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 refers 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.

This article rethinks digital access and community literacy by sharing aspects of intentional engagement informed by social justice frameworks to establish community partnerships that empower communities both local and global with digital literacy. The article explores access, privileges, and positionalities that the author strategically utilizes to support the communities within her current locality and in her hometown Nepal. By showcasing multiple intentional and equitable partnerships informed via social justice frameworks, the article argues that we require a transnational context to redefine digital literacy and our students need to understand these contexts better given the demands of the current workplace.

e write today about a journey to purpose.We write about how to keep going forward when the world is on fire.We write about holding onto the transformational power of expression and relationship.We see building connections and finding your unique point of agency as essential for creating systemic change.The injustices from Treyvon Martin to George Floyd are all-too-frequent reminders that living in a Black body in the United States is precarious.The persistence and deadly consequences of racism can be almost overwhelming.Now we are in a geopolitical nightmare with the war in Ukraine.We saw the hatred and fear scaling the walls of the Capitol, plundering democracy.We see the right to vote more and more constrained.We see grandmothers and aunts, fathers and brothers taken by COVID.How do we keep going forward?This is an essay about holding onto hope.We strive to build a world of equity and shared humanity.Progressive scholars, community activists, and public intellectuals identify the barriers to equity and shared humanity as lying within white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal structureshistorical legal and cultural forces that justify and maintain systems of power.When the goal of justice and shared humanity is framed as ending "systemic racism, " many assume that organizations who focus on inner reflection and personal connection are too naïve to make a difference.This is an essay about finding the power to dismantle oppression by beginning with the personal.Systemic structures are real but starting there takes you away from looking at you.This is an essay about the process of sustainable social justice work: find your passion, pay attention to your pain, journey into your purpose.

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 refers 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, disability studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

iphop manifested during the Black Power Era.Black Studies scholars assert that Hiphop pedagogy is useful when locating Black diaspora movement for liberation (Saucier &Woods).Hiphop is inextricably bound to Black Lives Matter (BLM) era of the freedom struggle.The Black Lives Matter Hiphop generation is shaping freedom in their own terms, sounds, and likeness (Cohen).Begun by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan Cullors in 2013 as a hashtag after the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin, these loving and powerful Black queer women started a movement, emphasizing the sanctity of all Black life, prioritizing the most marginalized ones.The global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement provides synergy for Hiphop [and others] to develop coherent political frameworks to demand long overdue justice.However, some artists such as Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Waka Flocka Flame, 50 Cent, and others, appeared to be going down on the wrong side of history in their support of Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential campaign.These rappers backed Trump, despite his support of white supremacist groups, confederate monuments, police brutality, anti-Black Lives Matter tactics, failures around Covid-19, which cost disproportionate loss of Black and Brown lives, and backlash against the first Black president-Barack Obama.(McGrady) Hiphop and Trump make for strange bedfellows.We see these artists as wasting their clout on Trump.Barack Obama called upon Jay-Z to support his campaign and the rest is history.

This article interrogates how hiphop composition pedagogies can interrupt what the author terms the "hiphop illiteracies" that circulate in predominantly white institutions (PWIs). An analysis of four college writing classrooms that integrate hiphop texts at one PWI reveals pervasive anti-Blackness in student attitudes, but also in the research and course design as well as in department-mandated course texts. The analysis demonstrates the need for writing pedagogies that name and teach Black language, writing, and meaning-making practices while also asking students, teachers, and administrators to reflexively examine their own identities' locations vis-a-vis those practices. The author advocates a reflexive pedagogy that asks students to locate themselves vis-a-vis power as a starting point for investigations of language and culture. The author concludes that hiphop pedagogies have significant critical social justice possibilities in institutionally white educational contexts, but these benefits are not automatic and demand pedagogies of reflexivity, sociolinguistics, and intersectional feminism.

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.

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.

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-

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression—a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I argue that we need to recognize that mass incarceration has created a new a racial caste system and is the root cause uniting many social problems. Mass incarceration and neoliberalism work together to exclude millions of people from economic and civic life, stain them with moral condemnation so that they remain invisible to the majority, and divert public attention from the flaws in our political and economic structures. I use examples from a local nonprofit to illustrate how this framework offers a new approach to servicelearning and public writing.

