As an American-trained compositionist working in the Middle East, Amy Zenger questioned the ways she and others in her position conduct research and construct, revise, or administer composition programs outside of the U.S., particularly when these programs purport to adhere to American models of liberal arts education. Universities and programs have sprung up at an astonishing rate in this region, including programs replicated whole cloth from U.S. universities. All too often, the local--the "other" of transnational, international, global--is regarded in composition theory and practice as a naturalized space, "pure," and not demanding theorization. The problem with this commonsense definition is that it pushes one to accept the binarization of space (as global/local) reified in globalization discourses, and thus fails to provide a meaningful basis for making decisions. In composition, there is a good understanding of how to study the specificity of programs in comparison to each other, but this does not provide a strong way to understand how each program becomes localized in the first place. To put the question in more general terms, how is it that one defines, constructs, or rebuilds "any" composition program or approach in relation to its locale? In Zenger's current research she turns to theorists and practitioners in architecture, urban planning, and landscape design to see how they go about defining locality as a basis for design practice. Her contention is that rhetoric and composition can benefit from identifying its own repertoire of planning tools and processes that would allow one to conceptualize locality for research and program design.