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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Effectively addressing wicked problems requires collaborative, embedded action. But, in many cases, scholarly commitments, social justice, privilege, and precarity collide in ways that make it difficult for community-engaged scholars to ethically navigate competing duties. This article presents our efforts to support reciprocal community engagement in addressing cancer- obesity comorbidity and risk coincidence in underserved communities. Partnering with community healthcare professionals, we conducted an adapted Systems Ethnography/Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) study. SEQM offers an alternative ethical framework for community-engaged research, one that supports reciprocity through enabling participant-centered community self-definition, goal setting, and solution identification.

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

While current community literacy scholarship foregrounds the importance of listening carefully to communities in the process of establishing, developing, and sustaining equitable and ethical community partnerships, the field does not yet offer explicit methods for practicing community listening, especially in the early, preparatory stages of the process. We address this gap by drawing on a case study of “preparatory community listening” in San Bernardino, California. In this project, we articulate an asset-based method for practicing community listening that emphasizes attention to discursive, material, political, and economic dynamics, particularly in communities shaped by deficit narratives.

hat does literacy mean, and why does it matter? Lauren Rosenberg posits that literacy, a term that remains contested, is not merely a set of skills but "a means of knowing and interacting in the world that can be shared" (154). Rosenberg's book is the result of a qualitative study about adult literacy learners' writing practices and their reasons for seeking literacy skills. Referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subaltern class, "that sector of the population whose experience counters the dominant and who are, therefore, shut out from dominant ideological concerns" (3), Rosenberg raises the question of whether those who have been positioned by dominant literate discourses as voiceless and without knowledge can gain the tools not only to be heard and to exercise their voices, but also to challenge the scripts that have been ascribed to them. Observing students at Read/Write/Now Adult Learning Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, Rosenberg focuses her study on four older adults, George, Violeta, Chief, and Lee Ann (pseudonyms), who are no longer in the workforce and who have voluntarily chosen to become literacy learners. She invites us to ask the important question: What are the motivations of these individuals, who have been rendered mute by societal values that equate literacy with intelligence, to become more literate?

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.

This qualitative study looks at how rural women in the American South have obtained access to digital technologies for reading and writing. Using the “life history” approach (Brandt; Hawisher and Selfe), we interviewed five women. We look at the challenges caused by the Digital Divide, at economies of access, including the financial factors that shape individuals’ uses of digital technologies for reading and writing, at the strategies that the women used for gaining access to needed technologies, and at the nature of sponsorship in digital, rural contexts.

During a series of writing workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that studentdriven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space. Reading, however, is free. —Quintilian (X.I.19)

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.

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded by community-engagement research can allow researchers to achieve insight into particular programs while contributing to local literacy. The author also argues that understanding the characteristics of particular programs can contribute to knowledge of the field of adult literacy education and help collaborators develop engagement projects that support adult literacy.

The subject of refugee experience poses compelling problematics for the study of community literacy. Yet, community literacy projects that support language acquisition, cultural orientation, and cross-cultural communication are some of the most important resources available to newly resettled refugees. Refugee students and adult learners arrive in the U.S. and are forced to learn English as quickly as possible while also having to figure out the new and complicated bureaucratic trappings of finding a job, making doctors' appointments, and enrolling in school. Refugees, however, cannot be considered one homogeneous group, and the issues surrounding refugee resettlement and community literacy play out in a myriad of ways. Community literacy research, particularly of the ethnographic variety, teaches us that very little can be generalized or concluded about literacy practice or literacy acquisition from one community to another. This observation cannot be overstated when it comes to the literacy issues faced by refugee communities in the U.S. In this keywords essay, I outline several aspects of refugee experience that carry important implications for understanding literacy in the contexts of refugee resettlement. While this essay is not meant to describe how refugees gain literacy or what their literacy practices look like-such work requires ethnographic study-instead, I offer a range of ways for talking about literacy in relation to refugee experience, particularly through the lenses of the interdisciplinary field of refugee studies and rhetoric and composition. Despite the implications refugee experience might have for understanding literacy in global contexts, the perspectives of refugees have been given only cursory attention. A synthesis of contemporary scholarship, however, affords us sufficient grounds to enact a more reflective, ethical, and responsible approach to understanding literacy-learning in refugee communities.

This case study investigates Carolyn, an effective volunteer ESL and literacy instructor of adult African refugees, in order to understand both what it means to be a qualified instructor, and also how community-based volunteer instructors may become more qualified. The study’s findings suggest that Carolyn’s qualifications are a combination of personal dispositions, such as cultural sensitivity, and professional behaviors, including self-education, seeking mentoring and outside expertise, and purposeful reflection on her teaching. Several implications for supporting community-based volunteer literacy and ESL instructors emerge from these findings.

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.

The purpose of this study was to explore one South Korean (hereafter Korean) mother’s literacy practices after she had migrated to Canada for the purpose of overseeing her children’s education. Using a case study method, we focused on language, media, domains, and purposes of literacy practices in Korea and Canada. Data were obtained through two semi-structured interviews, two home visit observations, a questionnaire, and collection of literacy artifacts. The documented changes in the mother’s literacy practices, along with the theoretical and methodological approaches used to document them, offer promising areas and approaches for future research about the out-of-school literacy practices of (im)migrant students.

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.

This article argues that methodologies for studying community literacy must be reexamined in light of advancements in technology and the research community’s relationship to those technologies. Based on her ethnographic study of an Amish community in southeast Ohio, the author offers a counterpoint to discussions of literacy and digital tools by showing how differing perspectives on technology led to complications during the data collection process. Furthermore, Adkins argues that methodologies cannot always be dictated by a template or by “best practice” and that researchers and IRBs should be more flexible in their thinking about how to treat research communities ethically.

