We attempt to deliver our vision; a vision that depicts how theories by Gloria E. Anzaldúa can offer us ways to help people of color (whom we identified as broken under current political rhetoric) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems that can lead toward healing. We argue Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative, that… Continue reading Healing Broken Bodies and Cultivating Hope through Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. Link to PDF

In what can be called a “culture of disconnect,” students and teachers alike often want to engage in public discourse but do not know where to begin. The newsletters and newspapers produced to support the work of small, alternative hospitality houses and prison ministries reveal the role communication plays in the lives of active participants… Continue reading The Word On the Street Public Discourse in a Culture of Disconnect by Diana George

“The Word On the Street: Public Discourse in a Culture of Disconnect” | Diana George “Confronting Clashing Discourses Writing the Space Between Classroom and Community in Service-Learning Courses” | Caryn Chaden Roger Graves, David A. Jolliffe, & Peter Vandenberg “Text-Based Measures of Service-Learning Writing Quality” | Adrian Wurr “Helping Undeclared Majors Chart a Course Integrating… Continue reading Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2002

Bruce Herzberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Bentley College. He is the author of several articles on service learning, including “Community Service and Critical Teaching,” published originally in CCC and reprinted in a number of anthologies, and “Public Discourse and Service Learning,” published in JAC . He is also the… Continue reading Community Service and Critical Teaching A Retrospective Conversation with Bruce Herzberg by Thomas Deans

Veterans are cast into two roles in American public discourse: Hero (Hawrot Weigel and Detweiler Miller) and Threat (also called Rambo (Schell & Kleinbart, Valentino); Ticking Time Bomb (Hawrot Weigel and Detweiler Miller, Wood); and Victim (Katopes) among others). Only half of one percent of Americans serve on active duty, so the gap between military… Continue reading Review Essay: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home & See Me For Who I Am by Catherine St. Pierre

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional… Continue reading One Grad Student’s Reflections by Jaclyn M. Wells

This article explores the collaborative experience of a university professor and the coordinator of a local hate crimes project as we developed and taught a service-learning course on public dialogue. We begin by describing dialogic communication and suggest that it can be integrated into other forms of public discourse, such as deliberation and advocacy, in… Continue reading The Promise of Public Dialogue in Service-Learning Courses by Shereen G. Bingham and Patrick T. McNamara

Compositionists have long been calling for scholarship aimed at productively reshaping various institutional and public discourses of writing instruction. Jeanne Gunner, for instance, has called for more scholarship that can help Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) to formulate “critical questions” about their “historical practices and modes of self-representation” (275) in order to address how “writing program… Continue reading Review of The Activist WPA by Linda Adler-Kassner by Steve Lamos

Environmental issues have long been the ugly step-sister of news media topics, as well as other communication outlets. When they’re not being ignored for the more glamourous, ratings driven Cinderellas of the world, (sports, celebrity gossip news, etc.), environmental topics are often misrepresented, ill-explained, and downplayed for the public. Robert Cox and Phaedra Pezzullo successfully… Continue reading Review: Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere by Aleashia Walton Valentin

“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed… Continue reading Visualizing Street Harassment: Mapping the ’10 Hours of Walking’ Street Harassment Meme by Rebecca Hayes

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities. Link to PDF

If rhetoric and composition is taking a “public turn,” Frank Farmer cautions, let’s be sure that the “public” we imagine actually exists. Farmer examines what a public is—or, more precisely, what publics and counterpublics are. His close examination of the punk zines and his new term, citizen bricoleur, highlight the creative ingenuity of counterpublics, and… Continue reading Review: After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder

In this article I examine the nature of reciprocity and representation when mental illness is associated with the researcher and/or participant. Reciprocity has been a central concept of activist research methodology, which explores how academic knowledge can be used in the public sphere. Ellen Cushman defines reciprocity as “an open and conscious negotiation of the… Continue reading Dangerous Reciprocity: Creating a Madness Narrative Research Methodology by Cynthia Fields

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to… Continue reading Mad Women on Display: Practices of Public Rhetoric at the Glore Psychiatric Museum by Lauren Obermark & Madaline Walter

On July 14, 2013, a group of education activists in Southern California held the 2nd annual Raza Studies Now Conference at Santa Monica College and presented a draft of the Plan de Los Angeles (PLA), a manifesto for spreading Ethnic Studies in local high schools. Link to PDF

The idea of public rhetoric, the first term in this journal’s new subtitle, might seem self-evident. The language of political campaigning and party platforms, the arguments that formulate (or justify) policies and institutional practices, the calls for voter participation — all of this surely is what we might think of as public rhetoric writ large.… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction: Public Rhetoric and Activist Documentary by Diana George & Diane Shoos

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… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Diana George, Cristina Kirklighter, & Paula Mathieu

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on… Continue reading Public 2.0. Social Networking, Nonprofits, and the Rhetorical Work of Public Making by Phyllis Ryder

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… Continue reading Global Street papers and Homeless [Counter] publics: Rethinking the Technologies of Community Publishing by Erin Anderson

“We is people” reverberates throughout Tropic Tendencies as Kevin Browne illuminates how Caribbean people acknowledge the past but do not remain there. For those of us who are people of color and/or teach marginalized communities, this idea of acknowledging our past but not remaining there is a powerful one. For Browne, public rhetoric is central to… Continue reading Review: Kevin A. Browne. Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean, reviewed by Romeo García

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware… Continue reading The Pedagogical Implications of Teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for Global Public Rhetorics and Civic Action in the U.S. Writing Classroom by Elif Guler & Iklim Goksle

Coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi In recent years “mass incarceration” has become part of our national vocabulary, indicating a growing awareness about the cost (in lives and dollars) of maintaining the world’s largest prison population. And yet even as public discourses increasingly criticize the criminal justice system, we maintain the fiction of “crime… Continue reading Call for Submissions: Special Issue “Prison Writing, Literacies, and Communities” (Closed)

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)