This article describes a series of community-based research projects, (Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories, done in partnership with the local African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish communities. The author argues that these projects are one substantive response to the ongoing, growing demand that English studies teacher-scholars and students participate in purposeful, impactful public work. These projects position students as rhetorical citizen historians who produce original historical and rhetorical knowledge and promote democracy through conscious, deliberate rhetorical historical work. But these partnerships also raise complex issues of unequal, fluid, and shifting discourses among community partners, students, and faculty and, consequently, inform ways to enact publicly shared meaning in community literacy partnerships.

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

In the post-Civil War United States, several historically black colleges gave a central role to classical rhetoric in their curricula, and many of their students used its concepts to develop a distinctly black, oppositional public sphere.

Reviewed are: A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, by Julie Lindquist Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education, by Catherine Prendergast.

Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

Addresses the hundreds of web sites devoted to the memory of Diana. Provides a thick description of the way in which people are writing and using the Internet in everyday life, with a special emphasis on the way in which this writing brings them into a public sphere. Concludes that hypermedia offers the immediate sense of audience and community.

Taps research in American studies to learn more about rhetoric and writing instruction in post-Revolutionary America. Merges the separate (and gendered) histories of early 19th-century American rhetoric, breaking down the separate spheres in contemporary historical and literary scholarship. Examines civic rhetoric found in texts that represent women’s schooling.

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