Babb & Beare aren't pretending to be neutral—they've taken stances in their classrooms and programs. But as editors, they're holding space for the full spectrum. They spent most of 2025 building a generative AI policy they're already calling "an evolving document."

The editors' introduction to CS 53.2 considered calling itself an AI hallucination. It references Terminator 2, cites a McSweeney's satire, and catalogs every AI construct in science fiction. Underneath the humor, it's doing something genuinely difficult. 🧵

Researched, drafted, reviewed, revised, edited, and published—by people who believe the field's questions matter. Which piece are you starting with? #CompositionStudies #RhetComp #WePersistAllTheSame

Six book reviews covering AI and writing, feminist technical communication, systemic bias in STEM, critical language awareness, DJ rhetoric, and multimodal transfer.

Four "Where We Are" essays on teaching writing in this moment. Campus protests, institutional erosion, fire and persistence, and finding the ocean. These are hard reads. They're supposed to be.

Two course designs rethinking FYC from the ground up—one built on critical AI literacy, the other on third places and composing from desire.

Six articles: generative AI as rhetorical memory, Black women's mentorship, an international GTA navigating the classroom, scrap writing as invention, dual enrollment pedagogy, and pandemic-era sustainability.

23 contributors. 19 sections. 1 issue. The table of contents for Composition Studies 53.2 is here. Here's what's inside—and who made it. 🧵

These aren't four separate debates. They're a field reckoning with what comes next. Six articles. Two course designs. Four field-level responses. Read the full issue at compstudiesjournal.com. #CompositionStudies #RhetComp #WePersistAllTheSame

04 — Composition as academic discipline / composition as political obligation. Four scholars respond to what the field owes the present moment. They don't agree with each other.

03 — Teaching that transforms students / teaching that exhausts the people doing it. Pandemic workloads, dual enrollment, institutional creep. Several pieces examine where pedagogical commitment crosses into unsustainable labor.

02 — Programs that promise mentorship / scholars who build a career without it. Five scholars in five programs describe the same structural gap. The pattern isn't anecdotal.

01 — AI as unprecedented disruption / AI as the oldest rhetorical practice in new form. One article traces generative AI's logic back to classical memoria. The implications for teaching look different from either side of the usual debate.

Issue 53.2 of @CompStudies is built around four tensions the field is sitting with right now. A thread. 🧵

Our editors see photography as a metaphor for composing—framing, organizing, attempting. Dozens of tries before the one that works. What do you return to in your work—not because you have to, but because you're still looking? #WePersistAllTheSame #CompositionStudies #RhetComp

"I write with a loving respect and patience for words in the same way I slow down, watch and wait in a kind of sustained engagement with nature." —Michael J. Day

Day is professor emeritus at NIU. Now retired, he walks the same path twice a day, camera in hand, checking the same hollow tree. A few times a year—usually in spring—a face appears.

Every cover has a story. Every issue of Composition Studies starts with a cover. This one started with a walk along the Kishwaukee River. Meet Michael J. Day, the photographer behind 53.2's "Peekaboo Raccoon." 🧵

Some big changes at Composition Studies. New submission policy: five-paragraph essays only. New section: Hot Takes. And a lifetime achievement award for Reviewer 2. Happy April Fools. 53.2 is coming soon—peer review included. #RhetComp #CompositionStudies

Something's happening at the journal this week. We're not ready to share the details yet—but you'll want to check back on April 1st.