In the editor’s introduction for her inaugural issue of College Composition and Communication (CCC), Kathleen Blake Yancey announced the initiation of what, borrowing from JAMA, she calls a “poster page” (“New” 408). For her debut of this novel contribution of her editorship, Yancey featured the rhetorical situation, a formulation introduced by Llyod F. Bitzer in 1968 and one that rapidly gained momentum as a crucial if controversial concept. Signaling the disciplinary importance of rhetorical situation to both performance and pedagogy, the CCC poster page sets forth, in a straightforward manner reminiscent of Bitzer’s own style, the factors by which each rhetorical act is constituted and the relationships by which those factors cohere, visually rendered through an intersecting triangle-circle diagram.

As Yancey recounts, an array of scholars tasked with compiling a preliminary set of terms as potential poster page projects emphasized the focal nature of rhetorical situation, an assessment that aligns with its cross-disciplinary valuation (“New” 409). Communication scholars similarly acknowledge the importance of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, claiming it “inaugurated a new chapter in the history of rhetoric and its revived dialogue with philosophy” (Hauser and Kjeldsen 91). Driven by an exigence (a concrete problem in a specific situation amendable to amelioration (Bitzer, “Rhetorical” 6), aimed at an audience capable of rectifying the problem (6), and guided by constraints (limits and tools) managed predominantly by the rhetor to persuade an audience (8; “Functional” 23), Bitzer’s pragmatic formulation of the rhetorical situation has yielded a template for the creation of “fitting” rhetoric (“Rhetorical” 11) and a framework for analysis (Brinton). Yancey concurs, pointing to rhetorical situation as a threshold concept for composition studies (Yancey, “In Memoriam” 12).

However, Yancey’s poster page, even as it offers deserved homage to Bitzer, also expands it in tempting ways.

Reflecting her belief that Bitzer’s 1968 formulation of rhetorical situation offers not an end point but a starting point, Yancey in her 2010 poster page “amplifies” rhetorical situation visually and conceptually (Yancey “Interview”). For instance, her rendition of rhetorical situation increases the “players” integral to any rhetorical situation: her communication triangle is anchored by composer (rather than rhetor), ties to subject, and then to audience, a dynamic mediated by context and encompassing the triadic influences of text, genre, and media. In addition, the nesting of text, genre, and media suggests a mutualistic relationship not only among these three elements but also with composer, subject, audience. So, while the discursive text adheres to the accepted account of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation—exigence, audience, and constraints—the visual “take[s] him in really interesting directions,” a move aligning with Yancey’s provocation to her graduate students to imagine what changes to rhetorical situation might “keep him [Bitzer] viable” for twenty-first century rhetoric (“Interview”). Thus, the CCC’s poster page positions itself with one foot in 1968 and another in 2010, holds within it the seeds of transformation.

But those seeds were planted two decades before the creation of the poster page.

Without diminishing the purpose or the innovations of Yancey’s first poster page as editor of CCC, this webtext taps into Yancey’s own publication oeuvre, especially her early-career collaborative writing, to imagine a very different rhetorical situation, one that aligns in suggestive ways with Donna J. Haraway’s concept of oddkin, or nonbiological co-relating, and its sister dynamic of sympoiesis, or “making-with.” That tantalizing alignment suggests a sweeping revision of the processes comprising the rhetorical situation and the relationships by which those processes cohere.

Yancey’s implicit oddkinism shifts a Bitzerian rhetorical situation—with its rigidly bound interactional dynamic comprised of exigence, audience, and constraints—into a permeable, messy, convoluted mutualistic dynamic governed by fluid, unconventional relationship building. It subordinates the nouns dominating Bitzerian rhetorical situation for verbs, fore-fronting the ongoing action of agentive co-constitution (subjectivities making-with), porous materialities(biologicals-nonbiologicals making-with), and rhetorical accountability(ethical making-with) as the essential processes integral to any rhetorical situation.

In so doing, this Yanceyan rhetorical situation expands the parameters of what constitutes rhetoric, opening the door to marginalized rhetorical identities excluded by eurocentric epistemologies, celebrating alternative textur-alities elided by Bitzer’s formulation, and adding a crucial ethical dictate integral to sustainable rhetorical action, a dictate absent from Bitzer’s theory.

