Community Literacy Journal

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October 2021

  1. Front Matter
    Abstract

    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 sta .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, gra ti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is de ned 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.us, literacy makes reference 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.

    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010601
  2. Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents
    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010612
  3. Higher Hussle: Nipsey's Post Hip Hop Literacies
    Abstract

    Nipsey Hussle is a post hip hop icon. In this essay, we mine popular music and media coverage of Nipsey to describe his artistry and advocacy anchored by his articulation of an African American diasporic identity, his ambivalence as an independent rapper within a mainstream music industry, and his leverage of Black capital in his Crenshaw community. We address these relationships--identity, industry, and community--to situate Nipsey within African American and hip hop literacies. By recalling relationships and roots, we call attention to emancipated blackness enacted by Nipsey Hussle.

    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010604
  4. Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating Theory and Activist Practice
    Abstract

    A midst an increasingly globalized world, abetted by COVID-19 pandemic and its necessitation of online interaction, feminist scholars, activists, and community organizers alike have faced increasing pressures to return their collective focus to more localized struggles.We see this forced movement to the local occur within issues such as reproductive rights in Texas, United States in 2021.Despite this and parallel movements throughout the world, digitally cultivated spaces, as seen in social media platforms, have deepened the possibility for transnational collaboration across borders and boundaries. is collaboration is particularly visible within social justice e orts such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has become a central cry amongst anti-racist movements across the globe.is paradoxical contemporary context created the exigence for Transnational Feminist Itineraries: Situating eory and Activist Practice.Composed for a predominantly academic audience, Transnational Feminist Itineraries o ers extensive discussions of our contemporary context and how collaborative, feminist practices are being taken up not only within, but across nations.Transnational Feminist Itineraries is a collaborative collection of essays which aims to contribute to the development of feminist theory and practice through a vepart approach: (1) positing that the global socio-political context requires the tools and methods of transnational feminism; (2) positioning transnational feminism as running parallel, and not in opposition, to other feminist approaches; (3) exploring a historical context rich with cross-border activism; (4) arguing for both the "scaling out" in addition to the "scaling up" of feminist methods; (5) o ering critiques of transnational feminism to further complicate the conversation surrounding its place amongst alternative feminisms.Transnational Feminist Itineraries consists predominantly of case studies.Each chapter takes a unique approach to discussing the a ordances of transnational fem-

    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010610
  5. 'She Ugly': Black Girls, Women in Hiphop and Activism--Hiphop Feminist Literacies Perspectives
    Abstract

    This work draws upon Hiphop feminism, studies of Black girlhood, and Black women and girls' literacies to illuminate the layered and violent narratives that shape society's treatment of Black women and girls, what these narratives look like in everyday life, how they are taken up and negotiated in different social spheres, such as an afterschool club for Black middle school girls and the platforms and artistry of women Hiphop artists and creatives. Richardson considers what activism is possible through juxtaposing Black girls as emerging creatives, celebrity corporate artist activists Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, independent activist artists such as Noname and dream hampton. Given the far-reaching representations of Black women and girls in popular culture, the art, lives and platforms of women in Hiphop are critical sites to understanding complexities, strategies and possibilities for social change.

    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010603
  6. Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning in Prison
    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010611

April 2021

  1. Love and Poetic Anarchy: Establishing Mutual Care in Community Writing
    Abstract

    This profile details the ethos and emergent growth of Writers Warehouse, a collective project founded in 2016 with a focus on creation, craft, collaboration, and community. Based in Colorado, Writers Warehouse now aims to position itself as a mutual care collective through curating inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces, developing open access resources, and establishing a microgrant program for local writers.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009370
  2. Front Matter
    Abstract

    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 makes reference 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.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009615
  3. Neighborhood Writing: Developing Drop-In Writing Consultations in Philadelphia Public Libraries
    Abstract

