Gesa E. Kirsch

Methods and Methodology in Composition Research

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

Sex, Labor, and Bodies: The Regulatory Power of Rhetoric

This issue of RSQ offers an intriguing showcase of the wide range of topics, places, and subjects that rhetoricians now study on a regular basis. We encounter a finely detailed portrait of the history and culture of a small mining town in Idaho, a sweeping look at the impact of maternal tourism in Hong Kong, and a collage of images produced by the Ford Motor Company to promote not only automobiles, roadways, and village industries, but a whole new suburban way of life. Yet the essays are in conversation with each other; they resonate across time, space, and international borders, or, to evoke a visual metaphor, they refract light as through a prism, each beam absorbing, reflecting, and bouncing off objects in unexpected ways (Jarratt 3).