Thus, this webtext concerns itself less with what the 2010 poster page does and more with what it could do if read through Yancey’s own innovative and daring writing. ^[1] What emerges from Yancey’s scholarship is less a single formal claim-driven argument about rhetorical situation and more a series of oddkin enactments of a sympoietic rhetorical situation. In other words, what Yancey does, especially in collaboration with other scholars, lays the foundation for a radical revision of Bitzer’s model that enlarges the scope of what Bitzer calls “fitting rhetoric” (“Rhetorical” 11).

To explore and underscore the transformatory potential in Yancey’s scholarship requires something more than what Myka Vielstimmig^[2] characterizes as “single-voiced, hierarchically-argued, master narratives” (“Petals” 90). It requires the multivocality embodied in the multiple points of view dancing across a webtext with its nonlinear potential. Thus, the combination of a (potential) linear discursive progression coupled with a webtext’s nonlinear invitations constitutes a deliberate act of irony and tension, mimicking the genre born of Bitzerian rhetorical situation in the individual “pages” and “segments” even as it disrupts it by recommending a syncopated, skip, dip, and swing across the webtext.

Following the mud tubes--pathways that termites create to move safely from nest to food sources and back again--embedded through the following webpages reveals the resonance between Yancey’s scholarship and Haraway’s concept of oddkin, a paradoxical agent-partner who exists through sympoiesis, or the act of making-with.

Or, inspired by Yancey’s work, the mud tubes might lead to one or all of the three processes constituting a Yancey-inspired sympoietic rhetorical situation: agentive co-constitution and its implications for expanding the rhetorical subjectivities; porous materialities and its validation of alterative textur-alities; and rhetorical accountability, an ethical stance to sympoiesis aligning with Haraway’s response-ability.

In a similar spirit, this webtext’s penultimate page “ends” without an ending, featuring an “unconcluding,” a “continuing” in the spirit of present progressive verbs (Yancey and Spooner, “Concluding Words” 298). Even that “unconcluding” can be a beginning.

In “Rhetorical Situation and Writing Assessment,” a book chapter structured around rhetorical situation as an interpretive lens, Yancey signals her admiration for Bitzer’s theory, an admiration more explicitly articulated in her memoriam for Bitzer.

Reminiscing about her first graduate school rhetoric course, she shares that the “rhetorical situation . . . transform[ed] how I understood not only rhetoric, but also life itself, oriented to exigence, bounded by constraints, available for various kinds of action” (“In Memoriam” 12).

Nor is Yancey alone in her regard. Controversial as well as consequential, the appearance Bitzer’s rhetorical situation in 1968 set off a “cottage industry” of interdisciplinary scholarly engagement (Ervin 318; see, also, Hauser and Kjeldsen).

However, despite the five-plus decades of scholarly engagement—which contributed important nuancing to Bitzer’s original formation, including Bitzer’s 1981 elaboration of his original concept (“Functional”)—the varied uptakes have trended toward extending or refining rather than substantively revising the theory. Much of this body of work shares “common presuppositions about the constituent elements. . . and the logic that informs the relationship between them,” reinforcing rather than re-envisioning (Biesecker 110; see, also, Garret and Xiao 30).

The CCC’s poster page positions itself between “extending” and “re-envisioning” of Bitzer’s theory, reflecting Yancey’s belief that “rhetorical situations, of course, are open to interpretation,” a claim that applies not just to specific situations but also to the theory itself, as she demonstrates (“‘Seizing’ Kairos” 3/52).

The visual context of the poster page, especially as a foil for the discursive summary, carries the seeds of radical re-interpretation, from the deceptively simple replacement of “rhetor” with “composer” to the nesting of the triad “text, genre, medium” at the beating heart of the communication triangle and thus the rhetorical situation.

However, those seeds first rooted and flowered in Yancey’s scholarship more than a decade prior to Yancey’s editorship of CCC’s and the design of her first poster page.

As Kenneth Burke asserts, altering the circumference of the scene inevitably alters the nature of the act (77).

So panning outward from Bitzer’s 1968 article to Yancey’s own scholarly writing in the 1990s and early 2000s yields a very different take on rhetorical situation: one that embodies an oddkin identity and a sympoietic dynamic.

In what she does as well as how she does it, oddkin Yancey inspires transformation rather than just refinement of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation.

Defined as forging “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in host compost piles,” oddkin, according to Donna J. Haraway, crafts partial and contingent co-relatings among nonbiological and biological partners (Staying 4).

