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Previous studies on L2 phrase complexity predominantly focused on noun phrases, while the verb phrase complexity are few and mostly simple verb phrase structures, they have limited expressive capacity. Complex verb phrase structures (e.g., n-grams, VACs) also have limitations. The present study proposes a set of 41 Chinese complex verb phrase structures and are meaningful. A total of 246 verb phrase complexity measures are calculated from the dimensions of account, frequency, diversity, and density. The ability of these measures to predict writing quality is compared with that of 10 large-grained syntactic complexity measures. The results show that large-grained measures (Average sentence length) and verb phrase complexity measures (two verb-object structures and three adverbial-head structures) can respectively explain 14.4% and 41.9% of variance in writing scores. Our results illustrate the importance of Chinese complex verb phrase structures in assessing L2 writing quality.

This case study examines factors that significantly affect student success in online first- and second-year composition at an open-access community college and, in doing so, contributes to scholarship on online composition and student success by empirically linking community and communication through high-context communication and students’ holistic contexts to indicators of academic outcomes and validating experiences. The study analyzes 175 participant responses to five low-stakes check-in assignments designed around the course-level concept of servingness. Eighty-one patterns identified in earlier research were grouped into 14 factors from which variables were derived. These, combined with check-in responses, course grades, course, sex, ethnicity, and race, yielded a total of 27 variables for quantitative analysis. Using chi-square tests (alpha = .10) and multiple correspondence analysis, 15 of 27 variables showed significant associations with course grades. Positive associations with academic growth, peer interaction, instructor engagement, inclusion, course design, and college resources aligned with higher check-in completion and higher grades; negative associations aligned with lower check-in completion and lower grades. Background characteristics, specifically course (English 1010/2010), ethnicity (Hispanic/Non-Hispanic), and race (White/Non-White), also showed significant associations with course grades. Results suggest that academic outcomes and validating experiences must be evaluated together to inform strategies that support both academic achievement and students’ racial and cultural ways of knowing. Future research should examine how targeted, low-stakes assignments and high-context communication practices operate across institutions and student groups, including longitudinal analyses that track how community, communication, and access to college resources interact with student success over time.

This essay examines three iconic photographs of “The 15 White Coats” who are a group of fifteen African American medical school students and emerging physicians who posed in solidarity in front of a former slave cabin in Louisiana. Although the photographs generated wide acclaim regarding underrepresentation in medicine, I argue that the performative goal of The 15 White Coats was to subvert any standard images of physicians as white and to underscore past and ongoing exploitation of Black bodies in medicine. More specifically, I demonstrate through these images a methodology of “visual counterstory,” which serves as a form of resistance to anti-Black sentiment while reinforcing positive images of Black physicians. Ultimately, I show how “visual counterstory” makes an important intervention in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine scholarship, thereby, raising consciousness of the disparities occurring in the contemporary discourse of health and medicine.

This methodologies and approaches article discusses an undergraduate journal in a technical editing undergraduate course as a location to leverage a social justice curriculum. The Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Issues and Media is a student-run journal that is at the center of learning about technical editing while facilitating diversity and inclusion. The article demonstrates how students can promote social justice by working with authors to edit texts as allies and activists.

Business communication pedagogy continues to debate the ways in which professional experience and theoretical training shape cross-cultural negotiation competencies. This study compares cultural intelligence (CQ) self-assessments and live simulation performance among 55 executive education participants and 79 university students from Mexico and Germany. Participants completed a CQ instrument before a multicultural HQ–subsidiary negotiation simulation. Students reported higher metacognitive, cognitive, and behavioral CQ but not motivational CQ. HQ teams outperformed subsidiary teams, and bilateral negotiations generated stronger performance than did presentations. The findings suggest that the simulation architecture influences which communication competencies are observable and rewarded.

