ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of rhetorical contexts in shaping perceptions of agency, with a particular focus on genre and audience. It also focuses on how students talk about the act of writing or reading itself. Their conversations about when they feel they are able to complete writing or reading tasks successfully can often turn to discussions of their familiarity or unfamiliarity with the genre they are negotiating and the audience they are trying to reach. Such perceptions of agency have resonances worth exploring with the rhetorical concept of kairos—which is, roughly speaking, the idea of finding the right thing to say at the most opportune moment. The chapter explores how students describe how it feels when they must struggle to understand a new genre or audience before moving on to explore the connections between rhetorical theories of genre and audience with how these students perceive a sense of agency.
