The women’s talking group featured in this article theorizes the community literacy practice of thanduk—“setting something aside”—that members practice together. Sanduk—with an s and translated as Arabic for “box”— has a long, well documented history involving informal, rotary credit and savings associations practiced among people in Africa and of African descent. Rather than using the s, the group’s spelling is distinctively Nuer— thanduk—harkening back to indigenous versions of the practice documented throughout areas of East Africa and beyond. Thanduk invokes nommo, a distinctly African spiritual and philosophical value that strives for harmony and balance among interdependent members of a community. This article aims to make legible how the women in this study employ thanduk to thwart the transnational, intergenerational impacts of indirect colonial rule and neoliberal economics in pursuit of individual and collective thriving.

This article situates the practice of composing CCCC Accessibility Guides in critical access studies (Hamraie) and introduces the concept of critical access literacies. I argue that CCCC access guides cultivate critical access literacies amongst the guide writers and disabled and nondisabled conference participants, empowering them to better observe access barriers and advocate for expansive access. To make this argument, I triangulate interviews I conducted with the authors of the first six years of the guides (2011-2016) with textual analysis of the guides themselves. The interviews illustrate how the guide’s early authors re-imagined access to include expansive and intersectional access needs.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

In this guest editors' introduction to Community Literacy Journal's special issue on access, the guest editors call for greater attention to access work as community literacy, pushing for the field to tend to issues of intersectionality, reciprocity,

This symposium builds from our discussions about communities, academia, activism, and access as four faculty members with different positionalities and perspectives to advocate for the protection of relations in the face of universities’ demands for access to peoples, communities, and lands. In each of four individually authored reflections, we recount our experiences working with and being in community as part of our academic practice. We extend from work in disability studies to explain that while access is generally understood to be good, and often is, access can also be the precursor to exploitation. We argue that to mitigate that risk, we can take on a positive gatekeeping function as part of being in community with care.

This article is an ethnographic case study of the work of two activist groups in Kansas City, Missouri. It discusses how unhoused activists with the Kansas City Homeless Union, through their 13-month on-and-off occupation of city property, worked to reframe access in ways that moved toward what disability justice activists call collective access, prioritized marginalized lived experience, and asserted their right to control over the resources that impacted their lives. This article ties these interventions explicitly to community writing work through a discussion of how citizen journalists from Independent Media Association, with whom the author has collaborated, documented and crafted narratives around the union’s work in ways that demonstrate ways community literacy work can function as rhetorical solidarity practices.

Skills, knowledge, time, ability, access, and cultural and societal norms all sponsor and constrain food literacies. Measuring the effects of class, race, cultural identity, knowledge, and ability on food access requires an understanding of how communities and institutions sponsor food literacy. Nutritionists have developed a framework for researching and measuring food literacy; however, the focus falls on measuring individual food literacy, which I argue is a form of epistemic whiteness that refuses to acknowledge the outsized responsibility of institutions in creating systems of food access and flattens the role community plays in mitigating barriers to access. A critical understanding of disability and the reciprocity intrinsic to community literacy research are offered as a way to move from measurement to sponsorship of community food literacies.

This article rethinks digital access and community literacy by sharing aspects of intentional engagement informed by social justice frameworks to establish community partnerships that empower communities both local and global with digital literacy. The article explores access, privileges, and positionalities that the author strategically utilizes to support the communities within her current locality and in her hometown Nepal. By showcasing multiple intentional and equitable partnerships informed via social justice frameworks, the article argues that we require a transnational context to redefine digital literacy and our students need to understand these contexts better given the demands of the current workplace.

iving thanks to the Creator, the conference organizers, especially Phyllis and Veronica, Cassandra for her generous intro.Special thanks to the family of Julian Clement Chase, and all who join in this emergent and urgent imagining of ourselves in community.This keynote offers ways to make meaning of who we are and how we be, from our inner selves to collective formations.My intention is to offer principles and practice to build together for liberation and affirm the importance of communicating as we say "yes" to this awesome endeavor.