Such mutualism ensues from fusing, like composting in which divergent elements—leaves, kitchen scraps, grass, and so forth—recombine and morph into nutrient rich soil. So, too, with oddkin’s mutualisms. “We become-with each other,” Haraway insists, “or not at all” (Staying 4), bluntly articulating the stakes in “nurturing more hopeful patterns of relating” (Hadfield and Haraway S209).

More specifically, eschewing the specious identification of DNA and linear dominance of blood relations whereby one individual connects to another in an orderly, clearly demarcated linear progression, oddkin, as Haraway explains, defaults to contingent, patchy, unorthodox, and affective co-relatings that co-evolve from sometimes unlikely multi-species, multi-material, multi-semiotic affiliations.

Haraway’s becoming-with aligns with Yancey’s 2022 insistence on the “‘coming together of things’” necessary for acting in any rhetorical situation (Braun, qtd. in Yancey 5/52). In a similar spirit, Yancey’s configuration of assemblage in rhetorical situations—as “continually evolving emergence” (“‘Seizing Kairos’” 5/52) resonates with Haraways oddkin as nonlinear and co-evolving. In a patchy, contingent dynamic, Yancey and Haraway make kin.

In the biological world, M. paradoxa stands as an exemplar of oddkin and an apt guide to a Yanceyan revision of the rhetorical situation.

A pear-shaped protozoan lodged in the hindgut of the giant northern termite, M. paradoxa lives “in obligatory symbiosis” with M. darwiniensis on two levels.^[1] The first concerns its own formation, for it is in and of itself a product of symbiosis, consisting as it does of at least five other identifiable symbionts. All necessary for the protozoan’s survival and their own, each entity exists “in or on different regions of the cell” co-dependent on the function of the others (Haraway, How 83).

As a result, this multi-faceted microscopic cell is “everyone’s favorite critter for explaining complex ‘individuality,’ symbiogenesis, and symbiosis” (Haraway, Staying 61) as well as Yancey’s “continuing evolving emergence.”

The second level of “obligatory symbiosis” involves M. paradoxa and its host—M. darwiniensis—both of whom require the other to survive. The protozoan is necessary for the giant northern’s existence, enabling the termite to digest the cellulose it consumes. At the same time, M. paradoxa gains a mobile home in the giant northern termite, an intimate reciprocity that allows them both to flourish.

Like Yancey’s “coming together to things,” protozoan and host exist because they exist jointly. They are oddkin.

But oddkin, while essential for semiotic and biological flourishing, also serves an equally important function: it opens up sites and opportunities for re-worlding, for radical change that increases the odds of mutual survival.

Haraway highlights oddkin’s generativity. She contends that the richness of crafting oddkin, like M. paradoxa, results not just from the co-relating but also from the interrogation it invites: “symbiotic innovations” (Bronstein 6) through a critical examination of “individuality and collectivity at the same time (How 83).

Such a reckoning involves assessing the benefits and costs of affiliating, both in the moment of co-relating and over time. That reckoning unlocks spaces and generates opportunities for “re-worlding,” for recognizing the need for change and acting on that need. Compos(t)ing thus makes more than oddkin; it innovates.

Across her scholarship, both in its content and in its compos(t)ing practices, oddkin Yancey displays just such a dynamic: She crafts oddkin, critically examines that co-relating, and re-worlds. Yancey rewrites the story of composition studies explicitly and rhetorical situation implicitly.

Particularly emblematic of this semiotic-material symbiosis is Yancey’s 2004 Chair’s Address at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a stunning multi-modal and multi-vocal performance later remediated for print publication in College Composition and Communication.

The double tension—between co-relating/making and re-worlding/unmaking—imbues “Made Not Only with Words” as it advocates for transformative pedagogical change in composition studies.

While oddkin choices abound across the address/article—Yancey deliberately “designed a multi-genred and mediated text” (299)—the co-relating of image and word emerges as the most provocative mutualism. As the title presages, “Made Not Only in Words,” the address/article overtly highlights a deliberate making-with of word-image.

As Yancey recounts, she carefully curated words—“twenty-six pages, more or less, double-spaced, and composed in Garamond 12”—that compos(t)ed “‘stock’ of two kinds”: verbal, “based on readings, some of my own writings, and some of my students’ work” and visual, based on images collected “again from my own work, photographs from places I knew, and images from the public domain” (“Made” 299).