This essay examines Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1949 visit to the United States as an embodied display of postcolonial sovereignty at a key moment of Cold War geopolitics. We argue that Nehru leveraged Truman’s invitation to articulate his own view of India’s role on the Cold War world stage. Rather than adopting the standard bipolar framing of Cold War rhetorical discourse, we make the deliberate choice to read Nehru’s tour as he saw it: a strategic opportunity to secure US economic assistance, affirm India’s independence from British or American ideological influence, and express solidarity with oppressed peoples around the globe. Drawing on governmental and historical archives in New Delhi and Washington and press accounts from India, the United States, and beyond, we show how Nehru’s rhetorical movement through the United States disrupted Cold War scripts and foregrounded an alternative moral politics rooted in decoloniality, racial justice, and global cooperation.

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) has traditionally emphasized textual features such as vocabulary and syntax, while often overlooking writers’ social identities and cognitive behaviors – factors central to understanding writing as a multidimensional construct. With the increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) into AWE, questions remain about how their assessments align with human judgments and the sources of potential divergences. This study investigates how linguistic (e.g., lexical diversity), cognitive (e.g., pausing behavior), and social (e.g., gender) factors covary with essay scores assigned by human raters and LLMs. We analyzed 4245 argumentative essays paired with demographic metadata and keystroke-logging data, using correlation analyses, random forest models, and regression-based approaches to examine relationships among writer characteristics, writing-process features, textual features, and essay scores. Results showed moderate agreement between human and LLM scores, but the two scoring systems exhibited different patterns of association with linguistic, cognitive, and social variables. These findings suggest that human and LLM evaluations rely on partially different cues and demonstrate how socio-cognitive metadata can be used to examine the factors associated with writing assessment decisions. By moving beyond text-only comparisons, this approach provides a complementary lens for understanding why and how human and machine judgments converge or diverge.

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.

Current writing models suppose that the production of a good-quality text is a complex interaction of low-level transcription skills (handwriting fluency and spelling) and higher-level cognitive and text-specific formulation skills (such as building cohesion and using diverse and appropriate vocabulary). Low-level transcription skills, albeit important for text quality, can only explain a small part of its variance. Therefore, in this paper we investigate whether there exist children who show discrepant achievements in text quality and low-level transcription skills and how they can be characterized in terms of higher-level text-specific formulation skills. A total of 186 native German-speaking 5th to 7th grade students had to complete transcription skills tests and write a narrative text. Text quality and text-specific formulation skills were measured. The following results were obtained: (1) Students with double dissociations (deficient transcription skills/ age-appropriate text quality or the reverse) could be identified; (2) these groups differed significantly in text-specific formulation skills, namely lexical diversity, correct sentence building, and local cohesion. Generally, children with the same low-level transcription skills (whether age-appropriate or deficient) who wrote better texts, achieved higher scores in these variables. The findings emphasize the importance of text-specific formulation skills and their consideration in writing instruction.

The relevance of the three core executive functions for text quality and individual text features had already been shown in a number of studies with novice writers. However, experimental data on the influence of executive functions in adult, skilled writers are rare. This cross-sectional study thus investigated how inhibition, updating, and shifting are related to text quality and relevant individual text features in skilled writers. Sixty-three adult, skilled writers wrote an explanatory text. The text product was used to analyze text quality (as perceived by the recipient) and individual text features (information content, cohesion, lexical diversity, appropriate words, syntactic complexity). Executive functions were assessed with standardized tests. Analyses highlighted the importance of conveying cohesive information when writing explanatory texts. Regarding the role of executive functions, inhibition significantly influenced information content and cohesion; updating influenced the use of appropriate words; and shifting influenced perceived text quality. These findings emphasize that executive functions play an important role in writing not only for novice writers but across the lifespan, whereby their influence changes with development and expertise.

The visual design of municipal websites contributes to their usability and user experience and shapes citizens’ first impressions of local governments. Visual complexity and colorfulness are two central dimensions of visual design. This study compares these dimensions across the homepages of 100 Chinese and 100 Western municipal websites. The findings show that Chinese websites are more visually complex and more colorful than Western websites. Regarding visual complexity, Chinese websites displayed more diversity and density of visual elements, less structured text organization, and more content blocks. Regarding colorfulness, they had more colors, higher saturation and brightness, and a stronger preference for red as a dominant color. Overall, the results suggest that visual design conventions in municipal websites are closely tied to linguistic, artistic, and pragmatic factors, highlighting the value of cross-cultural analysis in website design.

