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

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential–-institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, we examine the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, we argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.

Review of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell.

Review of The Language of Experience: Literate Practices and Social Change by Gwen Gorzelsk. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Drawing from my experiences as a Haitian Church of God (HCG) member, this article explores multilingual linguistic acquisition practices that support literacy development among church members (of multiple generations) of the Haitian diaspora. I examine how languaging and translanguaging shape identity, expression, and resistance across generations in the HCG. By sharing five moments of multilingual linguistic acquisition, I show how academic pedagogical theories inherently unfold in HCG settings, revealing the church as a preexisting informal literacy space. This work recognizes HCGs as sites of linguistic resistance, where heritage languages are preserved, adapted, and passed down.

Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.

In the fall of 2023, Jackson State University hosted the 5th annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. The goal of this symposium is to center the research and scholarship occurring in HBCUs within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. This special issue of Reflections highlights the work of those scholars who presented or intended to present at this symposium. The theme of the conference, Re-Imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a Woke White America, was intended to present ideas and scholarship that challenged white perceptions of wokeness and explored how this perception is rooted in anti-Blackness, and how Black scholars at HBCUs responded to this recent form off anti-Blackness.

In this article, we provide a reflection on a community storytelling project that took place at Kūtha Primary School, located in Kitui, Kenya in August of 2023. The project brought together faculty members at two Florida institutions in the U.S. with students and teachers at Kūtha Primary to develop and publish stories written by youth in grades sixth through eighth. By working together to develop the project objectives, mentor youth to write, edit, and illustrate their stories, and collaborate with a visual designer to publish the stories into a book that was shared with the community, our team learned about the value of collaboration and sustainability in developing transnational community-engaged projects. The article also emphasizes the need to embrace a multi-epistemological framework when developing and implementing community-engagement literacy projects.

It’s an absolute honor to publish Volume 24.1 of Reflections, which features articles stemming from the 5th Annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. This symposium was hosted at Jackson State University, and the theme of the conference was “Re-imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a ‘Woke’ White America.” I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Wonderful Faison, Director of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research at Jackson State University, who served as editor of this special issue.

In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign, one major assignment that asks students to work collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives. After doing so, I conclude by reflecting on the limits and challenges of doing mutual aid work in mainstream educational settings.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

In a sociopolitical context that continues to constrain reproductive agency, many organizations, media, and people construct pregnant or mothering teenagers as “things that are other than it should be” and many young mothers report being talked to as if they were a defect that must be addressed. People who experience dominant discourses of “teenage pregnancy prevention” are prompted to immediately respond to the rhetorical exigence of pregnant and parenting teen bodies. When visibly young pregnant or parenting people venture into public, they face an unpredictable and potentially hostile rhetorical arena. In this article, I reflect on a community-based workshop I facilitated in Boston from 2015-2019 at an annual one-day event for young parents called the Summit for Teen Empowerment and Parenting Success. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theories of interruption tactics, this workshop prepares young pregnant and parenting people with researched information and scripted responses they can use to interrupt and transform everyday moments in public places when strangers read their bodies as problems to criticize or loudly bemoan. However, findings from the surveys circulated at the 2019 workshop indicate that what participants value most about this experience is the opportunity to share and relate to one another’s experiences of reproductive injustice. This article offers feminist rhetoricians, community literacy scholars, and other scholar-activists an approach to sharing research findings and facilitating discussion in a useful way with those who embody exigences of reproductive justice.

This article describes a case study of an inclusive Summer Lunch Program, focused on nutrition, community engagement, and literacy programming. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally-funded, state-administered program designed to meet the needs of children from low-income families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. The most tangible outcome of the program is the food and the literacy programming provided to students during the summer months. Secondary outcomes include the development of new social skills, preparation for new educational experiences, less “screen time” for children, and learning about the community and the people in it.

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.

