to reject that universality ignores that it had an impact on not merely Europe and European self-conceptions, but European racial classificatory projects as well, which would also impact the ways that non-Europeans existed and thought about themselves in the world. Rather than the purity of European being, Judy notes throughout Sentient Flesh that poiesis exists in apposition to Euro-American humanism, which is not opposition, but side by side, close to one another. This speaks, in part, back to Judy’s (2000) long engagement with W. E. B. Du Bois, which we can find in Judy’s work on “Sociology Hesitant.” For both thinkers, “the mind” is not within you but constituted contextually, through the disorder that exists in the world. Euro-American humanism, too, is not distinct from a particular context, of which the fabrication of the Negro was also central, just as the imagination of other forms of Black life and thought, irreducible to Europe’s Negro concept.It is here that we really see the work of Judy adding to the potential work we can do in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric. The Negro functions not merely as a descriptor of Black people fabricated by white people, but as media, in the sense that the Negro construct serves a purpose for Euro-American self-imaginations. Following Judy, I have elsewhere referred to similar discussions of the Negro as a media function (Towns 2022). Such media, of course, do not fully correspond to the multiple forms of living of Black people (Poiesis in Black). In fact, the Negro construct ignores that Black people have opened up “infinities of other ways of being human in community becoming, ever becoming” (Judy 2020, 19). What I am calling a post-Judy moment, a thinking in disorder, is a call to take Judy seriously for scholars of rhetoric, English, philosophy, and communication studies—those closest to Philosophy & Rhetoric. To do so is to think about Blackness beyond anti-Blackness, beyond reactions to white supremacy, beyond inhumanity, and toward a concern with other forms of being and knowing. This is not to say that such thought did not exist before Judy or that it exists only after. Again, as per the postcolonial studies moment, this post-Judy moment is no simplistic end to all studies of Blackness or the Negro prior to Judy, but a call to rethink the terms of knowledge about both going forward. In doing so, we would have to have new conversations about what it means to be human in general, of which Blackness would be a central part of the discussion.

This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, rhetorical problem-solving through modal layering, and ambiguity in feedback interpretation. Despite these challenges, instructors demonstrated creativity and care in their attempts to communicate clearly and relationally. The article calls for a rhetorical framework to support multimodal feedback design, emphasizing the need for pedagogical reflection, professional development, and student co-interpretation. As genAI and platform automation continue to evolve, the findings underscore the importance of feedback as a site of human judgment and presence. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors, writing programs, and institutions to better support feedback as intentional, relational work.

This Teaching Tip introduces the Feedback Menu, a flexible protocol designed to promote student agency and feedback literacy in writing instruction. By allowing students to select the focus and mode of feedback they receive, the Menu helps tailor response to individual learning needs and supports meaningful revision at any stage of the composition process. The protocol is adaptable for use in first-year composition, professional writing, multilingual, and upper-division courses, in both face-to-face and online formats. Concrete implementation steps, sample menu items, and considerations for different teaching contexts are provided.

This article investigates the motivation informing President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s rhetoric regarding America’s lack of a direct military response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Employing Kenneth Burke’s pentad as its analytical lens, this study identifies how the president attempted to shape public opinion through his linguistic choices and selective interpretation of events. Biden’s rhetoric justifying the US’ non-military reaction to the conflict is found to reflect realism, and supports the claim that the US approach regarding the situation in Ukraine is an action policy. Furthermore, the results provide insight into the understanding of the working of the no-use-of-force rhetoric within the context of the still evolving post-Cold War world order.

Abstract Drawing on Rice's concept of para-expertise, this article asks, How can we position first-year students as experts who can speak back to Large Language Models (LLM) with authority? The authors analyze essays to demonstrate how seventy-two students drew on their felt sense of a city to respond to LLM writing.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 9 Issue 2

Abstract: Towards the end of his life (ca. 1790–1797), Edmund Burke resorted to a series of sublime appeals in his letters, pamphlets, and speeches, repeating several of the aesthetic forms he had theorized in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757/1759). These appeals invoked psychological terror and provoked violent response, leading Burke and his intended audience away from the prudential deliberation and liberal constitutionalism that he espoused in previous decades. Burke's sublime rhetoric constituted an illiberal response to efforts at promoting toleration of religious Dissenters and electoral reform. Additionally, Burke's authoritarian sublimity accounts for the reception of his Revolutionary arguments both in the late eighteenth century and in our own times. Finally, analysis of Burke's sublime appeals in the 1790s reveals that Burke was more than a psychological theorist of aesthetic affect. He was also a rhetorical practitioner with political effect.

This study contributes to the literature on corporate diversity and crisis management by analyzing stakeholder perceptions in the aftermath of Google’s and Microsoft’s sexual harassment scandals. The results reveal that both scandals were construed from the perspective of activism, an inherent feature of social media communication. While users made demands for additional corrective action from both companies, Google’s scandal was predominantly defined from the frames of controllability and perceived injustice, possibly eroding corporate reputation. By contrast, the frame of severity prevailed in the online discourse around Microsoft and showed a delineation between perceptions of senior leadership and HR. The findings have implications for the practice of communication management with respect to scandals.

How do we envision the future in community? The authors in this issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric help us interrogate this critical question. At a time when humanity is being attacked and challenged on multiple levels across institutions and borders, the articles in this issue provide a small glimpse into how community work can continue grounding us as scholars, practitioners, and humans seeking ulterior alternatives.