In technical and professional communication (TPC) there have been calls to locate the field in transnational contexts. Aligned with the social justice turn in TPC is an emergent body of critical and decolonial scholarship attending to power, privilege, and positionality. The following study extends this scholarship through attention to these issues in an emergent startup ecosystem in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Grounded in mobility studies, this telling case attends to the strategic manner in which a female entrepreneur navigates this system through a process of networking, or knotworking, as she navigates both patriarchal and colonial systems of oppression. Central to this process is the complex way she mobilizes a multimodal and spatial repertoire—conceptualized as repertoires of resistance. These moves shape not only the ways that she traverses the social, semiotic, and geographic landscape, but also the shifting nature of the landscape itself. Methodologically such moves entail a conceptual shift from a focus on activity systems to mobility systems.

Abstract While Presidential debates present policy positions, they also construct group identities. This article asks how argumentative structures and linguistic choices work together to produce the “We” identity and “Them” identity that is characteristic of polarised political discourse. We analyse the 2024 Trump–Harris debate by integrating only argumentation schemes into the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) for its approach to argumentation. Three questions guide our analysis: how argumentation schemes construct in-group and out-group identities; how do lexical choices, analysed through DHA’s nomination strategy, construct in-group/out-group identities; and whether patterned relationships exist between scheme types and discursive strategies. Drawing on 24 reconstructed arguments and six in-depth analyses, we observe that ad hominem attacks and poisoning-the-well arguments tend to co-occur with predication and perspectivisation strategies, while arguments from consequences tend to co-occur with justification. We term these patterned relationships schematic affinities and offer the concept as a hypothesis warranting systematic investigation rather than a confirmed finding. Lexical devices, including terms that categorise actors as criminals, victims, or workers, reinforce the opposition that arguments establish. The framework demonstrates how argumentation theory and Critical Discourse Studies can inform one another, and it opens pathways for research on national identity formation, racism, and discriminatory discourse.

This study examines how diversity and inclusion are communicated in LinkedIn job advertisements as workplace communication texts. Using qualitative, discourse-oriented analysis of job advertisements from global hotel brands, the study identifies recurring discursive frames through which organisations construct inclusivity, including belonging-oriented language, celebration of diversity, formal equal opportunity claims, and well-being–focussed narratives. These discourses are realised through specific communicative signals such as non-discrimination statements, values-based cultural cues, identity-affirming language, and references to inclusive policies. The study proposes the Inclusive Recruitment Communication Process conceptual framework, explaining inclusive recruitment communication as a platform-mediated process linking discourse, signalling, and conceptualised applicant sensemaking.

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.

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of globalization, the increasing diversity of languages and cultures has underscored the pressing need for cross-cultural comprehension and effective communication. This article stands at the junction of argumentation theory and translation studies, exploring their interrelationship. Using the “Hao Bridge Debate” as a case study, the article adopts a rhetorical perspective to explore the challenges of conveying ideas across linguistic and cultural barriers. By analyzing varied translations and interpretations of the debate, considering source language expressions within their historical and cultural contexts, this article discusses the multifaceted challenges faced by translators in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps and emphasizes the inherent deviations in translations. Moreover, this article examines the impact of cultural elements, such as metaphor interpretation and utilization in argumentation, influencing argument transmission and comprehension. This research also illustrates the importance of rhetoric to translation in the study of argumentation, which has further implications for understanding cross-cultural argumentation.

Abstract This chapter examines the rhetorical impact of instructors’ hyper-scrutinization of BIPOC students’ texts for AI involvement on their authorial agency and voice in US writing classrooms, problematizing how AI-surveilling pedagogical practices intersect with raciolinguistic ideologies, epistemic injustice, institutional distrust, instructor bias, and historical deficit-based views of BIPOC students’ multilingual composition.