e write today about a journey to purpose.We write about how to keep going forward when the world is on fire.We write about holding onto the transformational power of expression and relationship.We see building connections and finding your unique point of agency as essential for creating systemic change.The injustices from Treyvon Martin to George Floyd are all-too-frequent reminders that living in a Black body in the United States is precarious.The persistence and deadly consequences of racism can be almost overwhelming.Now we are in a geopolitical nightmare with the war in Ukraine.We saw the hatred and fear scaling the walls of the Capitol, plundering democracy.We see the right to vote more and more constrained.We see grandmothers and aunts, fathers and brothers taken by COVID.How do we keep going forward?This is an essay about holding onto hope.We strive to build a world of equity and shared humanity.Progressive scholars, community activists, and public intellectuals identify the barriers to equity and shared humanity as lying within white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal structureshistorical legal and cultural forces that justify and maintain systems of power.When the goal of justice and shared humanity is framed as ending "systemic racism, " many assume that organizations who focus on inner reflection and personal connection are too naïve to make a difference.This is an essay about finding the power to dismantle oppression by beginning with the personal.Systemic structures are real but starting there takes you away from looking at you.This is an essay about the process of sustainable social justice work: find your passion, pay attention to your pain, journey into your purpose.

Drawing from Latinx studies and the literacy experiences of men employed as university custodial staff, we propose a home- and community-based approach to workplace literacy. The central goals of this approach are to allow participants to identify their professional and vocational literacies to highlight their literate assets and goals across contexts. The approach offers a humanizing lens for individuals who are often denied the opportunity to showcase their literate repertoires and desires within the context of their formal workplaces. Overall, this article calls for a broader understanding of participants' literacy experiences--not only as workers but as people who work.

The use of comics can be a powerful tool to expand educational outreach efforts for improving the health and well-being of people everywhere. Dr. Ian Williams coined the term "graphic medicine" to denote the use of comics in medical education and patient care ("Graphic Medicine"). Alzheimer's disease affects approximately five million Americans and is expected to triple to 13.8 million by 2050. Hispanics and Blacks are disproportionately affected at a higher rate than other groups ("Facts and Figures"). There is a lack of culturally relevant educational materials available for these populations. To address this disparity, an interdisciplinary community engaged collaboration was initiated with the Alzheimer's Association West Texas Chapter, The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and Dukes Comics to produce a series of virtual workshops entitled, "Journaling and Doodling for Stress Reduction and Relaxation" for caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's and other dementias. These sessions were live-streamed and began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Spanish sessions have also been provided to the public. Health information about the disease process and common caregiver challenges are provided in each session. A guided journaling and doodling activity are also included. Journaling has been shown to be an effective and easy tool to use for stress management (Scott). The impetus behind this project was to address the dire need for increasing access to Alzheimer's disease education and resources in El Paso, Texas, a border community that is also home to Fort Bliss Army base. Hispanics comprise approximately 82% of the population and include a large Spanish-speaking segment. Language is often a barrier to health care access and education. To meet the aim of increasing accessibility, the workshops and comics are available in both English and Spanish and soon in-person. This project received a 2022 joint seed grant from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso and UTEP to conduct research and examine data from these workshops that will be provided in-person in marginalized and multilingual Latina communities surrounding El Paso starting in the fall.

This article presents a profile of the community writing and performance project Write Your Roots, organized by the author, which was disrupted by the impact of COVID-19 in early 2020. The project narrative is framed by the theoretical basis for the project, rooted in the concept of "making space," which borrows from Michel de Certeau's concepts of space and Sidney Dobrin's definition of "occupation." The article then offers a narrative of the Write Your Roots project in Providence, RI in 2020 leading up to and beyond the effects of COVID-19. Following the narrative, the author reflects on the project, reading its disruption through its theoretical framework to draw conclusions about the importance of liveness and publicness toward the project goals of "making space."

