It’s my honor to introduce Issue 14.1 of Xchanges. The graduate student scholarship featured here represents the intellectual breadth, critical depth, and practical sensibility of the next wave of scholars in rhetoric, writing, and technical communication. This work, like our journal’s mission, could not be more timely. At a historical moment when generational divisions are palpable in our field’s online forums, it behooves us all to recognize the intellectual contributions of undergraduate and graduate students as integral to our scholarly conversations.
Despite the range of concerns reflected in these articles, each holds important implications for graduate scholarly and professional development.
In “User Experiences of Spanish-Speaking Latinos with the Frontier Behavioral Health Website,” Raquel L. Dean demonstrates how important it is that technical communicators approach web usability as a matter of social justice affecting equal access to behavioral health services for culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse populations.
In “What Wants to be Said (Out Loud)?: Octalogs as Alter/native to Hegemonic Discourse Practices,” Eric Reid Hamilton interrogates our field’s overreliance on the genre of the scholarly journal article as our principal means of communication and scholarly enculturation, and he highlights other possibilities in print, at conferences, and in our graduate programs for inviting a more pluralistic and dialogic approach to scholarship and graduate education.
In “Building Critical Decolonial Digital Archives: Recognizing Complexities to Reimagine Possibilities,” Bibhushana Poudyal provides a rationale and methodology for her own digital archiving project, and in doing so, proposes an approach to digital archiving that involves metadiscursive deconstruction of colonialist structures imposed upon the archiving process and product.
And in “Differences in Print and Screen Reading in Graduate Students,” Lauren J. Short’s interviews with graduate students about their reading practices reveal that even a generation of “digital natives” can benefit from explicit instruction in active reading practices for both print and screen.
Together, these authors call on us to develop critical and reflexive pedagogies and practices that attend to a plurality of learners and publics, concerns reinforced in Elizabeth Barnett’s deeply researched and broad-ranging interview with Kairos editor Doug Eyman as part of our ongoing Profiles in Digital Scholarship and Publishing series.
As we approach the end of the 2018-19 academic year, we at Xchanges hope you’ll keep this work in mind as important scholarly and pedagogical resources, and that you’ll remember to keep an eye out for next year’s undergraduate and graduate issues, which will feature the third interview in our Profiles in Digital Scholarship and Publishing series, as well as a symposium on the state of graduate study in rhetoric and writing studies. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student in rhetoric and writing studies, please consider submitting for next year’s issues by June 30, and if you mentor undergraduate or graduate students, please encourage them to submit their best work to Xchanges.
~ Brian Hendrickson, Managing Editor
Xchanges Issue 14.1Articles
Interview
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