This article demonstrates the value of sentiment analysis for contextualizing audiences in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) by comparing vaccine related newspaper comments to non-vaccine related comments in the New York Times from 2017–2023 (n = 22,330,999). Our results show that while all comments skew negative, following a similar trend line, after the emergence of COVID-19, vaccine related comments decouple from the negative trend of baseline non-vaccine comments, becoming more negative and volatile. These results raise additional questions about the nature of the negativity for vaccine related comments, and we provide a properly sampled dataset for follow-up research to encourage iterative investigation into the public response to vaccine policy. In addition to these findings, this article calls for broader engagement with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data science in RHM.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 9 Issue 1

Bridget C. Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her primary teaching areas include eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, and Gothic and horror literature. Her research has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (2024). She is completing, along with a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, a critical edition of Elizabeth Meeke's 1796 The Abbey of Clugny, under contract with Routledge's Chawton House: Women's Novel Series.Kishonna Gray (she/her) is a professor of racial justice and technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and director of the Mellon-funded Intersectional Tech Lab. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and digital technologies, particularly in gaming and platform culture. She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and coeditor of Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play. Gray is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.Ashley Nadeau is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory. Her current research project examines the role of audiobooks in undergraduate literary studies and studies on the Victorian novel. When not thinking about audiobooks, she studies the relationship between the social and architectural histories of built public space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Journal, The Gaskell Journal, Modern Language Studies, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.Eleanor Reeds is an associate professor of English at Hastings College in Nebraska where she enjoys teaching across genres and periods in a small but vibrant department. Her research has appeared in venues such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, American Literary Realism, and Twentieth-Century Literature.Tes Schaeffer (she/her) previously served as an advanced lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as the associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Central Oregon Community College. Her fields of scholarship include composition and reading pedagogies, affect studies, and phenomenology.Krysten Stein (she/her) is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. She is a research affiliate with the Intersectional Tech Lab at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Her research explores reality television and social media, with a focus on identity, political economy, and wellness. She is completing her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health, and is a cofounding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network.Lisa Swan is an advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in English education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, reading, teacher training, and equity.

Editors' note for Writing Center Journal 44.1 (2026).

What makes societies see, acknowledge, and constitute an issue as a crisis which should be acted upon? We address this by examining a specific instance of media attention to a creeping health crisis, namely the communication of an individual non-governmental actor, the influencer Ingeborg Senneset. We ask: What is the rhetorical agency of an individual opinion leader (influencer) in a health risk situation such as the creeping AMR-crisis? Our study demonstrates that the rhetorical agency of Senneset as an influencer rests on three interrelated communicative strategies: First, she enacts what we term a multiple ethos implying both the expertise of a professional and the authenticity of an ordinary person; Second, she uses narratives of fear with a rational grounding; Third, she establishes and works rhetorically within a diverse digital ecology where she publishes, posts, and comments on several different platforms, where the different posts and publications reinforce each other.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 8 issue 4

Communication scholars have done an excellent work in creating business simulations to engage the students in learning communication concepts. However, more can be done to foster interactive business and professional communication pedagogy. Instructors must continue to devise new ways to enable the students to apply business communication concepts. In response to these calls, this article presents an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways team communication and proposal presentation manifest themselves in business speaking practices. This simulation enables students to engage with team communication issues by understanding persuasion and influence as an essential part of business and professional communication.

Public speaking is often conceptualized as a one-way monologue performed by a speaker for a listening audience. This monologic approach faces challenges and limited results as demonstrated by the education literature on active learning. In response to this research, this practitioner article explores the nature and effective execution of five universal Audience Engagement Techniques that provide opportunities for a speaker to turn their passively listening audience into active participants in a dialogue. Practical and theoretical implications of Audience Engagement Techniques generally are also discussed.

This article reports the findings of a long-term qualitative study that examines the experiences and perspectives of Native youth re-learning their tribal community’s language. Situated within notions of Indigenous relationality, “identity resources” from the learning sciences, and Indigenous futurisms, findings reveal that, through learning their ancestral language, Native youth: (a) develop a deeper sense of their cultural identity, (b) imagine new linguistic futures and possibilities for their tribal community, and (c) recognize ways they, themselves, can become contributors to the cultural continuance of their tribal community. Set against the backdrop of structural settler colonialism and ongoing apocalypse within what is currently known as the “United States,” this research demonstrates the ways language revitalization operates as an anti-colonial act of rupture to settler colonialism’s ongoing attack on Indigenous Peoples, as well as an Indigenous-centric act of healing and self-determination .

This is a time of extreme change. While we know that the world and our lives are defined by constant flux, it is hard to attribute the changes we see every day to the natural ebb and flow of the universe. Even so, it is how we acknowledge and, ultimately, address these changes that will determine how we continue to make our own change in the world.

By Andrea A. Lunsford. I’m grateful to the editors of Composition Forum, Aja Y. Martinez, and the authors of this symposium for the opportunity to read and reflect on the essays included here, since doing so led me to do some very memorable time traveling. And specifically to the mid 1980s and my first encounter with what would become known as Critical Race Theory (CRT)—in the work of Patricia Williams, particularly her “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.” In those years, Lisa Ede and I were studying (and practicing) collaborative writing, with its implicit challenge to traditional notions of singular authorship as the only valid and valuable form of academic publication. We were attuned to scholars who were resisting such values, rejecting the unwritten but powerful rules against anything other than single authorship, and who were pushing the boundaries of traditional academic discourse in other ways as well.