Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm? The eleven essays here explore such questions.

"My primary concern is with the ethics of representing vulnerable subjects—persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship, unable to represent themselves in writing, or unable to offer meaningful consent to their representation by someone else.... Of primary importance is intimate life writing—that done within families or couples, close relationships, or quasi-professional relationships that involve trust—rather than conventional biography, which can be written by a stranger. The closer the relationship between writer and subject, the greater the vulnerability or dependency of the subject, the higher the ethical stakes, and the more urgent the need for ethical scrutiny."—from the Preface Vulnerable Subjects explores a range of life-writing scenarios-from the "celebrity" to the "ethnographic"—and a number of life-writing genres from parental memoir to literary case studies by Oliver Sacks. G. Thomas Couser addresses complex contemporary issues; he investigates the role of disability in narratives of euthanasia and explores the implications of the Human Genome Project for life-writing practices in any age when many regard DNA as a code that "scripts" lives and shapes identity. Throughout, his book is concerned with the ethical implications of the political and economic, as well as the mimetic, aspects of life writing.

This book offers something quite new - an advanced textbook that considers professional writing as a negotiated process between writer and reader. Arguing that ethics, imagination and rhetoric are integral to professional writing praxis, the book encourages students to look critically at various writing practices in a range of contexts. A textbook for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in Linguistics, Communication, Journalism and Media Studies.

This book invites readers to reconsider how writing studies researchers work with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) on behalf of their communities and argues that engaging with IRBs during the research design process helps practitioners conduct research more quickly and effectively Using empirical data from both writing studies and extra-disciplinary contexts, Dr. Johanna Phelps presents findings from two discipline-wide studies, as well as metadata from two IRBs, to develop a principled engagement framework for writing studies researchers to interact with their communities This engaging and timely exploration of research design will be an important resource for scholars and students of writing studies; rhetoric and composition; technical and professional communication; cultural rhetoric; literacy studies; research design; research methodologies; research ethics; IRBs; justice; and critical theory

After Plato redefines the relationships of rhetoric for scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing in the twenty-first century. Featuring essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field, the book explores the diversity of ethical perspectives animating contemporary writing studies—including feminist, postmodern, transnational, non-Western, and virtue ethics—and examines the place of ethics in writing classrooms, writing centers, writing across the curriculum programs, prison education classes, and other settings. When truth is subverted, reason is mocked, racism is promoted, and nationalism takes center stage, teachers and scholars of writing are challenged to articulate the place of rhetorical ethics in the writing classroom and throughout the field more broadly. After Plato demonstrates the integral place of ethics in writing studies and provides a roadmap for future conversations about ethical rhetoric that will play an essential role in the vitality of the field. Contributors: Fred Antczak, Patrick W. Berry, Vicki Tolar Burton, Rasha Diab, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Gesa E. Kirsch, Don J. Kraemer, Paula Mathieu, Robert J. Mislevy, Michael A. Pemberton, James E. Porter, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Xiaoye You, Bo Wang