This profile features the authors' shared work to co-create both a community literacy project, Stories from the Flood, and the undergraduate community-based learning courses that supported the effort. Stories from the Flood works to assist community members in southwestern Wisconsin to share their flood experiences, aiming to support community healing and serve as a resource for future conversations about flood recovery and resilience. Our collaboration on Stories from the Flood demonstrates the importance of non-university expertise and aims to daylight and correct structural asymmetries that render these rural watersheds both particularly vulnerable to flooding and absent of government intervention.

This article examines how scientists, classroom teachers, poetry educators, and youth negotiated the domains of science through their engagement in a two-year Massive Open Online Collaboration (MOOC) funded by the National Science Foundation. To make sense of learners' unconventional and interdisciplinary writing and the cultural and disciplinary conflicts that emerged around it, I offer a reframing of science literacy as a series of crash encounters. Such a reframing prompts literacy practitioners to anticipate fallout when diverse bodies, objects, and rhetorics collide and, therefore, to better design and participate in interdisciplinary networks to create more dynamic and vibrant approaches to science literacy.

Our world is no stranger to mobilities, ranging from molecular movement in ecological systems to quotidian economic transactions and social interactions to transnational voyages across continents.Thus, readers of the Community Literacy Journal (CLJ) are sure to be engaged by this eclectic addition to the current scholarship on mobilities work, with the construct of mobility emerging as a central theoretical idea that underpins the epistemological and methodological premises of many disciplines, including that of cultural geography, feminist studies, critical race theory, queer studies, and composition and rhetoric.With a universalizing and broad focus on composition-in-mobility, this edited collection-organized in two sections across which all the contributing authors unpack and articulate the mobile nature of mobility and composition-answers the central question of what constitutes and sustains mobility in our divergent, diverse, literate activities and practices.The volume editors-Horner, Hartline, Kumari, and Matravers-advance a mobilities paradigm to further unpack the dynamic constitution of mobility in composition and rhetoric and to cast a norm-based light on mobility-in-composition work (3).In particular, rather than treat mobility as a matter "requiring adjustment or accommodation", Horner et al. argue that the proposition of mobility as a commonplace or even as a fact is long overdue (4-6).One hallmark that characterizes this paradigm is that mobilities are poly-faceted forms, whose social value is mercurial, relational, and provisional (4-6).This critical premise holds the potential to shift our perspective of viewing language, composition, writing-curriculum administration, writing pedagogy, or writing research as impermeable to perceiving them as fruitfully unsteady and potentially subject to transformation.As the volume addresses the nature of mobility in composition, the organization of the twenty chapters-divided into Part I where case studies in mobility-in-composing-practices (e.g., community literacy, translingual composition, or digital and professional writing) are reported and Part II where critical responses to Part I are articulated-also attempts to reflect on the nature of mobility, with each chapter conversing

hile teacher neutrality is a contested concept within the field of rhetoric and composition, the public often expects a teacher's neutral position.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, disability studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

This article is an ethnographic case study of a community literacy project that teaches immigrants to the U.S. how to get their driver's licenses.The article shows how perceptions of literacy change when project participants encounter the "rules of the road"-unspoken rules that are highly social, deeply embodied, and usually pitched by the powerful as clear, neutral, and necessary for survival.Based on qualitative analysis of written materials and interviews gathered during the project, we demonstrate how the community project activated analogic thinking about literacy.That is, realizing that driving rules are negotiable leads learners to realize that literacy rules are negotiable, too.

