"Surveillance" invokes the systemic observational practices purposefully used when controlling bodies. Recently interdisciplinary scholars have engaged intersectional feminist and queer frameworks to better understand surveillance cultures. How will rhetoric, composition, and technical communications "talk back"?

Special cluster conversation for Peitho. Co-edited with Morgan Banville. NOW AVAILABLE!

This book-length project enacts a queer-feminist following around method/ology (Ahmed) to interrogate the long-standing use(s) of “accountability” within academe as a necropolitical logic and the possibilities of “being accountable” as a transgressive queer-feminist embodiminded rhetorical practice. Accountability, as a god-term in Westernized higher education, is imbued with deep rhetoricity, or an obligation to respond (Davis). Our necessary response to accountability, as defined within academe, I argue, enables necropolitical policies and pedagogies, which make possible and profitable the management of death (Mbeme), that disproportionally impacts Black, indigenous, people of color, trans, queer, poor, disabled, and otherwise Othered populations. Most critically, such policies and pedagogies sustain academic surveillance regimes through education technologies (EdTech) and deeply ingrained technologies of governmentality. In following around while working out and working on accountability’s rhetoricity, I demonstrate how separate composings of accountability come into being. For example, using accountability to the university facilitates necropolitical pedagogies and building on queer and Black Feminist coalitional and fugitive activisms among students and teachers being accountable for each other in but not of the university. Rendering visible these uses, not only makes clear the material, embodiminded nature of accountability but also determines our response-ability vis-à-vis our proximities and relations to institutions, technologies, and each other. Such rendered determinations hold space wherein a refusal of accountability can be initiated through queer-feminist pedagogies (Campt; Kynard; Smilges). In sum, this book argues for a deep examination of the rhetoricity of accountability, its necropolitical deployment through academic surveillance technologies, and the worldbuilding potentialities of a queer-feminist refusal grounded in but not of the university.

key terms:

queer-feminist following around method/ology; accountability; being accountable; necopolitical policies and pedagogies; education technologies; technologies of governmentality; refusal; in but not of the university

Related work:

• Johnson, G.P. (forthcoming, 2025). "On Being Accountable: Queer-Feminist Pedagogies of Refusal in but not of the Necropolitical University." In J. Rhodes and S. Nur Cooley (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetorics. Routledge.

• Johnson, G.P. (2020). "Grades as a Technology of Surveillance: Normalization, Control, Big Data, and the Teaching of Writing." In E. Beck and L. Hutchinson Campos (Eds), Privacy Matters: Conversations about Surveillances Within and Beyond the Classroom. (pp. 53-72). Utah State University Press. 

Co-edited with Ashanka Kumari and Shane A. Wood

Assessment is central to contemporary writing studies praxis. Regardless of our areas of expertise, pedagogical approaches, or institutional contexts, all teachers engage with writing assessment—be it formative, informal, peer-to-peer, teacher response, programmatic, etc. Scholarship on writing assessment, multimodality, and justice-oriented practices has increased over the past two decades; however, each of these respective discourses have gaps. Writing assessment continues to be challenged by issues of individual approach, fairness, and validity. Multimodality and antiracist writing assessment overemphasize the alphabetic text (linguistic mode) as opposed to various modes of communication (e.g., visual, oral, gestural, spatial). This collection seeks to address gaps in research and works to dismantle the manufactured separation of multimodality and antiracist practices in writing assessment. 

Read the full Call for Project here: tinyurl.com/multimodalassessmentcollection 

Co-edited with the Digital Rhetorical Privacy Collective Advisory Board: Charles Woods (A&M-Commerce), Morgan C. Banville (Massachusetts Maritime Academy), Cecilia D. Shelton (University of Maryland), Chen Chen (Utah State University), and noah Wason (SUNY-Cortland)

This project invites authors who participated in the DRPC’s grant-sponsored Privacy Week 2024 to extend their presentations into full chapters. Divided into three sections––Political Places, Bodily Borders, and Learning Landscapes––authors examine the interplay between spaces, places, policies, and bodies in the sociocultural formation of “privacy.” The collection includes an introduction from the DRPC Advisory Board, nine original research chapters, three interludes, and an afterward.