The unique perspective that adult learners have on writing and its instruction in low or no-cost education programs offers valuable information to both instructors of written components in these courses and to scholars exploring how writing in adult education functions as community literacy. After conducting interviews with instructors and students at six adult education programs, I identify significant tensions between the ways that instructors perceive their students to experience writing and the ways students describe their own writing experiences, particularly in the areas of process, enjoyment, and feedback. After situating low and no-cost adult education programs as sites of community literacy, I explore these tensions and propose that they contribute to and arise from instructors’ understanding that personal development through writing occurs with free-forms such as journaling, whereas students experience these benefits through prescriptive modes such as note-taking, rote copying, and dictation. I introduce a concept called the “curriculum of the self” to identify students’ use of prescriptive modes to enjoy and engage with writing, and I end by situating this concept in other tensions inherent to and ongoing in community literacy, including “turbulent flow” and sustainable practices of reciprocity.

The research in the area of community literacy has flourished along the lines of activist and curricular work. The field explores these lines in journals such as Reflections and Community Literacy Journal, a bi-annual conference The Conference on Community Writing, and with the formation of a non-profit professional society The Coalition of Community Writing. It has been nearly ten years since Ellen Cushman and Jeffrey T. Grabill published their special issue on “Writing Theories: Changing Communities” in Reflections. In the introduction, Cushman and Grabill called for attention to the use of “community,” especially in these activist and curricular areas, a question we wish to pursue further now.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move from an “informal” to a “formal” academic structure also echoed the emerging status of community partnership scholarship in the field. Increasingly, academic and community-based scholars were finding that interest in such work was expanding beyond the capability of traditional journals and series to publish. Reflections’ expansion was designed to meet that need and to provide it a formal “disciplinary” space. Indeed, this moment also marked the emergence of Community Literacy Journal. And it speaks to the ethos of community partnership work that, since that time, the two journals have fostered a collaborative ethos, both finding a home in the Coalition for Community Writing.

Review of Community Literacies en Confianza By Steven Alvarez.

Common in higher education in prison (HEP) and writing studies research is the idea that writing and education are transformative for incarcerated populations. While we believe that both can be powerful tools for reflection and social change among people on the inside, the prevalence of such transformation narratives can contribute to stereotypical depictions or understandings of incarcerated people and their literacy practices. Drawing upon our experiences with the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program, this article argues for expanded recognition and study of literacy practices, genres, and prison education beyond those typically discussed in HEP and writing studies scholarship. In doing so, we draw on the work of Martinez (2017) to present four personal scenes of writing and education as counterstories that intervene in master narratives about how incarcerated students are transformed by literacy. This approach not only grounds our work in methodology that values the lived and experiential knowledge of marginalized people but also enables us to push back against stock stories of prison writing that might inadvertently stereotype incarcerated students. Through telling our stories in this article, we call on academics to join us in composing different stories about incarcerated students that honor the complexities of our multiple identities and literacy practices.

When I first stepped into an official college classroom inside prison, I had no idea that my writing had value. I was always told that I was an articulate person, an attribute that made me stick out amongst my peers in and outside of the correctional facility. I took on the habit of quickly learning the local vernacular to better camouflage my love of complex, formal language. Yet, those pesky, multisyllable symbols still managed to sneak out of my mouth and into my conversations at the most inopportune of times. Slurring or mincing words could not mask the slip of “multitudinous,” “ambivalence,” or “fruition” from my everyday speech. In the classroom, however, as I began to write academic papers, I realized that my grasp of the formal constructions of the English language that came so naturally to me gave me a clear advantage in speaking the local lingo of education.

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical approach are identified, as well as the opportunities they offer to understand the risks and complexities of writing in prison. These differentiations in literacy practice highlight the necessity of building relationships among and between incarcerated LGBTQ+ people in prison literacy initiatives, and situate the conclusion that prison abolition’s demonstrated commitment to transformative social relations has a direct application to understanding and shaping prison literacy programming and practice.

