Reviews of the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication Las Vegas, Nevada | March 2013 CCCC Reviews Coordinators: Kairos/CCCC Reviews Editor Liaisons: Christopher Dean Elizabeth Fleitz Kuechenmeister Andrea Beaudin Jill Morris Stephanie Vie CCCC Reviews Editors: Andrea Beaudin Kairos Copy Editors: Steven Corbett Tim Amidon Chris Dean Christopher Andrews Alexis Hart Elkie Burnside Will Hochman Courtney Danforth Michelle LaFrance Michael J. Faris Randall McClure Harley Ferris Kathy Patterson Moe Folk Fred Siegel Ashley Holmes Stephanie Vie Nate Kreuter Scott Nelson Kristin Prins Kairos Reviews Intern: Howard Fooksman Book Design: Cheryl E. Ball Reviews of the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication (held in Las Vegas, NV, March 13-16, 2013) are solicited and developed independently of Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy by the CCCC Reviews Coordinators. The views in these reviews may or may not reflect the views of Kairos editors (they probably do...), and reviews are published by Kairos as a service to the field. Enjoy! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Table of Contents American Dreaming and the Public Work of Composition: An Introduction 7 By Christopher Dean Lords of the 4C’s Cloud: After Wendy Bishop’s Conference Poem 9 By Will Hochman #4C13: Tweeting the C’s 11 By Andrea L. Beaudin From Sin City to Sin City: An Ex-pat Returns to the Megaconference of Composition 19 Reviewed by Mysti Rudd Meditations on Place, Meditations on Las Vegas 23 By Cydney Alexis Overlooking and Underwriting Environmental Concerns as Our Public Work 27 By Alexis Piper MY Cs: Las Vegas, Sessions B.05, C.12, F.29, Henry Giroux, and Our Work in Composition 30 By Kathleen Klompien TSIG.5 Disability Studies SIG 34 Reviewed by Bre Garrett W.2 The Political Turn: Writing Democracy for the 21st Century 37 Reviewed by Brian Hendrickson W.6 CBW 2013: Basic Writing and Race: A Symposium 42 Reviewed by Chitralekha Duttagupta W.6 CBW 2013: Basic Writing and Race: A Symposium 44 Reviewed by Sheri Rysdam AW.2 “Evocative Objects”: Re-imagining the Possibilities of Multimodal Composition 46 Reviewed by Maggie Christensen A.6 How Error, Non-Identity, and Memory in Digital Texts Destabilize Writing 48 Reviewed by Jenae Cohn A.8 Threshold Concepts & Topoi: Reading the 2013 CCCC Conference as “Overproduction of Mass Desire” 50 Reviewed by Cathyrn Molloy A.17 There’s Nothing Basic about Basic Writing 54 Reviewed by Carie S. Lambert A.19 New Perspectives on Literacy Instruction for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Publics 58 Reviewed by Anne Canavan A.21 Examining How Disciplinary Participants Provide Affordances for Student Writing 60 Reviewed by Sarah Perrault A.25 Getting a Job in a Two-Year College 62 Reviewed by Andrea Efthymiou B.5 Everyday Writing: Instances, Circulations, Implications 64 Reviewed by Josh Mehler B.8 Students as Public Writers in the Global Internet Age 66 Reviewed by LauraAnne Carroll-Adler B.23 Next Steps? Responses to Royster’s and Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices 68 Reviewed by Kerri Hauman and Stacy Kastner B.27 Expertise and Meaningful Assessment: (Re)Modeling the Public Trust in Teachers 80 Reviewed by Wendy Warren Austin C.4 Rhetorical Movement through Public Pathways 82 Reviewed by LauraAnne Carroll-Adler C.9 Composition in/for Virtual “Public” Spaces: Digital(ly Mediated) Divides 84 Reviewed by Mysti Rudd C.14 Responding to the Public Crisis in Student Writing: Study of Seniors’ Meaningful Writing Experiences 88 Reviewed by Wendy Warren Austin C.18 Peer Review and Conferences as Teaching Strategies for ESL Writers 90 Reviewed by Anne Canavan C.23 The Contingent Academic Workforce: Myths, Facts, Prospects 91 Reviewed by Jenae Cohn C.24 Private Trauma, Public Compositions: The Effects of Trauma Narratives on Classroom & Community 93 Reviewed by Mariana Grohowski C.27 Rethinking Writing About Writing (WAW) Courses from Student Perspectives 96 Reviewed by Lynn Reid C.33 Interrogating Rhetorics of Gendered Spaces: Flappers, Firefighters, and Submariners 98 Reviewed by Andrea Efthymiou Featured Session D: The Go-To Place for Basic Writing--Two Year Colleges 100 Reviewed by Lynn Reid D.3 Embodiment, Disability, and the Idea of Normativity 102 Reviewed by Abby Knoblauch D.4 Challenges for Writers from China and India 104 Reviewed by Kathryn Northcut D.4 Challenges for Writers from China and India 106 Reviewed by Anne Canavan D.10 Being There: The Rhetoricity of Queer Spaces, Identities, and Bodies 107 Reviewed by Patricia Portanova D.21 Race and Writing Assessment: Cross-Disciplinary Frameworks for Impact Analysis 110 Reviewed by Jessica Nastal, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee E.13 A Writing Tutorial for Taking a Student Support Services and Basic Writing Collaboration Public 112 Reviewed by Lynn Reid Featured Session F: “What Creativity Looks Like: Writing with Word and Image for the Post-Paper World” 113 