This ethnographic research argues that reciprocity—the attempt to equalize the power dynamics that occur in working relationships—is a way to counteract the widely-used but rarely-critiqued deficit models that dominate the nonprofit landscape. If community work is not done with a near constant attention to power dynamics, programming that is intended to help clients actually replicates and rewards structures that take away agency from those being served in community programs. The practice of reciprocity offers this structure.

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a community literacy project on its participants. This year-long study focuses on a public library program titled Books in Motion, in which community members read children’s chapter books and meet monthly to watch the book’s film translation. Using a case study approach, the study’s data sources included small-group structured interviews, individual open-ended interviews, written surveys, field notes, and a reflective journal from monthly film nights. Findings suggest the following: (1) Books in Motion increased community literacy interactions, (2) the program motivated participants in innovative ways, and (3) the program offered participants access to literacy resources. As communities and public libraries seek to influence children’s reading today, Books in Motion illustrates reading as an act of community engagement.

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.

The work highlighted in this essay focuses on an ethnographic study of a group of African American women, members of Phenomenal Women, Incorporated, who come together not necessarily to read and write, but who, in their “sista space”—their club—often read and write when they come together. In this space, they promote self-help through reading and writing and use their literacy skills to promote civic action and engagement and cultural enrichment. This essay examines the literacy practices in which these women engage in two types of literacy events during their annual Black History Month celebrations.

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.

Being prepared with accurate, credible, and timely information during a disaster can help individuals make informed decisions about taking appropriate actions. Unfortunately, many people have difficulty understanding health and risk-related resources. This exploratory, mixed methods study assessed disaster information-seeking behaviors and comprehension of public health disaster preparedness resources by individuals at an adult literacy center. A convenience pilot sample of 20 adult learners (mean age: 53.1) was recruited. Health literacy was assessed using Newest Vital Sign (NVS) and modified Cloze (multiple choice) tests on biological terrorism and avian influenza information. In-person interviews were conducted to determine participants’ knowledge, perceptions, and information needs about disasters. Thematic analysis of interviews was conducted using NVivo7. Mean NVS was 3.11/6.00 implying limited health literacy. Mean Cloze scores revealed marginal disaster comprehension (avian flu: .46/1.00; biological terrorism: .48/1.00). Over half of participants with inadequate Cloze comprehension self-rated their understanding as “good.” Key themes emerging from interviews were: multiple perceptions about disasters, limited access to preparedness resources, need for visuals and plain language information, and importance of knowing where to go during a disaster. Study findings advocate for multimedia, plain language, and visual communication to influence adult learners’ literacy practices and self-efficacy in interpreting instructions and acting appropriately in preparing for and responding to disasters.

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 part of an on-going ethnographic study of the role language plays in the construction of ecological relationships to Narragansett Bay, the major estuary and defining feature of the State of Rhode Island, this article explores the transformational moments when body and place connect and the literate acts that result from this connection. The participants in this study share stories of profound loss, unwavering advocacy, and ecological consciousness that reflect an understanding of what it means to be part of an ecological community and advocate for healthy, just, and sustainable communities across Earth’s entire biosphere. Moreover, the participants in this study demonstrate that biospheric literacies begin at the level of the body, extend outward through an understanding of the interconnectedness of living systems, and are reflected in the way we care for our own immediate ecological communities.

In this qualitative case study of one tutoring relationship, I present new data on the extracurriculum; investigate tutoring as it occurs in community spaces; and argue that individuals can connect across systematic inequalities through personal conversations around picture books, photographs, and other visual and textual materials. Rather than ignore individual positioning within institutionalized power and privilege, tutors and writers can strengthen relationships and make tutoring more effective by evaluating how the systematic becomes personal and intimately known in one-on-one conferencing.

We introduce the need for scholars interested in literacy, geography, and cultural studies to examine the role of English language literacy in shaping assimilation experiences of recent immigrant groups. We consider a case study of English language self-efficacy among ethnic Chinese immigrants in the Philadelphia metropolitan area to suggest how language, place, and economic participation are mutually constructed. We conducted interviews with 21 individuals to gain insights about how they perceived this relationship. We also considered the effects of English language self-efficacy on the geographic extent of their daily activities. Perhaps it is not surprising that those who reported stronger English language skills had larger activity spheres in the metropolitan region. Among those who did not note strong language skills, Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown remained prominent as a place of economic participation and center for daily activities and cultural cohesion. We suggest that more attention to the role of literacy and language self-efficacy is warranted among geographers interested in migration studies, assimilation experiences, and workforce participation issues related to immigrant groups.

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.

This paper considers how community literacy programs factor into broader economies of literacy development. The author analyzes two Appalachian community literacy projects, Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnographic project in the Carolina Piedmont and Highlander Research and Education Center’s organizing efforts with the Appalachian People’s Movement, to construct an image of sponsors of diverted literacy, people and institutions that employ three interdependent tactics to usefully redirect the means by which literacy travels through the educational marketplace.

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in Appalachia inform a teaching philosophy that differs significantly from her colleagues. Her story invites us to reconsider how “the culture of power” functions as a formidable gatekeeper.

Integrity is commonly conflated with basic literacy in assessments of the skills workers need. This case study of a word-based character education program in Springfield, Missouri examines how business leaders may blame a lack of skills by employees on a lack of moral literacy. The premise of this essay is that the expression of a literacy program by participating institutions will be influenced by the political culture of the region in which the institutions reside. Considering the influence of political culture on community literacy programs is important because such influence is likely to privilege certain sets of socio-political and economic values, and ways of knowing, over others.