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

This article has been written about, and with, the Swintec 2410cc, the typewriter model approved for incarcerated writers in the State of Nebraska and many other prison systems across the United States. The co-authors, one of whom is currently serving a six year sentence, relate their personal experiences with typewriters and typists as well as connect functions described in the Swintec User Manual to issues in community literacy. The "Left/Right Margin" function reflects some of the institutional and material constraints prison typewriters face; "Impression Control" invites us to think about the forces and functions governing representations of prison and prison writing; this writing tool and the environment for which it was designed, demand one submit to the process of "Corrections". Finally, this typewritten performance models and attempts to enact critical literacy and social justice from within and beyond the typewriter's cage.

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.

his conversation/article resituates the concept of reciprocity, as it has been theorized and enacted in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, within a larger framework of social justice, one that recognizes legacies of struggle, survival and perseverance. When situated within the Filipinx indigenous notion of kapwa, reciprocity takes a temporal turn not only in recognizing that building trust and reciprocity happen repeatedly over time but also in recognizing how enacting reciprocity extends beyond initial research contexts, participants, and outcomes. Enacting reciprocity requires slowing down in time and working with others in social justice work strategically, tactically, and repeatedly over longer durations. To see ourselves as reciprocal beings means that we continually see ourselves as members of a larger community invested in making structural asymmetries legible and open to deep revision.

Relying upon the work of a nonprofit, Food Security for America, this snapshot report explores how internships with undergraduate and graduate students offer opportunities to establish trust and understanding between university partners and community partners, particularly at the start of a relationship or project. The goal of this piece is to provide a framework for reciprocity, as well as exploration of projects for practitioners and stakeholders initiating relationships or interested in ways to incrementally expand existing partnerships with organizations and communities addressing critical food and environmental justice issues. It places the voices of graduate and undergraduate interns and leaders within a national nonprofit in conversation to better understand issues of activism and social justice that can be served through community writing and research initiatives connecting students and nonprofits. Approaches to assessing specific projects and participant engagement set forth a model for measuring the value and impact of internships in community-engaged work.

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.

This article highlights some of the successes the Humanities Out There (HOT) program at the University of California, Irvine had when partner- ing with progressive institutions, namely with the Chicano/Latino Studies program at the university and with the arts program in a local high school. The first program engaged students in exploring the history underlying their communities, and the second helped students to dramatize their life experi- ences before a local public using their home languages. Analyzing what en- abled HOT’s successes, I urge others sponsoring youth literacy to seek out, and make alliance with, progressive institutions within public education.

tatiana Jefferson's face shows on the large screen. Carmen Kynard looks straight at the audience packed into the Irvine Auditorium at University of Pennsylvania and asks us to consider how our teaching, our research, and our activism respond to the life and murder of Jefferson, a 28-year old Black woman fatally shot by police in her own home a week earlier. Kynard posed this question during her keynote address at the third biennial Conference on Community Writing as part of her overall challenge to community writing and literacy scholars, teachers, and activists not to confuse the job with "the work. " In her essay "' All I Need Is One Mic': A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff), " which expands on her keynote address, Kynard argues that a Black feminist imaginative is essential for dismantling white supremacy in our classrooms. Since Kynard's keynote in October 2019, many, many more Black people have been murdered by police, in the streets and in their homes. The antiracism protests happening daily in cities across the country as we write this Introduction in Summer 2020 only heighten the urgency of Kynard's question. How, in everything we do, are we addressing white supremacy and the unrelenting violence against Black and Brown lives? Through a series of meditations and counterstories, Kynard navigates her own and imagined classrooms to investigate why she has "been sent" to do the work she does. Her advisor, Suzanne Carothers, urged Kynard, "do not confuse the WORK with the JOB. " Ultimately, Kynard finds a violence in universities that we must counter through radical and disruptive antiracist work, which we must do often in spite of job requirements or the professionalization obligations that Kynard calls "the hustle. " In fact, "the work, " the real work of justice, "the healing and regenerative practices" we're called to, may in fact run counter to our jobs insofar as these jobs are tied to the violence of institutional, linguistic, and pedagogical racism. How do we center Atatiana Jefferson in our work? Celebrated, award-winning artist Michelle Angela Ortiz has spent the last twenty years as a public artist, community arts educator, activist, and filmmaker, using art as a tool for social change and cultural expression. In "Amplifying Community Voices through Public Art, " her CCW keynote address originally delivered at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ortiz shows us and explains several of her large-scale mural projects from around the world. In places as varied as Philadelphia, PA and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ortiz has worked alongside populations such as patients living with mental illness and farmer's market vendors. Ortiz explains how through word and image, her murals highlight the culture and memories of indigenous peoples in the United States and immigrant families separated from one another. In this essay,

