PDF version Abstract 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… Continue reading “We Were Cut Off From the Rest of the World . . . and From Each Other”: Advocating for the “Whos” After Hurricane María

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. Link to PDF

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,… Continue reading Breaking Free While Locked Up: Rewriting Narratives of Authority, Addiction, and Recovery via University-Community Partnership by Taryn Collis, Felice Davis, & Jennifer Smith

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… Continue reading Activist Archival Research, Environmental Intervention, and the Flint Water Crisis by Julie Collins Bates

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… Continue reading A Hunger for Memory: Oral History Recovery in Community Service-Learning by Susie Lan Cassel

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… Continue reading CITYbuild Consortium of Schools: From Disaster Response to a Collaborative Model for Community Design and Planning by Sarah Gamble and Dan Etheridge

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… Continue reading Introduction to the Special Issue on Veterans’ Writing by Eileen Schell & Ivy Kleinbart