Welcome to Issue 16.1 of Xchanges, our annual Spring issue that features original scholarship by graduate students.

As we launch this issue, a few months late, we are reflecting on the challenging past months that have faced us all, months that have been defined by a persisting pandemic, by political turmoil in our nation and beyond our borders, by the ever-present physical and mental health impacts of the stressful realties of the world that surrounds us all each day.  We foreground these challenges in this opening letter for a variety of reasons. First, we want our readers—who constitute an Xchanges community that is comprised of undergraduate and graduate students in Writing Studies, of faculty, of administrators, and of people in various zones of precarity between these roles—to recognize that we understand the challenges of completing day-to-day tasks, such as our teaching, our studying, our research, our service commitments, and our writing/composing practices (to name but a few “work-related” items) in this epochally unstable time. At the same time, we want to celebrate all of you for continuing and thriving in ways small and large, even as we all struggle in ways small and large. The staff who made this issue of Xchanges possible and the writers who are featured in these digital pages have all shown patience, resolve, and commitment to bring this issue together in these difficult times. We thank all of you.

The works of the writers in this issue will be engaging to Writing Studies scholars on so many levels, as they take on vitally important topics including critical autoethnography in the English as an Additional Language writing classroom, rhetorical style in the genre of the Statement of Purpose, the persistence of heteronormative temporalities in Utah’s abstinence-based sex-education curriculum, opportunities for visual-rhetorical improvements to “STOP AAPI HATE” reports, smartphone-driven documentary filmmaking in the FYC classroom, and students’ dispositional embodiments in the realm of directed self-placement. As is evident by this brief list of central themes, the topics at play in this issue vigorously attend to technological and social realities as they inform Technical and Professional Communication, FYC, and Writing Studies scholarship, broadly.

The writers of the featured articles in this issue come from graduate programs in Writing Studies across the United States. Manuel Piña, author of “Extending Informed Self-Placement: The Case for Students’ Dispositions,” is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi while completing his doctoral studies in the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University.  Jacob D. Richter is Assistant Director of First-Year Composition and a Ph.D. student in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University.  Jacob, whose article “Cameraphone Composition: Documentary Filmmaking as Civic-Rhetorical Action in First-Year Composition” is included in this issue, also serves as the Assistant Communications Editor at Xchanges. Dan Harrigan, author of “Reimagining Activist Data: A Critique of the STOP AAPI HATE Reports through a Cultural Rhetorics Lens,” is currently earning his Professional and Technical Writing M.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A first-year Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Virginia Tech (VT), Priyanka Ganguly is publishing the article “Rhetorical Style Analysis of the Statement of Purpose (SP) Genre: A Shared Understanding of Lexis in Successful SPs” in this issue. Ganguly also serves as a graduate teaching assistant in the engineering communication program of the Materials Science and Engineering Department at VT. Analeigh E. Horton, of the University of Arizona, is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English program and is the author of “Using Contact Zone Concepts to Teach Critical Autoethnography to Multilingual Writers in Foundational Composition.” Finally, Nina Feng, the author of “Bad Sex vs. No Sex: The Rhetoric of Heteronormative Temporality in Utah’s Abstinence-Based Education,” is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah.

This array of scholars, and the range of topics they explore, showcases a variety of research methods and multiple approaches to scholarly persuasion in the context of online, multimodal publication. As exemplars of the high level of research output created by today’s graduate student scholars, this issue serves not just as a rich collection of research content but also as a repository of model works, one that can be used by emerging scholars at the undergraduate and graduate levels, those who have not yet embarked on a path of publishing their own works and want to see scholarship by their peers from across institutions that demonstrates the culmination of a long process of research, composing, submission, revision, editing, and publication. So many parts of that process are obscured when readers only interact with a final text; we want all readers to know the labor that lies behind all of the works that appear on these digital pages.

