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.

A t a time when both physical and symbolic borders from national borders to socio-economic inequality are at the front of political debate, the exigency of Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America cannot be overstated. The collection explores the rhetorics of borders and their immediate implications for our students, our classrooms, and our communities. The essays in this collection operate in concert to highlight how the rhetoric of lines impacts democratic discourse as well as offer sites of intervention for rhetoricians and compositionists.

Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, challenges scholars to see and write past the limits of their own methods and knowledges.She advocates for writing not only about what we know about rhetoric, but what we don't know.Restaino frames herself as a writer and researcher who is figuring out how to move forward after the loss of her friend Susan Lundy Maute to cancer, recognizing how experiences and people change us and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our ways of knowing and being.Restaino's writing values narrative in scholarly discourse, embracing the idea of emerging as a presence to readers; this idea manifests in her work because she writes as a witness to the declining health and death of her friend.Restaino draws on the works of Jim W. Corder often in her book, and her writing reminds me especially of his argument that emergence is a risk of going out alone in writing, an exposure of ourselves and our narratives to the other.He writes that this kind of writing "requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one's narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other" (Corder 26).Restaino demonstrates Corder's idea of argument as emergence in her writing, but she also forwards a key concept attached to this process that comes from feminist theory, the notion of surrender.She explains that we have to let go of a facade of wholeness, to render our subjectivity and knowledge for what it always already is: fragmented.She further describes how, when we face illness and death, we reach the unknown, and we have to let go, or release, "not only of what we know how to do (practice) and what we think we know (epistemology) but also of our subjectivit(ies) as writers and researchers" (13).In her own release of these things, Restaino works to come upon a different way of knowing and being after loss that she communicates to us as readers in the themes of her book, which I outline in this review.

In this edited collection, Bruce Horner and Laura Tetreault explore a variety of contributions that introduce and discuss translingualism and its application. Based on the CCCC 2013-14 preconvention workshops on "Crossing Divides I and II: Pedagogical and Institutional Strategies for Translingual Writing" and after the special issue on "Translingual work" in College English, 2016, comes this collection. With twelve chapters, divided in four parts, it makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discourse of translingual research and practice.

n composition studies, "the streets" is a term frequently employed to delineate a tangible public space and/or the discourse emerging from it, particularly outside the bounds of government or other institutions (such as universities), where people interact and live. The streets also represent a site of protest for political or social change, as when people repeat the mantra take it to the streets! In his 1963 March on Washington speech, Civil Rights leader John Lewis stated, "I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village, and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. " Many people believe that embodying this ubiquitous public space guarantees them a venue and an audience for their discourse, particularly when it takes the form of dissent.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

McCracken explores how material conditions encountered by sex workers-realities that "are created and disrupted by discourse and rhetoric" (xxviii)-have the potential to both deny and construct agential choice. To do this, she used an ethnographic design to embed herself within a community of sex workers as a method for asking questions and spending time "with women who exchange sex for money or drugs and the myriad people who come in contact with them" (191). Consequently, as a researcher and a self-identified advocate for sex workers, McCracken argues for more complex interpretations of the stories, ones that can lead to robust solutions to the systemic and individual traumas experienced by them. Through critical discourse analysis, she disrupts the historical and cultural interpretations of sex workers, showing how these constructed realities have led to ineffective or limited solutions because they have historically been hindered by an over-reliance on the archetypal binary of victim/ survivor. This binary obscures not only the kaleidoscopic meaning of these workers' lives, but also limits opportunities for responsible rhetorical agency, or what McCracken calls agential choice.

Within community literacy scholarship, ecological perspectives are used to characterize the literacy and language practices of various groups.Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, David Barton draws from biology to theorize ecology as the study of "the interrelationship of an area of human activity and its environment.It is concerned with how the activity-literacy in this case-is part of the environment and at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment" (29).The reciprocal nature of ecologies, and the way they account for the distribution, influence, and movement of organisms within and between environments makes ecology an ideal term for characterizing the relationships among groups, technologies, and cultures that influence the ways individuals learn, communicate, and interact with one another.In this keyword essay, I will highlight the appropriateness of ecology for describing networked communication and literacy practices, as well as offer an overview of how compositionists and community literacy practitioners have used ecological approaches in the work they do.It is necessary here to distinguish an ecological approach from one that is exclusively environmental.In 1989, environmentalist David Orr defined ecological literacy as "the demanding capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and to understand their relation to health and disease in human ones; knowledge of this sort is best acquired out of doors" (334).Ecological literacy in this respect is concerned with reading the natural environment.Orr's call for increased environmental awareness and attention to the ways humans impact environments remains increasingly urgent.However, this keyword essay focuses instead on how scholars and practitioners have adopted ecological metaphors to characterize literacy environments.The ecological approach I examine aligns more closely with that of ecocomposition theories than those of the ecological literacy Orr defines.In their Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser define ecocomposition as "the study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (seeking, writing, and thinking)" (6).Dobrin and Weisser's approach does not exclude environmental concerns but instead makes the role of language and discourse central in making those concerns visible.As Rhonda Davis suggests in her discussion of ecocomposition and community literacy, "while ecological literacy and the pedagogical approaches that result do not focus exclusively on environmental concerns, they have the potential to expand participants' awareness of such concerns" (80).