As a graduate student in the humanities, I am often fearful that my labor is performed for the sake of performing labor. Exacerbated by academia’s in- creasingly precarious landscape, this fear requires a hopeful antidote: a new pedagogy of and for the public. Constructed through empathic conversa- tions between universities and communities, this new approach to pub- lic scholarship and teaching relies on the aims and practices of community literacy (e.g. sustainable models of multimodal learning, social justice, and community listening) in order to refocus the humanist’s work – particularly the disjointed labors undertaken by graduate students – around the cultiva- tion of publics and counterpublics. In turn, a pedagogy of and for the public also implements the digital frameworks and organizational tools of public humanities projects to enliven community literacy praxis. Graduate student conferences are one site where we could enact this jointly constructed ap- proach. By rearticulating these conferences’ capacity for professionalization, by expanding their audience, and by reimagining their form beyond the uni- versity context, I argue that we can establish sustainable programs aimed at expanding community literacies.

In this article, I take up the underrecognized and almost unstudied literacy work of Maria Varela, a Latinx Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff member in charge of developing literacy materials for African Americans in the South during the 1960s. I analyze the use of community activism in the multimodal literacy materials that Varela and African Amer- ican communities collaboratively produced. These filmstrips played a critical role in those communities developing a new ethos of place: an imagined and embodied relationship between local and national communities that offers a new identity, sense of participatory agency, and place from which to speak.

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.

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.

This paper examines the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cis-gendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

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.

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

Traces of A Stream: Literacy And Social Change Among African American Women (2000), scholars interested in literacy, identity, and social change have continued to pursue ways to include the voices of women who have previously been underrepresented within scholarly work.Indeed, these recovery projects-often considered part of a revisionist enterprise-represent important examples for those interested in the literary and rhetorical practices of women who have been overlooked based on gendered, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities.Illustrating this, scholars have developed a range of archival, rhetorical, and interview projects that uncover women as historical subjects who represent the myriad ways women develop and use rhetorical skills and literacies.For instance, in Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911, Jessica Enoch describes female teachers who contested the normative educational structures that oppressed marginalized groups and, rather, developed pedagogical strategies that encouraged civic participation.In another recovery project, Beyond the Archives, Gesa Kirsch describes the role of women who participated in a male-dominated sphere as physicians and civic advocates in the 19th century.In the same book, Wendy Sharer illustrates a new understanding of uncovering voices when she finds scrapbook examples of even her own grandmother's engagement with political literacies.These examples represent just some of the important work that has emerged in order to uncover and reframe the literate and rhetorical legacies of women from multiple subject positions.Erica Abrams Locklear's book Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies adds a unique contribution to these discussions by focusing on the literacies of women from Appalachia-a region, she argues, too-often characterized by a deficit framework.That is, Locklear challenges the gendered, regional, and classed stereotypes that represent women in Appalachia as "illiterate, " "hillbillies, " "Other, " or

Because food sovereignty and food justice are some of the most important issues of our time, issues that tie to topics of ecological collapse, peak oil, racism, poverty, corporate capitalism, overpopulation, disease, and hunger, servicelearning practitioners are well-positioned to help launch initiatives in colleges and universities across the country, in partnership with our local communities, to address community-centered food literacy(4).