hile "family literacy" has been a popular term and concept in para-educational settings since the 1980s, it has o en focused on using home life to meet educational aims, rather than studying the family as a site of literate experiences in its own right.In their book Family Literacies: Reading with Young Children, Rachael Levy and Mell Hall intentionally move away from school-based aims for pre-and primary-school children to instead ask what families get from creating, sustaining, and sharing literacy experiences.ey explore a widely acknowledged, but surprisingly under-researched, family literacy practice: reading with young children.Levy and Hall frame what they call "shared reading" as a familial act that shapes routines, reinforces emotional bonds, and displays familial "belonging" both to family members and outsiders.Focusing on children who have not yet started school allows them to explore "shared reading" as a separate activity from "learning to read, " though their ndings have major implications for both preschool community literacy programs and, potentially, primary classrooms.e book draws on ndings from the Shared Reading Project, which interviews families to understand how shared reading "is perceived in their homes and how it ts (or does not t) within everyday family life" (13).Levy and Hall's ndings stress the importance of understanding the habits and goals of individual families, in order to create programming that supports ongoing literacy practices rather than promoting school readiness.Demonstrating the di erence in ndings that a shi in focus can yield, the authors examine families and homes, rather than programs, until they discuss implications in the book's nal chapters.e authors use theory and methods from sociology to study shared reading as a feature of everyday life, asking what the activity achieves for families and making reading a means to an end, rather than a goal.e book is clearly laid out in ten chapters: an introduction to gaps in family reading research, two chapters reviewing relevant work on reading as a sociological

iphop manifested during the Black Power Era.Black Studies scholars assert that Hiphop pedagogy is useful when locating Black diaspora movement for liberation (Saucier &Woods).Hiphop is inextricably bound to Black Lives Matter (BLM) era of the freedom struggle.The Black Lives Matter Hiphop generation is shaping freedom in their own terms, sounds, and likeness (Cohen).Begun by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan Cullors in 2013 as a hashtag after the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin, these loving and powerful Black queer women started a movement, emphasizing the sanctity of all Black life, prioritizing the most marginalized ones.The global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement provides synergy for Hiphop [and others] to develop coherent political frameworks to demand long overdue justice.However, some artists such as Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Waka Flocka Flame, 50 Cent, and others, appeared to be going down on the wrong side of history in their support of Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential campaign.These rappers backed Trump, despite his support of white supremacist groups, confederate monuments, police brutality, anti-Black Lives Matter tactics, failures around Covid-19, which cost disproportionate loss of Black and Brown lives, and backlash against the first Black president-Barack Obama.(McGrady) Hiphop and Trump make for strange bedfellows.We see these artists as wasting their clout on Trump.Barack Obama called upon Jay-Z to support his campaign and the rest is history.

In this article, I critically dissect hip-hop habits of mind as a professional way of thinking, being, and doing (knowing, speaking and behaving) and explain how these habits hold critical literacy and cultural literacy benefits for students and educators. The goal of this project was to identify and name hip-hop habits of mind and to explore how educators view them as professionally life-giving practices. In exploring the nature of hip-hop culture, themes such as freedom of thought, flexibility, truth-telling, creativity, authenticity, confidence, braggadocio, uninhibited voice, unrestricted movement, community, honor, integrity, and cultural efficacy were discussed and organized as the Hip-Hop Mindset framework. This framework consists of the habits, values, and practices that promote cultural efficacy and critical social action within hip-hop culture.

This article interrogates how hiphop composition pedagogies can interrupt what the author terms the "hiphop illiteracies" that circulate in predominantly white institutions (PWIs). An analysis of four college writing classrooms that integrate hiphop texts at one PWI reveals pervasive anti-Blackness in student attitudes, but also in the research and course design as well as in department-mandated course texts. The analysis demonstrates the need for writing pedagogies that name and teach Black language, writing, and meaning-making practices while also asking students, teachers, and administrators to reflexively examine their own identities' locations vis-a-vis those practices. The author advocates a reflexive pedagogy that asks students to locate themselves vis-a-vis power as a starting point for investigations of language and culture. The author concludes that hiphop pedagogies have significant critical social justice possibilities in institutionally white educational contexts, but these benefits are not automatic and demand pedagogies of reflexivity, sociolinguistics, and intersectional feminism.