    In this project profile we discuss a drop-in writing project initiated by the University of Pennsylvania's Critical Writing Program in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia. We explain our drop-in writing project and rationale for a model embedded in the neighborhoods in which we live. Aware of our own constraints and opportunities living in a diverse urban area, we examine how an approach of practicing in place has allowed us to gain some success, but the nature of this flexible approach has also created a series of challenges.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009371
  4. A Word from Coda's Editors
    Abstract

    ust as musical codas persist beyond the end of musical work, Coda-a new sec- tion of the Community Literacy Journal devoted to creative writing-offers space for the representation of the lingering effects of community engagement, public engagement, and activism. Beginning with this, our inaugural effort, Coda will publish creative writing in a range of genres and voices in a move to expand conversations about writing studies, to document and preserve the work of community writing, and to encourage more creative writing. We invite readers and writers who are eager to create knowledge in new ways to join us in enacting writing as a form of communion.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009629
  5. Rhetorical Curation of Patient Art: How Community Literacy Scholars Can Contribute to Healthcare Professions
    Abstract

    In the era of a global pandemic, this article claims that community literacy scholars are well poised to support challenges currently facing healthcare providers. To demonstrate this, I offer one example drawing on my work with The ART of Infertility and explain how I repurposed patient art and stories to curate emotional literacy amongst healthcare professionals. I argue that "rhetorical curation" is an innovative method that can support public engagement around stigmatized or underrepresented health experiences. I end with an invitation for community literacy scholars to build upon their expertise and design innovative public projects that contribute to improvements in healthcare.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009622
  6. Editors' Introduction
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009616
  7. Writing Group in an Emergency: Temporary Shelter
    Abstract

    The author shares the challenges of facilitating a writing group in a temporary emergency shelter in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. She shows how within this constantly changing environment and its safety protocols, community literacy was as difficult to establish as it was vital to make available. Exploring some of the best practices in community literacy, including reciprocity (Miller et al.), fruitful forms of conflict (Westbrook), "meaningful acts of public rhetoric" (Mathieu and George), and flow (Feigenbaum), the author proposes that this challenging environment made possible new shapes for each of these concepts. This experience suggests that while best practices can guide creation of a writing group during an emergency, an emergency, in turn, can generate innovation with these best practices.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009621
  8. Researching Protest Literacies: Literacy as Protest in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009626
  9. Persistence and Creativity: EmersonWRITES Celebrates 11 Years with Young Poets and Writers of Boston
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009632
  10. (Re) Mixing Up Literacy: Cookbooks as Rhetorical Remix
    Abstract

    Exploring literacy practices of home cooks, this article analyzes how cookbooks are remixed by users (with writings, clippings and other ephemera added to the text throughout its use).The practice of remixing the text with further editing by its user/audience illustrates the multilayered literacies at work in establishing authorship within the domestic space.The article builds its argument around one remixed cookbook as a case study, describing the remix-literate practices of the user, as the woman who used this cookbook remixed the text and genre to fit her needs and interests.This literacy practice is argued as a remix, which results in a transformation of the text itself and of the authority of the user.Both the original authorship (the act of compiling recipes from the church community) and the remixed authorship (the added ephemera and handwritten editing done by the user of this particular copy) are analyzed in tandem.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009620
  11. Guest Editors' Introduction: Community Writing Centers: What Was, What Is, and What Potentially Can Be
    Abstract

    A Critical Field Scan of Theory and History, Practice and Place. " Our idea for this issue was a simple one. As the title suggests, we hoped to generate a "field scan, " illustrating the ways in which community literacy programs draw upon theory, along with their respective regional geographies, past practices, and collective histories, to create community-engaged writing and literacy centers.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009361
  12. The Complicity/Complexity Problem of Anti-Racism Work in The Academy
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009617
  13. Resisting the "COVID-19 Scramble" by Writing Towards Black Transnational Futures
    Abstract