Service learning has become a feature in higher education in courses ranging from computer science and graphic design to English and the humanities. These courses are designed to provide "internship" experience and enable students to use skills they learned in the classroom in "real world settings. " These "real world settings, " however, exist in some rather well-defined economic, social, and political system. Tania Mitchell suggests that traditional approaches to service learning either assume that such projects are already inherently related to social justice or are simply concerned with other issues such as the teaching of some rather acontextual "workplace skills. " There exists, however, a growing recognition that service learning could enable students to recognize and more deeply understand the social and economic structures they are asked to work within. The aims of this "critical service-learning" approach include the redistribution of power in the service-learning relationship, the development of authentic relationships between the university and community, and an unapologetic movement toward the goal of social change. At my university there is an interest in providing service learning in more traditional workplace settings, but there are also faculty members who are attempting to use these projects to help students understand the contexts in which they live and work. This keywords essay details some recent scholarship in literacy and critical service learning. It is by no means a complete picture of the efforts in this area but, rather, presents some interesting service-learning projects that might be duplicated at other institutions. All the projects provide opportunities for students to gain an understanding of the economic, social, political, and, in one case, environmental contexts in which they live. Writing plays a primary role in facilitating such understanding. Lisa Rabin's article "The Culmore Bilingual ESL and Popular Education Project: Coming to Consciousness on Labor, Literacy, and Community, " details a servicelearning project featured in a Spanish class at George Mason University. The project offered an alternative to more "market-based" service learning. In 2009, Rabin had been contacted by labor organizers from the Tenants and Workers United (TWU) in Culmore, Virginia to possibly have some of her bilingual students offer an ESL course for day laborers who were also new immigrants

Much of the current research on scientific literacy focuses on particular text genres read by students within the classroom context. We offer a cross-case analysis of literacy as social practice in multicultural communities around the world, through which we reveal that individuals with no formal education, as well as people with varied levels of schooling completed, customarily and actively engage in literacy events with the goal of learning about science as part of their everyday lives. We argue that these outcomes substantiate the notion that multiple ways of being scientifically literate actually exist and that scientific literacy in its most fundamental sense is crucial in science education, despite the fact that the most common definitions and notions of scientific literacy have predominantly considered its derived sense (Norris and Phillips 224).

This article highlights Education/Connection/Action (ECA), a locally developed community pedagogy deployed at a youth activism summer camp that served as a site for a community/academic teaching and research collaboration. Youth considered connections between a set of issues, including a local ban on Ethnic Studies, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Youth Sexuality, Health, and Rights. They drew from lived and learned literacies to inform participatory media projects that critically and creatively address restrictions on access to local knowledges and information with particular relevance to youth sexuality, health, and rights (broadly defined). In highlighting youth voices, desires, and needs across distinct youth communities, their collaborative productions demonstrate coalitional potential and a collective call for change.

In Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom, Bronwen E. Low argues for the significance of critical hip-hop pedagogies, particularly when engaging with racial and social conflicts in educational settings. Low collaborated with a teacher at an urban arts magnet high school in the northeastern United States through a performance poetry course that was taught using a hiphop and spoken word curriculum. Overall, Low's book is useful for community literacy scholars as an application and assessment of a popular practice and growing pedagogy in schools and community organizations.

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 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.

This article examines the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project’s challenge and legacy to scholars seeking to create an FWP-inspired project today. It explores how scholars in various disciplines engaged in the “public turn,” which has contributed to university-community research and teaching projects, can gain perspective and insight from learning about the FWP’s goals and accomplishments. The article focuses on the FWP’s pluralistic vision of national identity, which led national FWP officials to examine American diversity in encyclopedic guidebooks and through oral history, ethnic, and folklore studies. By exploring why the work of the FWP was ignored for a long time and how its vision and work gradually reemerged, I seek not only to provide a history of the FWPs reputation but also to shed light on the opportunities and responsibilities the FWP offers to current efforts to create new FWP-like projects for a new time.

This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our university and the year before his heroic, silent protest against racism with Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The author then turns to a linked effort five years later by local activist MacArthur Evans, a university student from Chicago. In 1973, Evans and other university students established the Norris Community Club (NCC) in partnership with residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood, to provide what they called “a clear channel of communication” between Norris and city officials. Both were successful, albeit it in very different ways. The author uses “a clear channel” as both the object of study and interpretive lens to examine these local efforts and their many implications for today.

Communities—and their literacies—exist within larger contexts, and writing has the potential to empower or oppress, to maintain the status quo, or to transform the collective community. School is one such context and, in recent years, the nature of writing has changed; digital writing skills needed to participate in contemporary society do not always resemble skills of traditional, school-based literacy. This article examines the teaching of digital writing as an issue of social justice by sharing the perspectives of several novice teachers who were challenged to alter their views of what writing is and how it should be taught.

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.

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.

The field of adult literacy is complex. This complexity poses many challenges for literacy programs. This paper addresses the challenges of collaboration, diversity, attendance, assessment and professional development as they apply to adult literacy programs. Recommendations for increasing the success of literacy programs are provided.