Phyllis Mentzell Ryder

The Timing of the Research Question: First-Year Writing Faculty and Instruction Librarians‘ Differing Perspectives

Faculty and librarians agree on the qualities of a good research question. However, in an exploratory study, they differed on when students should develop their research question. While librarians stated that students should develop their question early, first-year writing faculty advocated for delaying the development of the research question. The timing of the research question is an important issue because it has implications for the structuring of research assignments and library instruction, as well as having an impact on the students who get differing messages.

Beyond Critique: Global Activism and the Case of Malala Yousafzai

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

In(ter)ventions of Global Democracy: An Analysis of the Rhetorics of the A-16 World Bank/IMF Protests in Washington, DC

Through an analysis of the April 2000 IMF/World Bank protests in Washington DC, I identify an expanded repertoire of the creative arts of the contact zone in an era of global capitalism. I argue that three theories of deliberation are at play in the events: a rhetoric of benevolent capitalism, a rhetoric of a rational public sphere developed through supranational organizations, and an emerging rhetoric of grassroots globalization. I conclude that grassroots democratic globalization may provide a new model of the public sphere—a site of rhetorical deliberation where strangers meet to imagine the world they will create.