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.

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.

Book & New Media Reviews Book & New Media Reviews trial.These examples illustrate how people from the outside often have comparative social power.In acknowledgement of this power differential, Coogan engages in a set of ethical best practices throughout the project. 2 For example, he purposely did not read background information offered to him about the participants' crimes.This distancing allows the writers to reveal this information when they are ready.Secondly, all participants gave final approval for the way their writing appears in the book, and they were given the option of using a pseudonym.In a consent form, Coogan also made it clear that the writers could stop participating at any time.Notably, workshop participation did not obligate them to publish in the book.These measures provide opportunities for agency and indicate a profound respect for participants.Finally, Coogan and the writers made publication decisions together.In opposition to a topdown model in which the program facilitator decides how and when the stories enter the public sphere, publication with an academic press was a collective decision.As more people venture into the uncharted territory of carceral writing, it is clear that we need to think carefully about power and ethical practices.This work offers a crucial step in the right direction.The writing workshop has been succeeded by Open Minds, a program Coogan founded in 2010, that enables incarcerated people to take courses with college students and faculty from Virginia Commonwealth University.In addition, Coogan invites former participants of the project to speak in his prison literature classes.These approaches, along with Writing Our Way Out, are critical for countering monolithic conceptions of people who are incarcerated.The stereotypes circulating in the public sphere are counterproductive to the shift in public opinion needed for meaningful intervention in the broken U.S. criminal justice system.As a counterpublic text, this book provides a valuable blueprint for scholars, educators, and activists to become part of the intervention, and ultimately, the solution.

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

Chapter 1: Making Writing Accessible to All: The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers and The FED, by Nick Pollard and Pat Smart Chapter 2: The Challenges of Circulation: International Networking of Homeless Publications, by Paula Mathieu Chapter 3: Respect, Writing, Community: Write Around Portland, by Sara Guest with Hanna Neuschwander and Robyn Steely Chapter 4: Listen to My Story: The Transformative Possibilities of Storytelling in Immigrant Communities, by Mark Lyons Chapter 5: Oral Histories as Community Outreach: Toward a Deeper Understanding of a Rural Public Sphere, by Laurie Cella Chapter 6: Unfinished: Story of sine cera, a Community Publication in Process, by Rachel Meads Chapter 7: Here in this Place: Write On! of Durham, North Carolina, by Kimberly Abels, Kristal Moore Clemons, Julie Wilson, Autumn Winters and Mahogany Woods Chapter 8: Sharing Space: Collaborative Programming Within and Between Communities, by Mairead Case, Annie Knepler, and Rupal Soni Chapter 9: Katrina in Their Own Words: Collecting, Creating, and Publishing Writing on the Storm, by Richard Louth Chapter 10: Writers Speaking Out: The Challenges of Community Publishing from Spaces of Confinement, by Tobi Jacobi and Elliot Johnston, with the SpeakOut! Writing Workshop Facilitators and Writers Chapter 11: A Bunch of Us Beg to Differ!: Queer Community Literacy and Rhetorics of Civic Pride, by A.V. Luce

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.

Rhetorical theorists have argued that agency is a communal experience, but material conditions in jail and society often prevent prisoners and college students from experiencing it in meaningful ways that embrace difference. Challenging those conditions by bringing both groups together in a writing workshop enables everyone to resist discourses that would name them and to inquire, collaboratively, about pressing social problems like gun violence. This essay shows how a prisoner and a college student sustained that inquiry in writing, moving from metanoia or regret into kairos—the seizing of their day and the experience of agency. The ultimate value of that experience transcends the here and now of the workshop to become the building block of a better public sphere.

Youth perspectives are routinely absent from research and policy initiatives. This article presents a project that infuses youth participation, training and mentorship into the research process and teaches youth how to become policy advocates. Empower Latino Youth (ELAYO) studies the individual and systemic factors impacting sexuality and childbearing among Latino youth and seeks to reduce negative stereotypes and elevate the social standing of Latino youth. As a team-in-training, ELAYO provides adolescents, undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to develop research skills while learning the importance of linking science to policy. This paper was developed in collaboration with Latino youth.

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic inclusion. I argue that writing can be both a healing process and an occasion for exercising agency in a world of contingency and uncertainty. To illustrate, I describe several key events shaping the evolution of the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement in New Mexico. Taking a case study approach, I begin this chapter by examining the civic discourses of one prominent New Mexico leader in the post-World War II civil rights movement: Vicente Ximenes. As a leader, Ximenes confronted critical civil rights issues about culture and belonging for over fifty years beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a historical moment worth revisiting. First, I set the stage for this examination about writing, citizenship, and civic literacy by analyzing two critical rhetorical moments in the life of this post World War II civil rights activist. Secondly, I connect the Ximenes legacy to a growing movement at the University of New Mexico and the ways that we are making critical responses to current issues facing our local communities in New Mexico. By triangulating social acts of literacy, currently and historically, this article offers organizing principles for Composition teachers and advocates of community literacy serving vulnerable communities in their various spheres of practice.

A general overview of the Writing Democracy project, including its origin story and key objectives. Draws parallels between the historical context that gave rise to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project and today, examining the potential for a reprise of the FWP in community literacy and public rhetoric and introducing articles collected in this special issue as responses to the key challenges such a reprisal might raise.