Reviewed by Christine Martorana F.4 “Home Language”: De-Privatizing African American Oral Based Discourse 115 Reviewed by Raymond Oenbring F.10 Anti-Immigrant Discourse in the Media: Rhetorical Political Action for Gender Equality 117 Reviewed by April Conway F.16 Developing Methods for Self-Sponsored Writing Center Assessment 119 Reviewed by Andrea Efthymiou F. 20 When the Time is Right: Women, Rhetoric, Publics, and Policies 121 Reviewed by Elizabeth Kuechenmeister F.29 The Tyranny of Argument: Rethinking the Work of Composition 122 Reviewed by Romeo Garcia G.11 A Land without A People: How Composition’s Naturalistic Metaphors Leave the Body Behind 125 Reviewed by Jacob Craig G.19 Literacy Instruction Meets Intercollegiate Sports 127 Reviewed by Michael M. Rifenburg G.14 Ethos and the Public and Private Work of Teaching Composition in the 21st Century 129 Reviewed by LauraAnne Carroll-Adler G.34 Teaching FYC at the Community College using Food Politics, Consumption, and the Environment 131 Reviewed by Kristin Bivens H.15 Making the Grade: Exploring and Explaining “Failure” in the Composition Classroom and Beyond 134 Reviewed by Katie Baillargeon H.18 Politics, Basic Writing, and the CSU System 137 Reviewed by Katrina Miller H.23 Rhetorical Empathy, Insider-Outsider Rhetoric, and Representations of Disability 141 Reviewed by Abby Knoblauch H.35 “Paying Attention” to Web 2.0: Social Media and the Public Work of Composition 144 Reviewed by Carie S. Lambert I.12 Shifting Embedded Perceptions: Non-Western Feminists Writing and Speaking in the Public Sphere 147 Reviewed by Andrea Efthymiou I.12 Shifting Embedded Perceptions: Non-Western Feminists Writing and Speaking in the Public Sphere 148 Reviewed by Abby Knoblauch I.20 When the Private Goes Public: Addressing Legal/Medical Rhetoric in Professional & Technical Writing 150 Reviewed by Carie S. Lambert J.1 Civic Literacy and Critical Analysis of Source-Based Arguments in the Writing Curriculum 153 Reviewed by Dani Weber J.21 Start Playing Around: Videogames and Pedagogy in a New Key 158 Reviewed by Megan McIntyre J.28 Approaches to Teaching and Conducting Research: The Possibilities for Student Research 160 Reviewed by Christine Photinos K.15 The Digital Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change 162 Reviewed by Carie S. Lambert K.29 Oral Histories as Public Work: A Community Publishing Experiment in Rural Pennsylvania 166 Reviewed by Cara Kozma L.27 Pulled from My Roots: The Public Work of Youth Performance in the Borderlands 169 Reviewed by April Conway L.30 Becoming “Literate” About Communities: Lessons Learned in the Field 170 Reviewed by Bradford Hincher M.8 Inside Out: Teaching Embodied Research, Writing, and Revision 172 Reviewed by Abby Knoblauch Featured Session N: The Public Work of Contingent Labor 174 Reviewed by Meghan Sweeney N.25 The Impact of Social Class on Basic Writing Pedagogy 177 Reviewed by Genesea M. Carter CCCC 2013 Reviews American Dreaming and the Public Work of Composition: An Introduction to the 2013 Kairos Review of the College Composition and Communication Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada By Christopher Dean [email protected] “I want you to know that we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.”— Raoul Duke, AKA Hunter S. Thompson, to an unnamed hitchhiker at the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Driving into Las Vegas for this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), I had Exile on Main Street on the stereo and Hunter S. Thompson on my mind. In 1972 Thompson had published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with its telling subtitle, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. This book, for good or ill, has haunted me since I first read it in my early twenties. This book is shot through with the vilest passages imaginable—every crime short of murder is part and parcel of the fictional/real/surreal “narrative.” At the end of the piece, it’s pretty hard to really like Raoul Duke, the protagonist and narrator of the piece, but it’s hard to deny that he has something important to say about the “American Dream”: a dream that can become a nightmare in record time; a duality that haunts our nights and days in 21st century America. Thus, heading into Las Vegas, my thoughts were, as Thompson might say, a bit “dark and savage.” Faced with the lurid glow of neon from those advance scouts of Vegas, the M Resort and South Point, I found myself thinking, “Why are we meeting in Las Vegas for the Cs?” It seemed to me impossible that much meaning about the considerable public work of composition could be made in a city devoted, from my own bleak previous experiences and Thompson’s writing, to gambling, drinking, and the numbing of consciousness. It seemed equally impossible to think of doing, as Howard Tinberg encouraged the field to do in his “Greetings from the 2013 Chair,” to “put on display the valuable public work that our field engages in every day” (5).