Volume 9.3: Persistence
Present Tense Volume 9 Issue 3 arrives at the beginning of a new year, 2023. The beginning of a new year often involves reflection on the year most recently passed, and it’s no secret that 2022 brought significant worldly challenges. Since Present Tense last published, the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Department of Justice began their investigation of Donald Trump’s role in the January 6th attack, and the US experienced a record-setting year for mass shootings. The US also fought global inflation, when its peoples weren’t fighting each other over critical race theory and gender identity in educational policy. And we yet exist in a liminal space with no clear demarcation between pandemic and post-pandemic times. 2022 also brought significant personal challenges for our editorial staff. Managing Editor Jess Clements, for example, saw her then 9-year-old child diagnosed with acute pyogenic osteomyelitis and would sit at her father’s deathbed while nursing that child through hip surgery and months-long recovery.
While 2022 was a hell of a year, it also brought forth the important scholarship included in this issue. Bethany Meadows, Akshata J. Balghare, and Erin Brock Carlson remind us that we, scholars of rhetoric and composition, can and will persist. We will persist because “as the field has already set forth: language around sexual violence matters not only for material conditions but also societal ideologies” (Meadows), because “isn’t healthcare a basic human right provided even to the minority ethnic populations . . . so that we can live a life of dignity and good health?” (Balghare), and because “there is, as Adichie claims, danger in a single story; all people, in all places, deserve to be viewed with nuance, with attention towards the many stories that make up a place” (Carlson). It is a small but mighty issue, extended by the smart work of Julie Mi-Yeong Kidder and Christa Teston, who give us insight on immigrant and vaccine rhetorics, respectively, in their reviews of Lisa Flores’s Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant and Heidi Yoston Lawrence’s Vaccine Rhetorics.
We are keeping this introduction short and sweet so you can get right to reading before your spring term teaching begins anew, but we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that former managing editor and style editor Megan Schoen has been named incoming associate editor for a five-year term at College English. In her sign-off, Megan wrote, “Please know how much PT means to me.” And we want you all to know how much Megan has meant to PT. Megan was a founding member of PT and important influencer, if you will, who guided the journal with exceptional insight and grace for many years. We bid you a bit of a begrudging adieu, if only because we will miss you so much! College English is lucky to have you.
Volume 9, Issue 3 features the following works:
We hope you enjoy reading/viewing these works and sharing them with colleagues and students in the months and years to come.
Jessica E. Clements, Managing Editor
John Pell, Managing Editor
Shreelina Ghosh, Multimedia Editor
Matt Cox, Annotated Bibliography Editor
Don Unger, Social Media Editor
Jennifer LeMesurier, Review Editor
Cristyn L. Elder, Style Editor
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Editor-at-Large
Dana Comi, Technical Editor
Joshua Prenosil, Business Editor
COVER IMAGE CREDIT: Adapted from Kevin Dooley
KEYWORDS: persistence
