Welcome to Issue 16.1 of Xchanges!

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