With neither national nor local-level discussions of Senate Bill 1070 adequately addressing bottom line issues such as marginalization, access, and civic engagement, an exploration of marginalized rhetorical acts can provide an informative lens for understanding challenges among marginalized people, their rhetorical tools, and their relations to public spheres. Through an exploration of anti-Senate Bill 1070 graffiti, this article examines how the practice of graffiti points to difference manifesting and playing out in the wider public sphere. It calls for scholars and activists to recognize graffiti as a rhetorical tool worthy of study and cross-cultural discourse.

A multi-faceted Shakespeare festival in a small town in rural east central Arkansas, part of a larger Community Literacy Advocacy Project, represents a concerted effort to alter the discourse of decline in this economically troubled region, but it also raises some challenging issues about how such projects distribute social and cultural capital among their participants.

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aid-to-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

Community publishing" sounds like a relatively quaint thing. In fact, the quaintness is built into the term "community. " As Raymond Williams noted in his Keywords, "community" has always been a "warmly persuasive word" that "seems never to be used unfavorably" (76). Joseph Harris, who builds on and applies William's definition to composition classrooms, gives two warnings about the use of this "vague and suggestive" term (99-101). First, community can be any group, any discourse community, and thus floats as a relatively empty signifier. The second use of "community" distinguishes one group as insiders who have shared purpose, language, and experiences in contrast to others. While more descriptive, Harris notes how this concept of community often glosses over the internal tensions and differences we know to exist in all communities. In Tactics of Hope, Paula Mathieu looks for a term to describe her work outside the university, also expressing dissatisfaction with "community. " She settles for "street" because "its problems seem generative"(xiii). Most scholars and most of our students live in what they call communities, not in the streets; the street denotes a place outside the university that isn't always warm and favorable.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement spotlights her experiences with Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center (CLC), an innovative project in community literacy initiated in 1990. The 2008 book details a rhetorical model of engaging the privileged and marginalized voices of community leaders, academics and urban teens into meaningful dialogue that values all perspectives and embraces differences as valuable resources. According to Flower, the discourse of academic cultural critique has taught "us how to speak up [and] speak against" (2 original emphasis). However, what we lack and what this text provides is a model that teaches us "to speak with others [and] to speak for our commitments [] for a revisable image of transformation" (2 original emphasis).

In being denied literacy under Portuguese colonialism and its aftermath and in caring for their own literacy and selves, African slave women and their land-born descendants, Cape Verdean women, became the protectors of many African-centered Cape Verdean cultural literacies (CVCL). Like Linda Tillman who specializes in culturally appropriate methodologies of research, I define cultural literacies as the various ways of “thinking, believing, and knowing that include shared experiences, consciousness, skills, values, forms of expression, social institutions, and behaviors” that tie individuals to different and specific discourse communities (4). I use CVCL to refer to literacies used by a large majority of Cape Verdeans with the understanding that Cape Verdeans also belong to social groups with other sets of literacies that are just as valid as CVCL (Gee vii-ix; Street 77). Koladeras may be understood as women who improvise, string together, and sing complicated, impromptu tales about their lives and those in their community, especially during feasts for saints. I argue that koladeras, because they are present in feasts for saints throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora, are transgenerational, transmigatory literacy educators of CVCL. In the pages that follow, I provide a brief historical account of Cape Verde as it pertains to the formation of CVCL, and I discuss—through the opening narrative, an account shared by Nha Titina (a koladera), and my own experiences—how koladeras are literacy educators responsible for the survival of CVCL throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora despite institutional attempts of erasure.

This study uses fieldwork to investigate the sponsorship of legal literacy within a court mediation program. This examination of institutional involvement in literacy sponsorship demonstrates the ideological nature of literacy by showing the importance of context, investigating literacybased relationships, and uncovering the intertwined nature of oral and written forms of discourse. Little research so far has examined the sponsor’s perspective on literacy, and this study also examines how sponsors may accrue and distribute benefits. Further, the study explicates an approach to literacy sponsorship through mediation which, while still embedded with disparate power relations, may provide an equitable literacy sponsorship model for other community organizations.

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local youth media organization. The study takes a detailed look at how a group of teens wanted to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggled with the confines of conventions of film as were represented by the professional documentary maker who was their instructor. The research combines sociocultural and cognitive research traditions while investigating the teens’ and instructor’s relationship and interactions concerning the production of rhetoric.

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.

As a distinct geographically situated production of public record of daily events that is often imbued with the ideals of the community it serves, the daily newspaper, and the editorial pages in particular, holds a powerful space in the collective mind as a forum and litmus for community opinion. This essay provides a case analysis of community opinion on sustainability and sustainable development in the small island nation of Bermuda through letters to the editor in the country’s daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette. These letters, published in that powerful space through invested and dynamic local media literacy sponsorship, illustrate the potential for effective discourse on environmental sustainability that, at least in Bermuda, constitutes productive community activism in its own right and also fosters additional literate social action.

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

Linda Scott DeRosier’s autobiographical accounts of literacy attainment in Creeker: A Woman’s Journey and Songs of Life and Grace reveal that entrance into a secondary discourse community via literacy can bring both pleasure and pain. Analyzing the identity negotiations DeRosier encounters reveals that although she experiences a sense of loss as a result of continued formal education, such schooling also makes possible the creation of her memoirs, which help overturn stereotypes connecting Appalachia with illiteracy.