enculturation

A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture

Editorial Statement

Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce some exciting changes to enculturation and to announce the latest issue with new content and design features.

First, a new navigation menu can be found in the upper left-hand corner of enculturation’s interface that affords easier access to our journal’s diverse content.

Second, in this menu, you will notice a link to “Sonic Projects.” With Issue 28, we are delighted to present the first two publications in our new sonic projects section. The first of those two, “Rhetoric, Ethics, Poetics: A Psychagogic Interview with Steven B. Katz,” is an apt starting point for the section. While the interview revolves around Katz’s 1992 article “The Ethic of Expediency,” his 1996 book The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing was a key forerunner to the recent reemergence of sound as a major area of interest in rhetoric and writing studies. The interview is richly supplemented with music, poetic performances, and other sonic features that amplify the possibilities of this new section. The second, Joshua Losoya’s “Writing Program Issues: Sounds from the Programmed,” extends the possibilities of sonic scholarship in even more directions. In addition to an audio essay, Losoya’s piece features a pair of original songs (with heavily footnoted lyrics) that reflect on the challenges of assessing and responding to student work. All components of both publications are accompanied by transcripts. If you are interested in submitting a piece of audio scholarship for publication in the sonic projects section, contact Eric Detweiler at eric [dot] detweiler [at] mtsu [dot] edu.

Third, if you check out our editor’s page, you will notice changes to our editorial staff and board. Caddie Alford has come on as book review editor, and Anthony Stagliano is now taking over Nathaniel River’s role as the associate editor of production. We also have a diverse team of new copy editors, whose work is crucial to making enculturation content as strong as possible. In addition, we have added many new editorial members to help respond to both articles and sonic projects. As an independent journal, we appreciate the gift of labor that all our team members provide. We want to take this moment to thank all who have worked for enculturation in the recent past and welcome the newcomers who we are confident will help to keep strengthening our scholarly contributions to rhetoric and writing studies.

Finally, in addition to book reviews and responses, please check out the articles in our new issue. In addition to foci on the rhetoric of typos and design- oriented pedagogy, Issue 28 tackles questions about rhetoric’s deep relations to ecology through a number of interesting studies about trophic configurations, contagion, ethos, and invention. Here at enculturation, we value the unexpected, the strange, the mundane, and the novel, and we appreciate the innovation and extension of new and existing methodologies, methods, and pedagogies to diversify how we study and teach rhetoric and writing. Each of the articles in this issue reflect those values and, as such, push us to consider rhetoric and writing in exciting and provocative ways. 

We hope that this content, as well as the new interface menu, will make for an enjoyable and valuable reading experience. And we hope to receive more contributions from each of you in the future.

With warm regards,

Laurie Gries and the Editorial Team