Before I close this letter, I want to let our readers know of some changing-of-roles that has happened here at Xchanges. For the last three years, Brian Hendrickson has been our Managing Editor, with Al Harahap serving as co-Managing Editor for the last two years. Brian and Al are responsible for effectively “breathing new life” into this two-decade-old online journal and you are enjoying the fruits of their labors in this issue, the final issue of their period as a Managing Editing team. Brian is cycling off of direct service to Xchanges as a member of our staff but will continue as a promoter of the Xchanges mission and will serve in an advisory capacity. Thank you, Brian, so much for all that you have contributed, tirelessly. Al, thank you also for your incredible contributions in the realm of Managing Editing. Al is moving into a new role, that of Special Features editor and he and his team, Jennifer Burke Reifman and Rachel Bryson, have many boundary-pushing ideas in the works for new content in the journal, building on some of our recent “special” content, such as the “Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition” of 2020 and the “Profiles in Digital Scholarship and Publication” series of 2018-2019.

Our new Managing Editing team is Beau Pihlaja and Alex Hanson; Alex was our former Associate Managing Editor, working with Al and Brian. Alongside Alex and Beau in the Managing Editing realm is Courtney Cox; these three already are hard at work on our next two issues! Continuing in their roles as the Communication team are Christopher Stuart and Jacob Richter. Finally, our Technical Editing team, Eric Mason and Chanakya Das, has a new member on board, Nicole O’Connell. We are looking forward to our upcoming staff cycle with these teams in place and are excited for the new issues, new features, expanded social media presence, and additional research projects we are undertaking to study the impacts of undergraduate research publication in Writing Studies. On this last topic, a new Assistant Editor for Research and Outreach, Caroline Jennings, is working with me directly, in a range of capacities, including the public-facing research we are embarking on.

We wish all of you strength and vision as you proceed through this coming academic year (2021-22), as we continue to experience uncertainty, instability, and change—but we believe that, on the basis of the scholarship we have seen in our pages and the leadership provided by Xchanges staff over this issue cycle—people like all of us in the Xchanges community are committed to growth and expanded inclusivity across Writing studies disciplines. We are honored to work with all of you and to feature your voices in this publication.

--Julianne Newmark
Editor-in-Chief

We are publishing this latest annual undergraduate issue during strange times, when the Xchanges editorial and review teams have continued to dedicate our time and energy to showcasing the best of new and upcoming scholars’ work in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Like for many of you, our fellow academics and professionals, seeing our dedication through during the past few months has felt like we have needed to go through a range of emotional and intellectual acrobatics.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created uncertainty in our research, our teaching, and our service, including the very work that many individuals have contributed to the publication of this issue. Meanwhile, as part of larger global political upheavals, the leadup to the US general elections and various fallout incidents mired in rhetorics of difference, hate, and violence have affected our personal lives and our very institutions, including that of academia and education. And so we may sit, some of us feeling irrelevant, perhaps even paralyzed, and ponder: What is the point of doing this work? Why be curious about things, research, write, vet and be vetted for acceptances and rejections, when it feels like our world is crumbling down around us? I hear and see this frustration in our academic communities. And where I keep landing is this: We may not know what the immediate or long-term holds for intellectual inquiry. But whatever form it takes, the one certainty I have is that we have many minds eager to jump in and continue our work. Why keep doing what we do in times of uncertainty? Here are six very good reasons.

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It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you Issue 15.1 of Xchanges! This, our Spring 2020 graduate student issue, is for all intents and purposes a double issue in that we are presenting you with a regular issue of full-length articles plus a Symposium on the State of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition.

We launch this issue at an unprecedented moment for higher education and, more generally, the world—one that has already transformed our institutions, our teaching and learning, and our workplace communication. Undoubtedly, it will transform our field and its scholarship, as well. Although the scholarship collected in this issue was all produced in that other, pre-COVID lifeworld, it is as a whole exceptionally relevant in its concerns with digital cultural production and with the rhetorical strategies employed by marginalized communities—including graduate students—to effect their own cultural resilience.

