In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it. The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action. To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class. The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies. In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.

This book studies the role of rhetoric in the expansive movement for global higher education in U.S. colleges and universities. Drawing on an analysis of how discourses of security, economy, and ethics shape the rhetoric of global higher education, as well as that of its populist and nationalist critics, the author argues for an understanding of global higher education as a site of rhetorical conflict over visions of students as citizens. In doing so, the work advances the project of transnational rhetorical education, a theoretical and pedagogical project that can foster forms of rhetorical inquiry, performance, and ethics that equip students to pursue transnational forms of civic engagement, belonging, and resistance. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of rhetoric and composition studies, communication, and education, as well as to faculty and administrators working in global higher education or internationalization programs.

Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing is designed to spark conversation. It is intended to highlight the growing importance of posthumanist approaches to writing studies, and, in doing so, works to solidify the importance of such work to the future of writing studies. Its organizational structure, length, and approach serve this agenda, working as much to encourage a growing conversation as it does to provide substantial, original work from which such conversations might emerge. The thirteen original essays that comprise Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing are organized to provide a progression from articles that introduce theoretical concepts regarding the intersections of posthumanism and writing to works that examine specific contexts as vehicles for developing posthumanist theories.

Critical Expressivism is an ambitious attempt to re-appropriate intelletual territory that has more often been charted by its detractors than by its proponents. Indeed, as Peter Elbow observes in his contribution to this volume, “As far as I can tell, the term ‘expressivist’ was coined and used only by people who wanted a word for people they disapproved of and wanted to discredit.” The editors and contributors to this collection invite readers to join them in a new conversation, one informed by “a belief that the term expressivism continues to have a vitally important function in our field.”

Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers aims to inspire a re-conception and re-envisioning of the boundaries of writing center work. Moving beyond the grand narrative of the writing center—that it is solely a comfortable, yet iconoclastic place where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing—McKinney shines light on other representations of writing center work. McKinney argues that this grand narrative neglects the extent to which writing center work is theoretically and pedagogically complex, with ever-changing work and conditions, and results in a straitjacket for writing center scholars, practitioners, students, and outsiders alike. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers makes the case for a broader narrative of writing center work that recognizes and theorizes the various spaces of writing center labor, allows for professionalization of administrators, and sees tutoring as just one way to perform writing center work. McKinney explores possibilities that lie outside the grand narrative, allowing scholars and practitioners to open the field to a fuller, richer, and more realistic representation of their material labor and intellectual work.

EDUCATING ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES IN THE 20th and 21st Centuries: A Critical Annotated Bibliography, Volume 3 is the third volume in a series that addresses an eclectic host of issues germane to teaching and learning about social issues at the secondary level of schooling, ranging over roughly a one hundred year period (between 1915 and 2013). Volume 3 specifically addresses how an examination of social issues can be incorporated into the extant curriculum. Experts in various areas each contribute a chapter in the book. Each chapter is comprised of a critical essay and an annotated bibliography of key works germane to the specific focus of the chapter.

Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things is the first book-length collection of essays that explore the vibrant materiality of everyday objects in rhetorical theory, practice, and writing. It examines how things such as food, bicycles, and typewriters can influence history and sociality.