The increasing adoption of automated essay scoring (AES) in high-stakes educational contexts necessitates careful examination of potential biases within the systems. This study investigates how the demographic composition of training data influences fairness in AES systems developed from finetuned large language models (LLMs). Using the PERSUADE corpus of 26,000 student essays, we conducted a systematic analysis using demographically restricted training sets to isolate the impact of training data demographics on LLM-AES performance. Each demographically restricted training set comprised essays written by one racial/ethnic group. Four variants of a Longformer-based AES were developed: one trained on demographically balanced data and three trained on demographically restricted datasets. An initial analysis of the human ratings indicated that demographic factors significantly predict human essay scores (marginal R² = 0.125), a pattern that is paralleled in national writing assessment data. LLM-AES systems trained on demographically restricted data exhibited small systematic biases (marginal R² = 0.043). However, the LLM trained on balanced data showed minimal demographic bias, suggesting that representative training data can effectively prevent amplification of demographic disparities beyond those present in human ratings. These results highlight both the importance and limitations of training data diversity in achieving fair assessment outcomes. • 12.5% of variance in human essay ratings was explained by demographics. • We construct demographically restricted training sets to isolate bias. • Balanced training data minimized LLM-AES bias across demographic groups. • LLM-AES trained on demographically restricted data showed more bias.

This study revisits Sam Dragga’s research on ethical decision-making in document design, updating it to reflect contemporary concerns. Our findings indicate that participants today perceive the document design scenarios as significantly more unethical than those in Dragga's original study, with heightened attention to accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and social justice. While Dragga's study emphasized concerns over the consequences of document design choices, our results suggest a shift in focus toward the writer's intent. Participants frequently judged deliberate manipulation as unethical, even in cases where no direct harm was evident. These findings highlight the evolving ethical priorities in technical communication and underscore the need for practitioners and educators to reassess and revise the field's guiding principles to align with contemporary values of inclusivity and social responsibility.

Abstract: In Calpurnius Flaccus's Declamation 2, a Roman wife is accused of infidelity on the grounds that she has given birth to an "Aethiopian" ( Aethiops ). The present article seeks to contextualize this relatively understudied declamation within the recent efflorescence of scholarship on ancient race, highlighting its connections to conventional discourses of race in Latin literature. In what follows, I identify a system of racial categorization as a component of Rome's imperializing vision of the world and demonstrate how discourses of race regulate domestic concerns at Rome, such as marriage, extramarital desire, and reproduction. The article also seeks to show how anxieties of racial contact, exemplified by blackness as index of symbolic exteriority, collide with anxieties regarding the presence of enslaved people within the Roman household.

Annually, disasters ranging from wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes to epidemics and even pandemics impact diverse communities globally. The calls for and research into improved disaster preparedness and better surveillance and resistance technologies are valid and necessary. However, it is pertinent that we also research and assess communicative practices of specific disasters, especially the discourse, rhetoric, and praxis that shape disaster response and management before, during, and after crises in vulnerable and marginalized communities. In Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and Crisis Communication During Disaster , Sweta Baniya argues for the prioritization and inclusion of marginalized voices, centering their grounded knowledge, rhetorical agency, and coalitional networks. This will enhance effective and efficient disaster response as well as provide a more nuanced understanding of disaster rhetoric and praxis.

Within this tumultuous moment, it feels like years have passed since the release of the last issue. Energy continues to be an issue that I'm following with concern and interest, as it holds both disciplinary and global significance. In this editorial, I aim to say a bit less than I had in my previous two editorials, while gesturing toward the continued relevance of critical- and praxis-oriented social justice work in the fields of communication design (CD) and technical and professional communication (TPC).

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.

This article presents critical positive communication pedagogy (CPCP), which synthesizes the fields of critical pedagogy and positive communication pedagogy to promote positive communication practices that develop a social justice sensibility among students. We argue that CPCP contributes to the creation of learner-centered classrooms that promote interpersonal connection, foster feelings of inclusion and belonging, and aid students in achieving sustainable happiness. We provide examples of CPCP in business and professional communication classrooms to promote diversity and inclusion, specifically related to issues of gender and sexuality, race, disability, and class.

