This article explores the struggle to transport an ethos of white antiracism across different racial climates within two university contexts. The author analyzes the influence that students' home rhetorics of racism and their conceptualizations about “progressive” white identity have in (de)constructing a teacher's credibility to discuss racial identity and racisms in the classroom.

This article features pushback as a rhetorical and ethical pedagogical posture for engaging whiteness in the tight space of the university elevator. In addition, it outlines how the racialized space of the historically white institutions renders the ways faculty women of color such as myself exercise pedagogical care and teacherly ethos.

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

Abstract What exactly is untology? And why is it important for thinking about teaching effectively? In this article I argue that the most exciting opportunities for pursuing real change in pedagogical practices can be seen in the work of Jacques Rancière, especially in his controversial book The Ignorant Schoolmaster and (as this article traces) in his short essay “What Does It Mean to Be Un?” I argue that what is needed in educators today is an egalitarian aptitude for openness and what I am calling unlearning. Furthermore, through a close reading of Charles Baxter's short story “Gryphon,” I claim that the best teachers today are unqualified to teach. Thinking about qualification, as the current neoliberal regime would have us think about it—as a bankable phenomenon—misses the promise of education as a process of unlearning, unknowing and unbecoming. Education is untology.

Abstract In this article I critically consider the usefulness of Jacques Rancière's “politics of literarity,” as explicated by Samuel Chambers, for understanding feminist politics. Emphasizing the historical and grammatical dimensions of the speech acts central to a politics of literarity, I show that women's assertions of gender injustice remain tightly tethered to a police order whose disruption remains crucial to establishing the political bona fides of any such claim to equality. While Chambers embraces this paradoxical aspect of a politics of literarity—that it both disrupts police and remains embedded within it—I suggest that the paradoxes confronted by those who articulate the “wrongs” of the gender order perforce raise questions about the adequacy of literarity as a linchpin of democratic politics. I elaborate this claim by reconsidering the historical example of Olympe de Gouges, first as her feminist speech is parsed by Joan Scott and second as it is parsed by Rancière.

AbstractThis article contests Jacques Rancière's disinclination to theorize the gendered, sexual, racial, colonial, and other fields of power that dramatically shape contemporary possibilities for democratic disruptions. Drawing on Samuel Chamber's book The Lessons of Rancière (2013), I sketch out Rancière's account of democratic politics as dissensus, conflict, and rupture by particularly emphasizing his compelling notion of democratic quarreling and use it to illuminate disruptive practices within the U.S. civil and welfare rights movements. As valuable and productive as Rancière's ideas are, I nonetheless argue that his reluctance to heed the lessons offered by critical race scholars, postcolonial critics, feminists, and others about how histories of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and colonialism influence who remains uncounted or miscounted perpetuates the all-too-common tendency of Western theorizing from an unacknowledged center. I conclude with reflections on the politics of polemicizing and Rancière's recent elevation within the worlds of political philosophy and political theory.

Race and class are deeply embedded in the way the field and teachers think about linguistic and written performance. Yet, addressing and understanding racial and linguistic prejudice remains important to the fairness of one’s pedagogies, assessment practices, and curricular development. The author argues that social justice approaches to assessment require instructors and program administrators to rethink assessment concepts such as reliability and validity with an eye toward the ways disadvantage is embedded in the very construct task responses and assessment materials used to define quality writing. Because historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) present a unique blend of culturally relevant teaching and traditional (i.e., White) definitions of quality writing, they provide a unique site for inquiry into questions of writing assessment and social justice. Specifically, in engaging with the push-pull legacy toward language use and race that is found at HBCUs, the author indicates ways we might enable teachers, administrators, and students to resist monolingual, racialized consequences embedded in their views of writing assessment and rethink the foundational measurement concepts of reliability, validity, and fairness.

The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

“This analysis suggests that, in order to interrupt the injustices that flourish in Silicon Valley and in tech culture, we must rhetorically and systematically disentangle masculinity and whiteness from intelligence.”