    This case study demonstrates how a community-based literacy program, HELP, took up Black literate traditions, endarkened transnational feminism, and anticolonial practices to construct emancipatory literacy experiences for Haitian and Haitian American middle schoolers in Miami, Florida. Overall, the institutional practices of HELP worked to destigmatize the discourses of Haiti, center Black Haitian women's stories, and develop spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, this article discusses the "COVID-19 scramble" and its ability to detract from building socially just futures for Black transnational students. Lastly, the article ends with questions for consideration when confronting the cyclical violence of white supremacy in literacy programs.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009363
  14. Detention/Writing Center Campaigns for Freedom
    Abstract

    This essay will focus on student campaigns to stop deportations at Krome Detention Center between 2013-2017 in Miami, Florida. This advocacy work shaped a letter writing project between my university writing center and a detention center. Writing in this context, then, is a collective act, challenging a prison industrial complex that impacts both the classroom and community. The work of student organizers can challenge

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009362
  15. My Life with Charles Billups & Martin Luther King: Trauma and the Civil Rights Movement
    Abstract

    ene Billups Baker's book offers a personal and historical account of often overlooked details in the narratives of the civil rights movement: the legacies of fear and trauma faced by family members of civil rights leaders (4).The daughter of

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009625
  16. Side Streets
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009634
  17. Moments
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009633
  18. Write Here, Right Now: Shifting a Community Writing Center from a Place to a Practice
    Abstract

    In 2013, Westminster College in Salt

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009368
  19. From the Book and New Media Review Editor's Desk
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009373
  20. Poesia para la Pas: Voces de Jovenes Colombianos
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009630
  21. From the Book and New Media Review Editor's Desk
    Abstract

    n Roxane Gay's CCCC 2021 keynote address she praised academic writing that people actually want to read, which

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009624
  22. Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom: Options and Opportunities
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009358
  23. My Caesarean: 21 Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009627
  24. Reflection on "the Field"
    Abstract

    Tiffany Rousculp T omorrow morning, I'm planning to talk with an old friend I haven't seen for nearly two decades. It's become commonplace to reach out like this during the COVID-19 pandemic; perhaps it's a kind of inventorying of our lives while we move through the months of uncertainty, reckoning, fear, loss, and more uncertainty. Along with many others, I've been building digital connections with people I used to (and still) love.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009372
  25. Oral Literacies: When Adults Read Aloud
    Abstract

    T his book is rare in that it focusses on an area of literacy studies that at first glance seems familiar, but which in fact has been remarkably under researched. Addressing this gap was thus one of the starting points of Oral Literacies: When Adults Read Aloud, according to its author, Sam Duncan, an adult education specialist, and literacy across the lifespan researcher, at

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009628
  26. Building a Community Literacy Network to Address Literacy Inequities: An Emergent Strategy Approach
    Abstract

    As a consortium of individuals, programs, and agencies that embrace the power of collaboration, the Washtenaw County Literacy Network works to shift conversations and practices surrounding literacy and literacy inequities. Using an emergent strategy lens, the authors describe the partnerships at the center of the network and the collaborative work that has emerged from these partnerships. The authors also analyze the adaptations recent events have generated in terms of the relationships and interactions that center the work, and they explore ways to rethink the idea of assessment for community literacy initiatives. Ultimately, the authors posit that emergent strategy helps networks like the WCLN navigate change in thoughtful and sustainable ways.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009367
  27. 'I knew this was gonna be chaos': Voices Collide While Decolonizing Intersectional Injustice
    Abstract

