Introduction to Special Collection

In the fall of 2023, Jackson State University hosted the 5th annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. The goal of this symposium is to center the research and scholarship occurring in HBCUs within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. This special issue of Reflections highlights the work of those scholars who presented or intended to present at this symposium. The theme of the conference, Re-Imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a Woke White America, was intended to present ideas and scholarship that challenged white perceptions of wokeness and explored how this perception is rooted in anti-Blackness, and how Black scholars at HBCUs responded to this recent form off anti-Blackness.