This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

This article intersects the US government’s imperialistic attitude with its ambivalent and sluggish behavior towards helping the island of Puerto Rico achieve disaster preparedness and recovery from hurricane events. To learn how Puerto Rican residents employed self-reliance and resiliency in the context of disaster to shift and extend past definitions of tactical technical communication, I triangulated US-based longform reports with a radio journalist’s logbook from Hurricane María. From the stories in these texts about how Puerto Ricans crafted communication, I conclude that this craftiness during disaster empowered the Puerto Rican community to enact post-Hurricane María political and social changes on the island.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form of community engagement. The case study presented here, which focuses on local activist writing (broadly conceived) in response to the Flint water crisis, illustrates one possibility for how activist archival research might be undertaken. Specifically, it highlights the tactics of black and working-class community members who joined together to make apparent how water contamination was affecting their own bodies, families, and communities through complex, multimodal interventions online and in the Flint community. Furthermore, this article emphasizes why such research is necessary and important, particularly when the embodied, scientific, and cultural knowledges of marginalized community members are represented little, if at all, in mainstream media coverage and normative rhetorics of risk.

This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork, and research about the issues that have shaped their lives. Through the reflections of the participants and sponsors, common themes—such as navigating dynamics of stereotypes and authority, reframing narratives of transformation, and building connections through both empathy and alterity—emerge. This article explores the opportunities and complexities that emerge when unincarcerated university students and incarcerated writers collaborate to create a project to help reshape rhetorics not only about addiction and recovery within a carceral setting but also about the potential of a liberatory experience within such a setting.

The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works—poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.

Near the end of the 19th century, literacy manuals were marketed to African Americans who sought to improve their reading and writing skills outside of a traditional classroom setting. I argue these texts had a worthwhile goal of providing literacy instruction for learners, but they were problematic in that they also served as a source for assimilation into the dominant white culture. Via archival research methods, I examine three of these manuals to discuss how they taught literacy in addition to assimilating students regarding family, politics, and religion—a marked difference from more traditional literacy instruction in the classroom. The lessons represented the idea that discrimination was not necessarily a problem caused by whites but the result of a moral deficit on the part of African Americans. One selection, “Politics,” published in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule (1905), edited by Josie Hall, an African American teacher, instructs, “I think it would have been better far/If the Negro had let politics alone/For the first thing he needed was a home/An education and clothes” (173). Another text Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge (1897), written and published solely by James T. Haley, an African American publisher, seems to be the exception, emphasizing a sense of community through point-counterpoints on language used to reference African Americans. These texts raise questions of how writing instruction past and present may assimilate students through the complicated idea of bettering oneself through education. I conclude that the texts represent a still-present paradox in education; the social advantages students seek are often unattainable without some adoption of dominant social mores, even though it may unknowingly imply a student’s own cultural identity is somehow deficient.

This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.

On a cold night in December 2010, the experimental documentary Rothstein’s First Assignment was screened at Virginia Tech. After the film, the audience asked questions of the panelists, who included Dr. Scott Whiddon, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Transylvania University and composer of the original music in the film; the film’s director, Richard Knox Robinson, an award winning photojournalist; and me, the film’s assistant producer.1 That night was the culmination of years of archival research, interviews, long phone conversations, planning missteps, rewrites, emotion, and gratification. The film has since been accepted to the Seattle International Film Festival, the Appalachian Film Festival, the Virginia Film Festival, and several other smaller screenings.

In 2006, a college professor found herself teaching freshmen composition students during the fall semester at Xavier University of Louisiana. This in itself was not unusual; what was different was that this "fall" semester was starting in January, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. Whether an out-of-towner who rode out the storm on campus or a New Orleans native who lost everything to the disaster, each student had been affected in some way, as had their still-shaken professor who was aware that, in time, not only would the shock wear off but the all-important memories and stories would fade. Throughout the semester Laborde shared her writing and her photographs (most taken in her recovery work as an Exterior Damage Assessor for the City of New Orleans) in order to encourage students to share their own observations and experiences in the form of journal entries and essays.

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the results of the first two years of collaborative practice and some critical reflection on the goals and realities of this model of collaborative community design in a post disaster context.

Departments of English are generally known for the storms within and their failure to calm the seas with minimal casualties. Even in times of fair weather, they often appear rudderless. What can be said about English can at times be said about other disciplines. What happens to a department, really a university, when external forces completely overwhelm internal ones? On August 29, 2005, the flood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina laid waste to university campuses in New Orleans. What this paper will do is to indicate how it affected a single department of English, what steps were taken toward recovery, and how using the strengths of the discipline could have carried faculty and students through the waters to higher, more secure ground.

At a moment when multiculturalism is inspiring new directions for studying non-fiction, new literary genres are emerging, including the oral history narrative. This essay explores the value of the oral history narrative through its recovery in a service-learning course. Interrogating questions of genre, subjectivity, ethics, and composition, this paper affirms the place of oral history recovery in the composition classroom and proposes innovative strategies to remake a basic assignment into an interdisciplinary event.