My symposium Coeditor, Xchanges Associate Managing Editor Al Harahap, and I provide a separate, fuller introduction to the symposium elsewhere in this issue, but here I would at least like to emphasize that the symposium was a collaborative effort, its theme arising out of discussions with leaders of a number of Rhetoric and Composition graduate student organizations invited early on in the process, and with the final product containing eleven separate contributions from a combined total of 24 graduate student authors, including representatives from DBLAC, nextGEN, WAC-GO, and WPA-GO—all in conversation with one another across the symposium. Al and I hope you will pay close attention to what these scholar-activists have to tell us. It is only that much more pressing now, in this current moment of amplified economic and corporeal precarity, that we attune ourselves to and amplify graduate student concerns, as well as their visions of a more equitable future for graduate study in our field.

Attunement and amplification are exactly the sorts of gestures that make the full-length articles in the current issue stand out.

Building off of her experience as a participant in the Salt of the Earth Recovery Project, which amplifies the stories of the citizens of Santa Rita, New Mexico, Kelli R. Lycke Martin employs rhetorical analysis to attune us to the creative means by which those citizens fought and continue to fight to retain their collective identity and memory against repeated attempts at erasure.

Jacklyn Heslop amplifies the Aristotelian concept of the enthymeme to attune us to the manner in which memes are an essential and extremely generative component of digital cultural production.

Sarah Lonelodge and Katie Rieger meanwhile attune us to the value of analyzing students’ self-reported perceptions of writing instruction in public digital spaces, and in doing so amplify the importance of students’ perceptions of teaching more generally.

Please join me in applauding the tremendous intellectual labor that these graduate student authors have put into the work collected here, and join me as well in encouraging colleagues and students to read, share, and teach this important issue of Xchanges.

~ Brian Hendrickson, Managing Editor

Welcome to Issue 14.2 of Xchanges! We pride ourselves here at Xchanges on rendering visible the intellectual breadth and depth of undergraduate scholarship coming out of Writing Studies courses and programs. The current issue is no exception. However, the current issue is exceptional in that each of the five articles featured herein is extremely timely in its own way.

Several of the undergraduate scholars are taking on complicated and provocative political issues:

In “American Misconceptions of Syria,” Feras Aboukhater critiques American journalism’s coverage of the war in Syria to advocate for a more nuanced approach that captures the complexities of life in a conflict zone.

Analyzing the post-9/11 rhetoric of our 43rd president’s “war on terror” through the dual lens of rhetoric and public policy, Ross Fitzpatrick’s “What Bush Said: The War on Terror and the Rhetorical Situation” reveals some important implications that various constituencies might consider in developing their own counter-rhetorics in the present day.

And in “PragerU as Genre: How Ideologies Typify Speech,” Christopher Luis Shosted applies rhetorical genre analysis to expose how the far-right media outlet PragerU propagates falsehoods in order to destabilize competing worldviews.

Though less explicitly political, our other two articles are equally as timely in their subject matter and impressively rigorous in their research design:

Matthew White’s “A Disconnect in the Process and Understanding of Prescription Medications” employs survey and think-aloud protocols to investigate patients’ understandings of prescription medications and their effects as communicated to them by their physicians and by medication guides.

And in “Creativity and Collaboration: The Relationship of Fact and Fiction in Personal Writing,” Rachel Casey applies a theory of collaborative activty to analyze a series of artifacts collected over ten years of her own literacy development to reveal her own creative writing to be more collaborative than she had expected.

Lastly, we’re delighted to bring you the third and final installment in former-Associate Managing Editor and graduate student Elizabeth Barnett’s Profiles in Digital Scholarship and Publishing series, this time featuring the digital publishing paragon Cheryl Ball discussing historical and contemporary trends in multimodal pedagogy and digital scholarly publishing.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together for you. Please stay tuned in the coming months as we prepare to release Issue 15.1, a graduate-student issue that includes three full-length articles as well as a Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition.

~ Brian Hendrickson, Managing Editor

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