Making players care: The ambivalent cultural politics of care and video games

The relationship between care and video games is fraught. While the medium has the potential to allow players to meaningfully express and receive care, the cultural rhetorics that connect video games to care are often problematic. Even among game designers and scholars committed to social justice, some view care with hope and others with concern. Here, we identify and unpack these tensions, which we refer to as the ambivalent cultural politics of care, and illustrate them through three case studies. First, we discuss “tend-and-befriend games,” coined by Brie Code, which we read through feminist theorists Sarah Sharma and Sara Ahmed. Second, we address “empathy games” and the worrisome implication that games by marginalized people must make privileged players care. Lastly, we turn to issues of care in video game development. We discuss Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series (2012–18) and strikingly care-less fan responses to recent employee layoffs.

Assigning Authenticity: Future Directions for Undergraduate Writing in Sociology

Social movements seeking to dismantle white supremacy within academia cast long-running debates over writing instruction in a new light. This conversation approaches these critiques as an opportunity for pedagogical reinvention. I put forward new theory that centers the social performance and psychological rewards of authenticity. I first review two essential literatures on writing instruction in sociology: (1) writing in the disciplines and (2) cultural rhetorics. This twinned review focuses on the values that inform curriculum design and how these biases and ideals shape instructors’ perceptions of student writing. I then apply research on authenticity to reflect on the self-formative challenges today’s undergraduates encounter and how these obstacles shape their relationship to learning. I argue that centering authenticity in writing instruction can help the discipline achieve its inclusive ideals because it enhances students’ sense of belonging in the discipline.

Working Closets: Mapping Queer Professional Discourses and Why Professional Communication Studies Need Queer Rhetorics

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets and asks what the implications are for professional communication studies. He also looks at the need to learn from and through queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and social justice frameworks, especially given the cultural turn of professional communication studies in the early 21st century.

Unlikely Dinner Guests

This work opens a space where Visual Rhetorics, Cultural Rhetorics, Food Studies, Technical Communication, and Critical Race Theory can expand and work together to understand how visuals associated with racial and ethnic groups and their food products contributes to perception of cultures. This work is necessary because food product packages are largely unexamined spaces within the field of Rhetoric; however, because one image associated with a food product is so intimately connected with the home culture it has the potential to create, a single essentialized interpretation, of a group.

Theorizing the Value of English Proficiency in Cross-Cultural Rhetorics of Health and Medicine

This study reports the results of 12 recent interviews with nonnative-English-speaking (NNES) authors who have conducted research and written articles on health and medical subjects. Analyzing the interview transcripts through the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of capital, this study expands on previous research by offering a more precise and theoretically grounded understanding of how NNES authors perceive the value of English proficiency in relation to their success as scientific researchers. This theorization of the varying ways in which authors perceive the value of English proficiency affords new perspectives on the inequities that NNES authors encounter in the global publishing economy and their rhetorical strategies for overcoming these inequities. The study concludes by reflecting on theoretical and practical implications for researchers, teachers, and other stakeholders in the global publishing industry.