This paper highlights the reflective experiences of five graduate students who emerged as practitioner-scholars in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) through their participation in the Spring 2025 graduate course, Writing Grants and Proposals, at Sam Houston State University. The semi-simulated, Better Sam Program assignment, grounded in a community-engaged and social justice framework, required students to develop unsolicited full proposals addressing local issues or opportunities within SHSU or the Huntsville community. This assignment challenged students to align their proposals with community needs while engaging in ethical, research-driven practices. Drawing on extensive community engagement, students developed proposals that were not only realistic and contextually grounded but also reflective of broader social justice concerns. The reflective process, guided by structured questions, encouraged students to critically analyze their proposal development experiences and consider the broader implications of their work for community advocacy and social responsibility. This paper presents these reflections, offering insights into how grant writing can be a transformative educational experience that fosters critical thinking, ethical engagement, and social impact.

This article presents findings from a content analysis of 707 articles appearing between 2011 and 2020 in five journals issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a major teaching and research organization in North America. We examined topics and theoretical frameworks, finding that while core topics such as academic writing, curriculum, cultural studies, literacy, and teacher development remained stable, the latter part of the previous decade (2016–2020) showed increased attention to labor, diversity, social justice, and writing program administration, alongside declines in work focused on history, educational policy, ESL, and community writing. Many articles lacked explicit theoretical grounding, often using broad labels like “critical theory,” though use of specified frameworks (e.g., feminist and postcolonial theory) has grown. We identify differences among the journals and discuss the implications of these findings for NCTE, for content analysis as a method and for scholars’ efforts to navigate a complex and expanding field.

After 40-plus years, I retired from my professorship and returned to my first role as a teacher of children (kindergarteners through second graders, now at a neighborhood after-school center). As an academic researcher, an ethnographer, I had spent years with children as a “friend” as they often described me. But at the center, I was a teacher, expected to promote the children’s composing. In this role, I experienced at first a sharp shift in my relationship to children. The question arose: What is the relationship between being a researcher and being a teacher? I compared my responses to and from three selected center children and three research project children; data (field notes, written products) for each center child was compared to that of a research project child with similar composing characteristics. All children were urban and African American. Among my findings were that, first, my observations of center children were not the data-filled field notes of project children, and, second, that the teacher me was more attuned to the writing community in formation. Children expected our routine prac-tices, they were eager to share their work, and, moreover, they were ready responders to each other. By the school year’s end, I knew that all who teach must blend the roles of researcher and teacher: We are curious about those we teach; we work to study them the best we can by observing their responses to our efforts, and what we thereby learn feeds into how we teach and how our students learn.

This article draws from a yearlong practitioner inquiry to explore solidarity and inspiration among Black and Latinx youth songwriters in a community-based music program. The inquiry builds upon scholarship and practice around solidarity across Black and Latinx youth through songwriting, performance, and multi-sensory practices. Theoretically, the study brings together a language of solidarity framework and the emergent, future-facing standpoint of the not-yet. Findings address the uneven access to racial knowledge between Black and Latinx, creative enclosures and how inspiration travels within and across these enclosures. Leveraging the not-yet, we discuss implications for embracing unevenness, non-linearity, and enclosures while theorizing a language of solidarity among Black and Latinx youth.

This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

This graduate level assignment requires students analyze rhetorical artifacts through an African American epistemology of rhetorical knowledge. The expectations of the assignment built on the concepts of Kemetic-rooted (Ancient Egyptian) rhetorical traditions that are common to the U.S.’s Black communities. The objective of the assignment was for learners demonstrate foundational declarative and procedural knowledge of the practices and frameworks within an African-American rhetorical tradition that would help them expand their understanding of rhetorical aims throughout the course and beyond. This assignment expanded the perception of the relationship between rhetoric, society, culture, and community both historically and contemporarily. For some students, working with a different rhetorical mindset allowed them to theorize about rhetorical communication in ways they feel they had not been able to articulate in previous courses or contexts.

