In response to recent critiques of  voice, this essay explores the relevance of the metaphor for feminism, in general, and women writers, in particular. Because of its fluidity and its capacity to represent a range of oral, written, and embodied experiences, voice is, and will continue to be, a useful metaphor for feminist theorists and teachers. Women students (as well as students from historically marginalized racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups) can benefit from its associations with traditional power structures.

Brooks, Kevin.  "Composition's Abolitionist Debate: A Tool for Change."  Composition Studies (30.2): 27-41.

The abolitionist debate in composition contains within its exchanges a variety of institutional tactics that are worth considering whenever first-year programs consider making changes to their staffing and/or curriculum, regardless of one’s position in the debate.  This essay identifies the common ground that can be located in the debate, and generates a list of possible goals, tactics, and attitudes writing program can adopt.  The essay also looks closely at how two institutions, SUNY Albany and Temple, used diametrically opposed tactics to achieve similar, desired effects.  “Composition’s Abolitionist Debate: A Tool for Change,” does not attempt to stake out a new position in the debate, but instead mines the literature that has been generated by this topic for ideas, insights, and possible plans of action.

Stenberg, Shari J.  "Embodied Classrooms, Embodied Knowledge: Re-thinking the Mind/Body Split."  Composition Studies (30.2): 43-60.

This essay explores the tendency in scholarly and pedagogical sites to both deny embodiment and to conflate disembodiment with authority and freedom.  While feminism has long conceived the body as a material, political site, the author contends that “new” postmodernist scholarship too often “textualizes” the body, articulating it as a site than can be altered and even transcended, at the expense of attention to the concrete and experiential. Challenging the notion of bodily transcendence, this essay argues for the potential of bodies to operate transformatively, promoting pedagogies that take into account the body as a material, lived site of political struggle.

Rohan, Liz.  "Hostesses of Literacy: Libraries, Writing Teachers, Writing Centers, and a Historical Quest for Ethos Composition Studies (30.2): 61-77.

This article critiques a method for establishing ethos in our field–promoting progressive developments by distinguishing them from work associated with women.  It compares our field’s history, and its dependence on female labor, with the development of library science, arguing that both fields developed response to perceived mass illiteracies.  It highlights library science, our “sister” discipline, as a model for understanding our field’s century-long dependence on exploited labor and our field’s relationship to technology.  It suggests finally a new ethos for our field-adopted by library science in recent years-which combines the goal of knowledge-making with that of service.

Boardman, Kathy, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Emmerling, Heidi Estrem, Brad E. Lucas, Katherine M. Schmidt.  "Adding the Field to the Work: A Dramatic Re-enactment of a Qualitative Research Seminar."  Composition Studies (30.2): 79-107.

In this "polylogue," the teachers and students who participated in a qualitative fieldwork seminar present their reflections on their practice.  With a blend of anecdotes, quotes from other researchers and from study participants, and small dramatized vignettes, the authors explore the challenges and rewards of learning how to do research by actually doing work "in the field."  The polylogue examines such matters as balancing in-class and in-the-field activities, managing time, maintaining good relationships with participants, doing fieldwork in one's own department, representing participants in a trustworthy manner, dealing with IRB contraints, and other practical considerations.