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over building academic skills. The yoga students shared reflective writing on yoga-related topics—from philosophy, to tips and modifications for poses, to personal experience—in a monthly newsletter called “The Om Exchange.” The sound of “om” in yoga symbolizes the universal “oneness” of all living beings. The purpose of the newsletter was two-fold: to support reflective writing for deeper engagement with class material and to connect with the larger yoga community beyond classroom walls. While the yoga students only met in person once, the newsletter enabled them to build a sangha, or a local community with shared values that offers members motivation, guidance, support, and accountability in practicing those values. I suggest that the intersections between contemplative practice and feminist rhetorical listening facilitated these students, who may appear distinct, in finding “oneness” with each other; with its focus on building community, this writing project affords visibility to the power of forming partnerships around explicit shared values through the lens of sangha, and offers transferable methods for more conventional community literacy projects. A contemplative approach fosters social and emotional learning, including civic and democratic values, that bridges institutions, cultures, and differences for a more equitable society. As one incarcerated yoga student reflected: “If what we do for the good inside these walls doesn’t reach beyond these walls, then what’s the point—[this partnership] is the point and a start.” Read more at https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/19Sp_KINE_1410-1_Yoga/.

The articles centers on haunting genealogies and literacies. It asks the question, what lurks in the beyond and that is already present in and around? Working at the tension between inheritances and responsibility, I argue that a framework of hauntings invites a modality of a different kind of “scholar.” It calls for a careful reckoning, prompting an ethical injunction, one that demands of the “scholar” to learn how to address oneself to and work towards becoming a scholar of hauntings. Throughout, I assert that future without a place for hauntings is like a responsibility absent of a careful reckoning. The article concludes with a final question, “Are we ready to be a different kind of scholar?"

The future of higher education in prison remains a pressing question more than twenty years after incarcerated students were denied access to Pell grants. We are still considering questions about who should be incarcerated and why. The forces were different in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, but we still have much to learn from those who labored in prison literacy classrooms in those times. This project, based on oral history interviews with six teachers who taught in writing workshops and higher education in prison programs in the 1970s and 80s, a time when prison arts, education and literacy programs were undergoing drastic shifts resulting from social, political and cultural forces, can help us understand the evolving nature of this practice. Additionally, the interviews can help us understand how these teachers’ experiences of teaching in prison at a time when carceral environments were often dangerous and challenging reflect and refract the prevailing narratives of literacy at the time. As Stanton, Giles and Cruz note about their investigation into the history of service-learning, “we should build on the insights of those who have confronted these challenges before” (xiii). This project provides not only reflection on these experiences and the ways they can help us understand the past and future of literacy teaching in prison, but access to insights that are, because of the marginalized nature of this teaching, in danger of being lost to history

Review of Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison by Patrick W. Berry.

Applying the framework of coalitional rhetoric, this paper seeks to consider the rhetoric of prison literacy work and its implications for university-community relationships. Through an examination of four academic publications— three peer-reviewed articles and one published conference paper—that advocate or reflect the possibility of coalition-building between prison education programs and prison abolition. The selected texts represent how scholars of prison literacy and public rhetoric bridge abolition and prison education ideals by (1) mobilizing other scholars to join the prison abolition movement as well as (2) making a case for how prison education programs can contribute to the prison abolition movement. This essay explores how activist prison education scholars employ and adapt coalitional rhetoric within their scholarship, such as publishing incarcerated students’ writing to challenge dominant narratives, encouraging students to critique the PIC through critical pedagogy, helping other prison educators recognize the ways in which we are complicit, and much more. Considering the role of coalitional rhetoric in our work suggests the continuation of such coalition-building in directing prison education work to create social change beyond the university.

Call for papers for Reflections Special Issue: Prison Writing, Literacies and Communities, coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi.

Scholarship in community writing and service-learning has called attention to the lack of community partner voices in the assessments of writing partnerships. This article foregrounds those missing perspectives by reporting on the consequences of a community literacy program, Writing for Change, from the perspective of the high school youth involved. Analysis of high school student interviews and letters demonstrates myriad benefits of the partnership, extending from personal growth to a heightened sense of social responsibility. However, our study also reveals disconnect between participants’ development as writers and rhetoricians and their perceptions of that growth and its relevance to their academic work. We ultimately argue for the importance of building connections between the rhetorical activism often forwarded by community literacy programs and the “school literacies” that youth associate with writing.

