From Painting to Pixels: Expansionist Topoi in American Visual Culture

Digital representations of the mythic West abound, from Rockstar Games’ popular open-world Western, Red Dead Redemption, to free iPad and iPhone apps (Oregon Settler, Trade Nations Frontier). These virtual re-enactments use twenty-first century technologies to reinforce broader dominant-cultural narratives celebrating the twinned colonization of indigenous land and bodies, yet their roots lie in far older aesthetic and discursive conventions: those found within nineteenth-century landscape and frontier paintings. This project traces the evolution of frontier imagery from the nineteenth century to the digital age and uses Aristotelian topics theory to evaluate recurring images’ discursive impact over time in a Western context. Nineteenth-century landscape artists generated a number of recurring visual topo which persist to this day. Among the most prominent are the “empty” prairie or rugged Western landscape, waiting to be filled with white settlements, and the vanishing or dying "Indian," whose demise paves the way for the land’s new inhabitants. My project articulates the rhetorical dimensions of these images and demonstrates the ongoing role of both visual and digital culture in shaping U.S. public opinion concerning Western land use and Native American tribal sovereignty. It also analyzes the additional rhetorical power and complexity such images hold when they make the leap from static media (paintings, illustrations, sculptures) to more interactive formats. Because participatory media such as video games allow for multisensory engagement – tapping users’ aural and kinesthetic faculties alongside visual faculties – their multiple sensory appeals enhance rhetoricity at the same time they blur the lines dividing rhetor and audience in traditional Western understandings of rhetoric

Psychological Disability and the Director's Chair: Interrogating the Relationship Between Positionality and Pedagogy

The act of writing this essay involves some professional risk, because it also involves a disclosure: I am a writing center director and tenure-track assistant professor at a regional public university in the Midwest. I also live with an anxiety disorder – the most prevalent class of psychological disorder among U.S. residents in a 2005 study (28.8%). I know I am far from alone. Roughly half of Americans will meet the DSM-IV criteria for a mental disorder at least once during their lifespans (Kessler et al. 595).1 Within academia, however, you would not recognize mental illness’s prevalence – at least, outside anecdotes shared between close friends, or the occasional Facebook post from a colleague in which he or she discloses a diagnosis in response to a mental-health awareness campaign or high-profile celebrity suicide.University Writing Cente

Beyond Binaries of Disability in Writing Center Studies from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol.19 No.1

In her introduction to the anthology Writing Centers and Disability, Allison Hitt argues for the importance of honoring the nuances and complexities of disabled student writers in writing center work (viii). In our provocation, we center these nuances and complexities of disability, not only for disabled people/people with disabilities¹, but also as these complexities might shape writing center praxis. Too often disabled experiences are not relayed in their complexity but are flattened by binary understanding of disability. We worry about the ways in which an understanding of disability in writing center studies is haunted by the stories nondisabled people tell about disability, about how Disability discourse in writing center research both opens and forecloses possibilities for disabled student writers and writing center instructors.University Writing Cente

Medallion-like dermal dendrocytoma

Medallion-like dermal dendrocytoma is a benign cutaneous neoplasm that mimics dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans histologically. The distinction between these two entities is critical to prevent unnecessary wide excisions. Herein we describe an acquired MLDD in a 55-year-old female

The Effectiveness of Internet- and Field-Based Methods to Recruit Young Adults Who Use Prescription Opioids Nonmedically

BACKGROUND: Nonmedical prescription opioid (NMPO) use is a problem among young adults, yet young NMPO users are a diverse population that has been challenging to engage in overdose prevention and harm reduction programs. OBJECTIVES: This study compared the effectiveness and characteristics of persons recruited through two different sampling strategies to inform research and intervention efforts with young adult NMPO users. METHODS: We analyzed data from the Rhode Island Young Adult Prescription Drug Study (RAPiDS), which enrolled persons aged 18 to 29 who reported past 30-day NMPO use. We compared the characteristics of two samples recruited simultaneously between February 2015 and February 2016. One sample was recruited using field-based strategies (e.g., respondent-driven sampling, transit ads), and a second from internet sources (e.g., online classifieds). RESULTS: Among 198 eligible participants, the median age was 25 (IQR: 22, 27), 130 (65.7%) were male, 123 (63.1%) were white, and 150 (78.1%) resided in urban areas. A total of 79 (39.9%) were recruited using field-based strategies and 119 (60.1%) were recruited from internet sources. Internet-recruited persons were younger (median = 24 [IQR: 21, 27] vs. 26 [IQR: 23, 28] years) and more likely to reside in rural areas (16.2% vs. 5.3%), although this finding was marginally significant. Field-recruited participants were more likely to have been homeless (36.7% vs. 17.7%), have been incarcerated (39.7% vs. 21.8%), and engage in daily NMPO use (34.6% vs. 14.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Multipronged outreach methods are needed to engage the full spectrum of young adult NMPO users in prevention and harm reduction efforts