This article examines a multi-year study of a client-based, critical service-learning project embedded in a Professional Writing course at a Jesuit Catholic university. Drawing on surveys and interviews with students across six course sections, the study explores how students perceived service learning, which aspects of the project most shaped their learning, and how the university's mission informed their understanding of service and professionalism. Findings reveal that while students often entered the course with conventional assumptions about service as charity and professionalism as formality, many came to adopt a more relational, justice-oriented view of professional communication. By engaging with real clients—many of whom face structural inequities—students encountered the human realities behind workplace writing and began to see professionalism as a flexible, context-responsive ethic grounded in care and reciprocity. This article proposes the concept of justice-oriented professionalism as a reimagined model for technical and professional communication, one aligned with critical pedagogy, social justice, and relational responsiveness.

Typically, one might expect a review to highlight similarities, but here, I choose to place these books side by side for their contrasting perspectives.Before delving into the essence of the comparisons, it is important to recall the mission of the AK Peters Visualization Series.This series aims to capture what visualization is today in all its variety and diversity, giving voice to researchers, practitioners, designers, and enthusiasts.It encompasses books from all subfields of visualization, including visual analytics, information visualization, scientific visualization, data journalism, infographics, and their connection to adjacent areas such as text analysis, digital humanities, data art, or augmented and virtual reality ("AK Peters Visualization Series," n.d.).Both authors are practitioners who bring their expertise in communicating through visualized information and data.Jen Christiansen, who graduated in geology and art, is a senior graphics editor at Scientific American, while Nancy Organ, formally trained in statistics, has experience as a data visualization designer and educator.Each utilizes her unique skills for effective communication.Traditionally, rhetoric is understood as "a discipline concerned with the effective use of language, to persuade, give pleasure, and so on" (Matthews 2007).While this definition seems self-evident, it is essential to note that contemporary rhetoric encompasses all modes of communication.Interestingly, practitioners, educators, and researchers frequently refer to "the language [bold -EM] of data visualization," exploring its grammar, vocabulary, and stylistics (DataVis Lisboa 2020; "Visual Vocabulary," n.d.; Ben-Joseph 2016; Kandogan and Lee 2016).This context invites a closer examination of three key aspects: first, how various authors describe persuasive communication through information and data visualization, or as some call it, data storytelling; second, how to expand our rhetorical framework to include data, numbers, and statistics; and third, a deeper exploration of the audiences-crucial for rhetoricians-of data and information visualizations.As Burns et al. (2020) state.When designers create visualizations for communication, they make choices about encoding and design that they think will accurately and persuasively communicate their interpretation of the data.The ultimate interpretation of a visualization depends on both the designer and the reader. InventioBoth books target distinct audiences, as indicated by their titles.Building Science Graphics serves as both a textbook and a practical reference for anyone looking to convey scientific information through illustrations for articles, poster presentations, and beyond ("AK Peters Visualization Series," n.d.).In contrast, Data Visualization for People of All Ages is more approachable, specifically aimed

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.

This paper reports on a user experience (UX) study investigating how college students navigate university-sponsored online systems for sharing chosen name and pronouns. While the opportunity to share gender identity ostensibly enables inclusive and usable systems for queer students, the visibility of gender nonconformity also imposes surveillance concerns, as pronouns have become an organizing tool for governments and university boards intent on limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Drawing from trans and queer scholarship, this article suggests that the concept of visibility should be closely scrutinized in design settings where heightened visibility can present risks to bodily autonomy or safety.

Using the results of a qualitative research study, this webtext theorizes ways to resolve the quantum indeterminacy of online learning spaces in ways that serve social justice efforts. The webtext's design encourages readers to engage with content in varied, unpredictable ways, mirroring the ways that digital learning spaces are experienced in single-multiple ways.

