Welcome to Issue 15.1 of Xchanges!

It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you Issue 15.1 of Xchanges! This, our Spring 2020 graduate student issue, is for all intents and purposes a double issue in that we are presenting you with a regular issue of full-length articles plus a Symposium on the State of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition.

We launch this issue at an unprecedented moment for higher education and, more generally, the world—one that has already transformed our institutions, our teaching and learning, and our workplace communication. Undoubtedly, it will transform our field and its scholarship, as well. Although the scholarship collected in this issue was all produced in that other, pre-COVID lifeworld, it is as a whole exceptionally relevant in its concerns with digital cultural production and with the rhetorical strategies employed by marginalized communities—including graduate students—to effect their own cultural resilience.

My symposium Coeditor, Xchanges Associate Managing Editor Al Harahap, and I provide a separate, fuller introduction to the symposium elsewhere in this issue, but here I would at least like to emphasize that the symposium was a collaborative effort, its theme arising out of discussions with leaders of a number of Rhetoric and Composition graduate student organizations invited early on in the process, and with the final product containing eleven separate contributions from a combined total of 24 graduate student authors, including representatives from DBLAC, nextGEN, WAC-GO, and WPA-GO—all in conversation with one another across the symposium. Al and I hope you will pay close attention to what these scholar-activists have to tell us. It is only that much more pressing now, in this current moment of amplified economic and corporeal precarity, that we attune ourselves to and amplify graduate student concerns, as well as their visions of a more equitable future for graduate study in our field.

Attunement and amplification are exactly the sorts of gestures that make the full-length articles in the current issue stand out.

Building off of her experience as a participant in the Salt of the Earth Recovery Project, which amplifies the stories of the citizens of Santa Rita, New Mexico, Kelli R. Lycke Martin employs rhetorical analysis to attune us to the creative means by which those citizens fought and continue to fight to retain their collective identity and memory against repeated attempts at erasure.

Jacklyn Heslop amplifies the Aristotelian concept of the enthymeme to attune us to the manner in which memes are an essential and extremely generative component of digital cultural production.

Sarah Lonelodge and Katie Rieger meanwhile attune us to the value of analyzing students’ self-reported perceptions of writing instruction in public digital spaces, and in doing so amplify the importance of students’ perceptions of teaching more generally.

Please join me in applauding the tremendous intellectual labor that these graduate student authors have put into the work collected here, and join me as well in encouraging colleagues and students to read, share, and teach this important issue of Xchanges.

~ Brian Hendrickson, Managing Editor