Like M. paradoxa and the giant northern termite, word-image partnered in obligate symbiosis, where one could only meaningfully exist with the other.

The most dramatic illustration of this mutualism occurred in the delivery of the address itself. Spotlighted on a stage in a darkened auditorium, Yancey stood behind the lectern with two giant screens standing on either side of her like sentinels. The screens offered “two synchronized PowerPoint slide shows” with a total 84 slides that, while running independently, flashed in sequence with Yancey’s spoken words (“Made” 299).

But the oddkin collectivity of word-image comprising the address/article exists not an end in and of itself. Rather, the semiotic co-relating served two goals.

First, as Yancey describes, she deliberately planned the word-image performance so that it “would embody and illustrate the claims of the talk” (299): the multi-modal sea change occurring in early twenty-first century literacies in the wake of digitalization, especially outside the classroom.

Second, Yancey explains, the address/article aim to invite an interrogation of word-image, individually and collectively, as a prelude to effecting a shift—a re-worlding—of disciplinary and pedagogical thinking and acting. She crafted the synchronized PowerPoints, comprised of different images co-relating with each other and with her own words, propelled by the goal of “putting them in dialogue with each other.” So the word-image as well as image-image juxtapositions complemented and contested each other, calling into question stable, definitive meanings, truths, and realities. In fact, Yancey notes, the desire for a multi-semiotic interrogation operated as “a key part of this composing process” (299).

Finally, from the combination of oddkin and interrogation, Yancey’s opens the door to re-worlding, a goal foreshadowed in the address/article’s subtitle: “Composition in a New Key.” And re-worlding composition studies is Yancey’s endgame.

As Yancey shares, changes in literacy are “structural changes—global, educational, technological. Like seismic tremors, these signal a re-formation in process, and because we exist on the borders of our own tectonic plates—rhetoric, composition, and communication, process, activity, service, and social justice—we are at the very center of those tremors” (320).

Surviving those tremors as a discipline and as teachers requires radical change. That new world—composition in a new key—emerges, again, from co-relatings.

Among the three foci of Yancey’s re-worlding of disciplinary thinking and pedagogical practice—new curriculum, revised WAC efforts, and new major—Yancey focuses primarily on curriculum as a site of a re-worlded composition studies. She explicitly calls for “a new vocabulary, a new set of practices, and a new set of outcomes” as well as “new and provocative” changes in “our research,” all with the goal of creating “thoughtful, informed, technologically adept writing publics” (308). Then she provides specifics for her oddkin vision.

In another wave of making-with—along with another wave of interrogation—Yancey articulates three elements of this curricular re-worlding: circulation, canons, and technological deicity (311-12). In each, Yancey emphasizes their nature as oddkin.

To illustrate, circulation in composition’s new key emphasizes writers’ compos(t)ing “in the contexts of other writers and thinkers and speakers” (312), a shift that set mutualism—co-relating—at the core of compos(t)ing.

Similarly, the canons in the re-worlded curriculum are also oddkin: they “interact, and through that interaction they contribute to new exigences for invention, arrangement, representation, and identity. Or: they change what is possible” (317). Such canonical oddkin suggests that compos(t)ing in a re-worlded composition studies intrinsically possesses the power of change by its nature.

Finally, Yancey makes kin between the deicity of technology and the deicity of literacy (318). A concept emphasizing that literacy is always a social act mediated by technology in the now, technological deicity co-relates transformations in technology with “transformation in literacy” (318).

Rich in oddkin, rich in interrogations, and rich in re-worlding, “Made Not Only in Words” demonstrates that Yancey already emerged as oddkin before the term entered the lexicon. Consistently and persistently, Yancey shows that, like Haraway, the importance of embracing the truth that “we” (be)come together or not at all, a truth that she implicitly extends to the rhetorical situation.

However, to (be)come together, oddkin requires the act of sympoiesis, or the process making-with, a compos(t)ing already evident in “Made Not Only with Words” but actualized even more vividly through Yancey’s collaborative scholarship performances.

In “From the Editor: Another Beginning,” Kathleen Blake Yancey introduces her first issue as editor of College Composition and Communication (CCC), articulating, among other goals, her plans for her five-year tenure and the historical context (both for the journal and the discipline) within which those plans nested.

