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 introduces and explores a cultural rhetorics project created by Clara Lechowski, a then-senior English Education major, with guidance from Alexander Slotkin, an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Clara’s honors project—a zine-style cookbook—blends storytelling, family history, and culinary tradition, code-meshing Polish and English to reflect the author’s Polish American identity. We situate Clara’s work within the pedagogical framework of the course in which it originated and present her zine as a model for culturally responsive writing practices. Her zine not only showcases recipes from her community but also serves as a rhetorical space where cultural identity, memory, and writing intersect. By sharing this work, we invite educators and students to see writing as a means of honoring and engaging with their own home communities.

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx/a/o communities as people face interlocking global pandemics: “COVID-19, economic recession, global warming, and structural racism” (Solorzano, 2021, xvi). While popular discussions have focused on how these systemic inequities have resulted in learning loss, we have found the focus on school-based learning loss also obscures experiential knowledge students have gained from home, work, and community activities (Delgado Bernal, 2001; González et al., 1995; Pacheco, 2012; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014; Yosso, 2006). In this article, we, a group of working student-researchers of Peruvian, Mexican, and Bolivian heritage and our research mentors, share six digital testimonios that examine how we learned during the ongoing pandemic. This multi-authored, multilingual, and multimodal article uses digital testimonio (Benmayor, 2012; Medina, 2016) as methodology (Pérez Huber, 2009, 2021) to demonstrate how, in addition to any learning losses and barriers we had experienced in our formal education, we also learned from our lived experience of the pandemic and wish to see that learning valued in formal education.

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class predominantly made up of immigrant students. The videos spotlight the students’ personal experiences with immigration, incorporate multiple languages, and explore themes such as cultural diversity and welcoming immigrant students into the classroom. Following the creation of the videos, the college students participated in a video chat with the third graders. This article offers an overview of the video project, student reflections, and guidelines for future pedagogical implementation. In addition, I reflect on the importance of pedagogical flexibility in the classroom and the ways in which multilingualism can expand our understanding of multimodality.

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.

In this article, we examine how Latinitas, a non-profit organization aimed towards empowering Latina youth through multimedia and technology, is a site of resistance. Latinitas provides linguistic, cultural, and technological resources as means to promote empowerment in the Latinx community, thereby creating and nurturing a space for Latinx youth. This article is written by two members of Latinitas: Jasmine Villa, Coordinator for the Youth Editorial Advisory Board, and Taylor Figueroa, a high school senior and Contributing Writer for Latinitas Magazine. Using personal experiences and testimonios, this article highlights how Latinitas sustains social justice efforts by providing an interplay of multimodal spaces (physical and digital) for Latinx youth to use as a platform for self-expression.

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

“All visualizations of disability are mediations that shape the world in which people who have or do not have disabilities inhabit and negotiate together. The point is that all representations have social and political consequences. Understanding how images create or dispel disability as a system of exclusions and prejudices is a move toward the process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography (75)

Service-learning courses have typically encouraged students to write for or about communities. Such courses rarely involve students writing with the communities they serve, despite the growing number of opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media. Scholarship on collaborative writing with communities in service-learning courses is scarce; research on collaboration using digital, multimodal texts is more so. Arguing that digital technologies have the potential to make service-learning more reciprocal and effective for all participants, this article 1) suggests that digital spaces are an underutilized technology in community-university partnerships; 2) discusses common barriers to using digital mediums collaboratively; and 3) recommends a set of best practices for introducing collaborative digital writing into service-learning courses.

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new opportunities to organize, communicate, and campaign utilizing these new rhetorical networks. I argue for a notion of “viral advocacy” for organizing in new digital spaces. Based on an on-going project using social media in my faculty union’s advocacy work, I demonstrate some possibilities for using social media for rhetorical advocacy.

In this essay, I explore the institutional and intellectual resources necessary to develop, revise, and sustain an outreach initiative involving new media composing with community organizations. A retrospective analysis of one course central to this initiative will be offered to illustrate what I term a praxis of new media. A praxis of new media unfolds at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies in order to produce transformative knowledge products with all stakeholders. I argue that particular alignments of material and intellectual resources must be in place if such community literacy projects are to sustain the capacity building of stakeholders.