    Events following a display of archival photographs depicting a Navajo Civil Rights march that was sponsored by One Book/One Community of San Juan College illuminated racial tensions and competing injustices in the community of Farmington, New Mexico.These events are analyzed through a paradigm, indigenous-sustaining literacy, which could benefit common reading programs that conduct literacy work in communities with populations of indigenous people or border Native American reservations and are seeking to decolonize community literacy practices O ne late November afternoon, five members of the One Book/One Community (OBOC) committee hung archival photos of the 1974 Civil Rights Protests in Farmington, New Mexico, in a gallery space on the campus of San Juan College, located in Farmington.Several students stopped to look the 26 poster-sized photos selected by the committee from the Bob Fitch Photography Archive Movements of Change.The display was part of the OBOC programming associated with the committee's selection of the graphic memoir March (Lewis et al.), a retelling of Congressman John Lewis's civil rights activism.The committee recognized that March could provide an interesting connection to the 1974 Civil Rights protests in Farmington that resulted from the minimal sentencing of three white teenagers who had murdered three Navajo men and provide an opportunity for students and community members to explore this legacy and their situatedness in the community.The photos were compelling.One photo showed protestors marching down Farmington's main street.Another depicted a Navajo man holding a cardboard sign that read "veteran WWII.Holder Purple Heart.My son was kill [sic] by a white boy on the reservation." Three of the photos depicted protestors holding upside down American flags.Other photos showed groups of Native Americans facing off with law enforcement.Onlookers identified relatives in the photos and expressed their gratitude for showcasing an important moment in local history.Others stated they had no idea that there had been civil rights protests in Farmington and were glad to learn about them through the display.One onlooker, though, was not supportive.He said that the committee should not hang any photos near the glass display located in the gallery that is dedicated to veterans.Committee members agreed with the man, citing the need to be respectful.Still, displeased, he asked why the committee was displaying the photos.(Danielle), the director of the OBOC committee, explained the historical nature of the photos and the connection to the OBOC selection.She also explained

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009623
  28. Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing
    Abstract

    ecent social justice awakenings such as the "Me, too" movement and Black Lives Matter indicate a rising social consciousness that understands that perpetuating privilege is itself a form of complicity. In Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing, Rosanne Carlo fortifies movement against complicity as she decries current undertakings in rhetoric and composition that would discount expressivist writing as integral to the desired outcomes for writing in higher education. In particular, Carlo implores rhetoric and composition scholars to consider the ways in which the field's preoccupation with outcomes and professionalization ignore the material realties of class and race consciousness. Through a careful synthesis of theory, personal explication, and pedagogical example, Carlo offers insight into how a transformative ethos-rooted in place and the material-is central to writing that produces identification across difference.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009375
  29. Public Memory as Community-Engaged Writing: Composing Difficult Histories on Campus
    Abstract

    Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in nature. Using our own institution and our work with local Indigenous community members as a case study, we argue that students and faculty can employ community-engaged, public-facing, digital composing projects to effectively challenge entrenched institutional interests that may elide or even misrepresent difficult histories in public memory works. Such projects are a nimble and accessible means of creating counter-narratives to intervene in public memory discourses. Additionally, by engaging in public discourses, such work helps promote meaningful student rhetorical learning in courses across disciplines.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009618
  30. Front Matter
    Abstract

    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 makes reference 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.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009360
  31. Conceptions of Literacy: Graduate Instructors and the Teaching of First-Year Composition
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009359
  32. Poemas
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009631
  33. You Can't Say Pupusa Without Saying Pupusa: Translanguaging in a Community-Based Writing Center
    Abstract

    In this article, we share our experiences with the ongoing language and literacy practices and pedagogies of a bilingual, community-based writing center located in South Philadelphia's Italian Market. This writing center -one in a network of sites across Philadelphia and southern New Jersey -targeted bilingual, Latinx children from ages seven to eighteen. For the past four years, we have partnered with the center to create a translanguaging space. Here, we reflect on the experience of offering translanguaging writing workshops.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009364
  34. Back Matter
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009357
  35. Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009374
  36. Beyond 'Literacy Crusading': Neocolonialism, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and Possibilities of Divestment
    Abstract

    This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education.As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents.I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education.Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009365
  37. Whose House? A Dual Profile of Two Spaces for Writers in Camden, New Jersey
    Abstract

    The leaders of two Writers Houses in Camden, New Jersey, examine the intersections and divergences of their programming philosophies and practices, as well as their spaces' identities as rooted in, and in collaboration with, the communities they serve and the institutions they are part of. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they also explore what distanced programming has meant for the accessibility of their programs and strategic planning of their organizations.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009369
  38. Cultivating Legitimacy as a Farmer
    Abstract