A significant element of her editorial agenda includes the inauguration of the “Poster Page” (408), designed and deployed to serve teachers pedagogically and to connect “to the public at large” (409). Yancey concludes her explanation of this innovation with an invitation: “I’m looking for evidence of how you have used the Poster Pages and to what effect? . . . What contribution did it make? Please let me know as you can” (409).

With the double impetus of “connecting” teachers and public (as well as connecting teachers to publics), Yancey signals not only her oddkin identity but also the practice of sympoiesis: making-with. Providing the guiding force by which cross- and intra-species stakeholders—biological and nonbiological—combine forces, even if only temporarily and contingently, sympoiesis encompasses “the play of collective making and personal invention” (Haraway, Staying 89).

Introduced as a term in the shortest chapter in Staying with the Trouble, sympoiesis simply means “making-with” (59), so necessary for non-genetic oddkin collaborations. Juxtaposed to, but not opposing, autopoiesis^[1]—or self-creation—sympoiesis emphasizes that “nothing makes itself” (59). “All together the players evoke, trigger, and call forth what—and who—exists” (16). The action of making-with underscores the integral truth of “learning to be truly present. . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1).

While Haraway introduced the term in 2016, Yancey was practicing sympoiesis decades before, predating even her 2010 poster page invitation, as her participation on Portnet in 1992 reveals.

Yancey’s sympoiesis shines forth in her foundational contribution to the third wave of writing assessment, which consisted of the shift to portfolios. Significant to that shift was the formation of the multi-purposed listserv Portnet, a “group and site and research project” (Yancey, “Rhetorical Situation of Writing Assessment” 479).

Prior to the creation of Portnet, the initial group of nine geographically dispersed colleagues operated “more like a collection of individuals than a group,” Yancey narrates (479). However, this collocation of single entities—organized by Michael Allen to share experiences concerning portfolios—changed with the creation of a listserv, a change that illuminates Yancey’s sympoiesis.

First for the group to emerge—to make-with as a collective—they first had to learn to trust, something that Haraway emphasizes in her description of sympoiesis. To illustrate, quoting Isabelle Stengers, Haraway notes that “thinking-with, that is becoming-with, is in itself a way of relating, but less in fealty; rather in the ‘trust of the held-out hand,’” suggesting the need for risk-taking, a dynamic reflected in the Portnet thinking- and becoming-with (Staying 34).

Yancey explicitly documents this sympoietic behavior, pointing to what the nine original participants, all from very different local contexts, called “‘putting on another hat’”: suspending judgment by “chang[ing] their roles” and temporally embracing an “outside program’s criteria and standards” (481). Such a good-faith effort to step outside comfort zones constitutes Stengers’s metaphoric hand held out in trust: “because we did not know everyone in the group initially, we had to be particularly sensitive to that which we could not see” (Yancey 479).

Second, in addition to trust—or because of the need to trust—the group also effected a second change that manifested sympoiesis in action: Portnet participants developed new protocols for joint work.

Haraway, again quoting Stengers, points to the need in sympoiesis for an “‘an ecology of practices’” appropriate for “collective knowing and doing” in particular environments and participant configurations (Staying 34). Yancey describes exactly this process: “Because the electronic environment was new, we had to learn new ways of behaving,” new ways that yielded learning not only about portfolios but also “about structures that foster such collaborative work” (479-80).

In sum, Portnet emerged from sympoiesis, “a material-semiotic composting” that unfolds as “theory in the mud, as muddle” (Haraway, Staying 31). Yancey scholarly performances repeatedly reflect the action of sympoiesis, “threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting” entangled relationships (31).

As someone whose scholarship reflects a sustained search for and embrace of unexpected and unconventional re-worldings, oddkin Yancey lays the foundation for a sympoietic rhetorical situation, one focusing on the actions of becoming rather than only the products of being. She provides insights into “sustained relationality, about who and what are accountable to whom and what” (Hadfield and Haraway S234).

By so doing, she offers a vision of a rhetorical situation comprised of open boundaries, resonating with non-linear logic, and marked by the messiness of “making-with” rather than linear logic and deceptive simplicity of “made-of.”

Three interweaving and interpellating properties-processes characterize a Yancey-inspired rhetorical situation: agentive co-constitution, the compos(t)ing logic of making-with that validates alternative rhetorical subjectivities; porous materialities, that authorizes alternative textur-alities; and rhetorical accountability that threads ethical accountability within, between, and across a sympoietic rhetorical situation.