Motivated by needs for intersectional, student-involved class participation research, I report the results of an exploratory study of student participation disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and their intersections. Surveying students (n=42) about their identities, attempts to participate, and motivations for participation, I found White students attempted on-time work at a greater rate, while Latinx students attempted it less than peers. Female students attempted exit ticket reflections more often than peers, and male Latinos attempted labor reflections less often. Explanations emphasized ease, habits, self-regulation, and learning. Disabled participants cited habits more, and White men cited self-regulation less. This study contributes to scholarship in participation and assessment, with implications for classroom assessment and policies. I conclude with directions for future research and a classroom heuristic.

This study examines the role of risk visualizations in public health communication through an analysis of the MyWater-Flint Map and Flint Service Line Map , developed during the Flint water crisis. Applying a newly proposed social justice-oriented framework for risk visual design, the study evaluates these maps' effectiveness in communicating risk through dimensions of accessibility, accountability, ethics, productive usability, hybrid collectivity, open systems, and circulation. Findings highlight the importance of community participation in the production and dissemination of risk visualizations. This work sheds light on visual risk communication theory, professional practice, and technical communication instruction.

At a moment when questions of equity and access are reshaping higher education and professional practice, technical and professional communication (TPC) is undergoing a "social justice turn" that centers ethics, equity, and care within its research and design practices. Designing for Social Justice: Community-Engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication (edited by Jialei Jiang and Jason C. K. Tham, 2025) situates itself squarely within this movement, framing justice not as an optional theme but as a guiding principle for communication design. Jiang and Tham note that this collection "explore[s] the intersection of multimodal design and community engagement for social justice" (p. 3), and they introduce design advocacy to capture this orientation.

Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

This study examines the rhetorical endeavors of a grassroots citizen and a youth activist in addressing official ignorance and denial surrounding the Flint water crisis. These civic participants engaged in extensive communicative, interactive, and affective labor to assess and communicate risks, raising public awareness and pushing for policy change. This article theorizes an extended materialist social justice framework by illustrating the complex interactions between immaterial labor and different types of social justice.

By Allison Gross and Jessica Lee. In the Fall of 2022, we set out with a handful of our colleagues in the English department to create an anti-racist writing curriculum. Of particular importance to us was crafting this curriculum for our specific context, not just as a two-year college, but also at Portland Community College (PCC) in particular, the largest higher education institution in Oregon, situated in the “whitest big city in America” (De Leon). Even though Portland itself is predominantly white, our students at PCC are far more diverse, with PCC itself situated on the traditional village site of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. Specifically

Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]

Megan McIntyre Abstract In response to a growing awareness of the oppressive foundations of educational institutions, literacy educators have turned to antiracist, culturally responsive (Alim and Paris; Paris), and equitable teaching and assessment practices to combat the inequities (colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) on which our institutions are built. According to scholars including Geneva […]

This brief article discusses the advantages of using a student grade proposal within a labor-based grading framework, focusing on how the grade proposal may reinforce the equity-related aims of labor-based grading and hone students' ability to self-assess. The article discusses the learning outcomes of the grade proposal and its process, then ends with a sample grade proposal.

Abstract Taking their cue from the internet and popular cultures in which they engage, college students are becoming more comfortable with the notion of intersectionality, a term first coined in the late 1980s by the critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Drawing from her legal training as well as Black feminist precursors such as Sojourner Truth, Crenshaw shows how to best understand the experiences of the multiply marginalized, not through a simple process of addition (woman plus Black, for instance) but through a careful attention to the way in which the specific combination of those two identities can create new forms of marginalization obscured by single-vector frameworks. For those who teach undergraduate writing students, the proliferation of intersectionality in cultural conversation offers a unique opportunity: here is a densely theoretical concept that students are eager to think about and which, in fact, they may already be thinking about. This piece provides a pedagogical model for approaching intersectionality in the writing classroom. Using Langston Hughes's richly ambiguous short story, “Seven People Dancing,” which foregrounds the racial, sexual, class, and gender identities of its characters, the article guides instructors through a process by which students can use theoretical concepts to produce stronger analyses of complicated texts.