This article explores the methodological impact of building and curating a transnational archive of working-class literacy practices, spanning themes of vocation, immigration, gender, race, and disability, from the ground up alongside the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. The article focuses particularly on how our disciplinary methods might be (re) shaped within a context of precarity when working with/archiving the literacy practices of disenfranchised populations. I argue that such precarity shapes how our methods/methodologies account for material realities—the laboring of bodies, influx of finances, physical conditions of the community involved—and changing social conditions that affect not only archival creation but also sustainability. I illustrate how The FWWCP Archival Project responded through a kitchen-table ethos in order to design the archive with the community’s expertise at the forefront.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical strategies. Based on its comprehensive focus on sustainability, ecological literacy, sociopolitical factors that affect communities, and a multitude of other factors that underpin social injustice, ecopedagogy may be uniquely positioned to offer a more holistic view than other composition pedagogies such as place-based education and ecocomposition.

At a time when accusations of American ignorance and anti-intellectualism are ubiquitous, this article challenges problematic assumptions about intellectualism and proposes an expanded view of intellectualism. It is important to recognize and to challenge narrow views of intellectualism because they not only influence public perceptions of and engagement with education and intellectualism, but they also affect what and how we teach in U.S. schools and aid in institutionalizing social hierarchies that privilege the knowledge, learning sites, and educational experiences of the cultural elite. To demonstrate the benefits of revising our views of intellectualism, I draw upon my observations of and interviews with adult learners participating in GED-preparation writing workshops.

Newspaper media create interpretations of marginalized groups that require rhetorical analysis so that we can better understand these representations. This article focuses on how newspaper articles create interpretations of sex work that affect both the marginalized and mainstream communities. My ethnographic case study argues that the material conditions of many street sex workers— the physical environments they live in and their effects on the workers’ bodies, identities, and spirits—are represented, reproduced, and entrenched in the language surrounding their work. The signs and symbols that make up these “material conditions” can be rhetorically analyzed in order to better understand how interests, goals, and ideologies are represented and implemented through language. Locating the street sex workers’ voices at its center, my analysis reveals that journalists include and omit words and themes that serve to highlight particular material conditions related to street sex work that influences the reader’s perspective of sex work as a whole. I then offer suggestions for making different language choices that subvert these disempowering ideologies.

In this ethnographic study of an organic foods cooperative, I examine community through three different facets—the Voluntary Association, the Lifestyle Enclave, and the Neighborhood. I use fieldnote examples to show how each of these community facets corresponds with the three visions of discourse for social change considered by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. Peck et al.’s most powerful discouse, community literacy, corresponds to the Neighborhood facet of community. The neighborhood holds promise for developing a Biospheric Literacy as developed by Anne Mareck in the introduction to this special issue. The kinds of meanings that she says acknowledge biospherically interdependent human and non-human community members are, I suggest, ritually enacted through neighborly communication. Further, it is through the cordial talk of neighbors that we communicate the kinds of understandings needed to affect positive social change and limit damage to our biosphere.