    Beyond growing and selling food, women farmers perform literacy work to establish and maintain legitimacy. As part of a larger interview-based dataset, this article analyzes the literacy practices that one woman farmer, Lauren, undertakes in relation to her legitimacy as a farmer. Informed by literacy studies research and feminist rhetoric scholarship, as well as interdisciplinary studies on women in agriculture, the analysis here illustrates how Lauren performs specific literacy practices. Audiences' gendered expectations necessitate such practices, which Lauren performs in order to be understood as a farmer in a masculine, patriarchal landscape shaped by her family, customers, and broader farming community. These literacy practices include crafting an image visually, interacting intentionally through verbal conversations, adapting to audience assumptions, and taking on community leadership roles.

    doi:10.25148/clj.15.2.009619
  39. A Network Approach to Writing Center Outreach
    doi:10.25148/clj.15.1.009366

February 2021

  1. Keep Writing Weird: A Call for Eco-Administration and Engaged Writing Programs
    Abstract

    Influenced by ecological theories of writing, the author proposes a new model for writing curriculum design and community-based projects. The article provides a project of the Writing Initiative for Service and Engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder as an example of programmatic engagement with a community issue using an ecological methodology.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.1.009249
  2. Designing an Engaged Swarm: Toward a Techne for Multi-Class, Interdisciplinary Collaborations with Nonprofit Partners
    Abstract

    This essay proposes a model of university-community partnership called “an engaged swarm” that mobilizes networks of students from across classes and disciplines to work with off-campus partners such as nonprofits. Based on theories that translate the distributed, adaptive, and flexible activity of actors in biological systems to organizational networks that include humans, swarms are well-suited to providing a diverse range of responses to complex problems. As such, swarming tactics can be useful when applied to nonprofit organizations that do not have the capacity or time to redesign their communications strategy across print, web, and social media platforms. Employing a case study of three classes that collectively produced a wide range of multimedia artifacts for a nonprofit in a single semester, the essay illustrates how a swarm embedded within a university operates, and concludes by providing a schema for modifying swarms to future partnerships.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.1.009253
  3. Working within the System: The Effects of Standardized Testing on Education Outreach and Community Writing
    Abstract

    This snapshot describes and reflects upon two case studies of community writing projects between Emerson College and Boston Public Schools. Emerson College students were asked to tutor 10th grade BPS students for the English Language Arts portion of the state standardized assessment. Through both quantitative results and qualitative reflection, this paper suggests that approaching such standardized tests as a distinct genre of writing can not only help students to gain awareness for multiple genres, but also to recognize their own writing as an empowered and meaningful political form of social action.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.1.009254
  4. A Writing Retreat at the Intersection of WAC and Civic Engagement
    Abstract

    Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE instructors a willing audience for critiquing the structural oppression inherent in literacy and for valuing dialectical, linguistic, and genre diversity. This snapshot focuses on a faculty writing retreat that emerged out of a WAC/ CE partnership and demonstrates how such partnerships can open the door for critical WAC pedagogy.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.1.009258
  5. Introduction: Envisioning Engaged Infrastructures for Community Writing
    Abstract

    We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on "Building Engaged Infrastructure." Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015 1 and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations.This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring.This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action.According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was "to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures-an engaged infrastructure-to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded." 2 In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing.For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely.The same is true for what counts as writing.An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex.However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call "community writing." Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 "Imagining Community Literacy" meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 "Writing Democracy" conference in Commerce, Texas 3 , or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world.We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work.In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official "Position To this end, they hosted a conference of about 150 librarians, public historians, community leaders, and teachers and scholars from our field and beyond at Texas A&M-Commerce in March 2011 and have held pre-conference workshops at the CCCCs every year since.In July 2012, Michelle Hall Kells hosted about 25 leading scholars in community literacy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities.Clearly, the desire to establish a collaborative unit of some kind is high.3.

    doi:10.25148/clj.11.1.009244