Review of Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African-American Literacy by Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy.

This essay proposes that a “governmentality” framework applied to literacy sponsorship in refugee communities can help identify and critique competing agendas of control. By drawing on interview transcripts collected from an after-school program for refugee youth, the essay offers a glimpse of the different perspectives that shape tutor and aid worker discourse. Some of these discourses deceptively appear to be more “acceptable” than others, while sponsors can seem to be limited in their range of rhetorical strategies for talking about their work with refugee students. Michel Foucault’s (1991a) theory of governmentality shows how such discourses do not necessarily emanate from sponsors themselves, as if they are a central location of authority, but from power relations that are diffuse and contradictory. By examining these relations, a governmentality framework can help teacher-scholars in the community identify alternative discourses to those that shape the sponsor-sponsored paradigm.

Review of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (2017a) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (2017b) by Steven Alvarez.

Review of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard.

Review of South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies by Iswari P. Pandey.

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream1 and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of the journey toward their dreams. Sharing their narratives and photographs in public forums, the students challenged the individualist American Dream discourse, underscoring a collective approach instead. The outcomes foreground previously-silenced voices and provide an example of culturally relevant pedagogy within a structured literacy curriculum.

This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

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.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

Review of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

Review of Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age by Jennifer Rowsell. Routledge, 2013.

This paper draws on our time working together in a community literacy organization in New York, NY. In it, we describe the strengths of the program while also detailing our questions about how our “mentor/mentee” relationship was represented in the organization’s mission statement and fundraising rhetoric: specifically, the term “at-risk,” which was applied to the “mentees.” We describe the difficulties we faced when we proposed a writing workshop that challenged the organization’s mission statement and raise questions about the rhetorical tension inherent in education nonprofits’ reliance on funding. We ask community literacy nonprofits to consider whether their mission statement and fundraising language inadvertently individualize and/or racialize systemic inequities in public education and argue in favor of community-defined mission statements.

Review of Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2010.

This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secures their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and the public schools. However, because the police and schools help to subordinate community residents, the teens’ new identity sets them against their neighbors. The study describes how Mike and his fellow teacher instruct the teens in how to negotiate this irresolvable structural contradiction through double-consciousness. Drawing on interviews and observations, the author presents the perspectives of Mike and the teens he teaches regarding race, empowerment and justice in literacy education.

Our mission is to provide opportunities for local communities to represent themselves by telling their stories in their own words. We document stories of local communities because we believe their voices matter in addressing issues of national and global significance. We value these stories as a way for communities to reflect upon and analyze their own experience through literacy and oral performance. We are committed to working with communities, writers, editors and translators to develop strategies that assure these stories will be heard in the larger world. —New City Community Press, circa 2000

Though born in Ohio, Eli Goldblatt would soon be able to call several more cities home as his father moved the family to Army posts in the United States and Germany. It was this transience that pushed Eli to develop significant relationships quickly and to cherish them long after the family had moved again. This focus on relationships and a sense of movement through the world is something that continues to inform Eli’s career as a professor of writing and a community partner in literacy education. Just as a hitchhiker and a driver build their brief relationship through narratives, we also harness the power of narratives to build our relationships with others, with our communities, and with our world.

Contemporary nonprofit and governmental organizations actively mediate relationships through and compose representations of literacy initiatives and their participants’ literate abilities for multiple national and transnational audiences. Connecting Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship and New Literacy Studies scholars’ conceptions of literacy mediation to Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural intermediary, this article identifies critical processes of literacy intermediation during a 2008 “Voices of Women” national quilt project collaboration between nonprofit organization Create Africa South, the South African Parliamentary Millennium Programme, and women project participants. Intermediating relationships and processes intensify at postcolonial and multilingual sites of literacy initiatives, in particular through acts of framing and translating that literacy intermediaries engage. Identifying literacy intermediaries affords literacy studies scholars a critical tool to connect local sites of literacy to transnational organizational processes and policies.

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes—even subtitle changes—are no small things, so we begin with a note on what led us to make that decision.