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

Abstract This essay investigates the authenticity of Geraldine Hoff Doyle’s widely accepted status as the model for the World War II–era “We Can Do It!” poster. After considering the rhetorical nature of the so-called woozle effect, the analysis endeavors to counter this particular woozle by plotting a reverse narrative. Taking the form of a quest that moves backward through a metaphorical forest of visual rhetoric, the essay initially traces the sources of Doyle’s tale into the recent past and, subsequently, into the original visual context. At length, it debunks Doyle’s claim while identifying Naomi Parker as a previously unknown figure in the controversy surrounding the poster.

Reviewed are:—Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies Carmen Kynard A Language and Power Reader: Representations of Race in a “Post-Racist” Era Robert Eddy and Victor Villanueva, editors

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

This article and its five authors investigate how writing programs, writing instructors, and the profession itself engage in the erasure of race—of blackness and brownness specifically—and perhaps most importantly in a hesitancy to address white privilege.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

This column reviews four books that illustrate the idea that our locations shape our meaning-making processes. She notes how each author frames the social justice issue at the heart of her or his analysis, paying close attention to how visible the Indigenous presence is as well as the settler colonialism involved in each. The resulting readings are not so much as critique of these studies, but rather show how explicit attention to the settler colonial situation might inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues.

“The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) tells us a story through which we can more closely examine how the law has functioned in both constructing and affirming certain cultural discourses about human trafficking.”

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

“Clarifying the rhetorical potential for hashtags as an organizational tool demonstrates the caution with which protesters must approach the task of organizing online.”

Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

This article argues that writing centers must recognize themselves as already reading centered and prepare tutors to teach multiple ways of reading because current writing center scholarship does not help sufficiently with nonliterary reading work and because doing so would position centers to fully support students as they work within the wealth of “new” reading pedagogy and curriculum that has surfaced (or resurfaced) in recent years. It discusses the limitations of tutor handbooks in supporting tutors in reading-focused sessions and offers a tangible tool for helping tutors begin thinking and talking about reading work, ending with a call for writing centers to reconceptualize themselves as reading centered in order to embrace and explore “new” reading pedagogies through research and practice.

This article explores the emphasis on reading instruction in the classical pedagogical technique of imitatio. It briefly surveys scholarship in literary and composition studies to trace a short history of this pedagogy before turning to contemporary descriptions of reading pedagogy and showing how imitatio interacts with such practices.

This essay traces a branch of translingualism in US college composition to the era of open admissions, when the emergence of basic writing precipitated a new kind of reading on the part of composition teachers and a new understanding of what error or language differences might mean. It locates one of the antecedents of a translingual approach in the close reading derived from literary studies that developed out of the experience of basic writing, from Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations to David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error” to the present-day work of Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner.

Emancipatory projects that have sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen short of addressing the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought. This essay defines three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition and rhetoric (i.e., languaging, translating, and dwelling in borders) that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always index imperialist legacies of thought and deed.

Book Review| December 01 2015 In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity. By Jeannine Marie DeLombard. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012; pp. x + 446. $59.95 cloth; $27.50 paper. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Bjørn F. Stillion Southard University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2015) 18 (4): 798–801. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0798 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bjørn F. Stillion Southard; In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2015; 18 (4): 798–801. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.18.4.0798 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

“What galvanizes our aim is the increasing call by scholars across disciplines to critically engage violence and repression committed by and on behalf of the state. We seek to explore the ways in which the structures of the state explicitly and implicitly normalize violence against communities of color.”

ABSTRACT“Like race” analogies have been critiqued from various perspectives, and this article enters that conversation to engage those criticisms from a rhetorical perspective. In short, this article makes a case for resisting proscriptive judgments about these analogies until they have been contextualized and afforded their complexity as rhetorical figures. A rhetorical perspective of analogies engages them not as truth statements or as part of propositional logic (a monological view of communication) but instead as invitations to explore similar sets of relationships that are qualified through continued dialogue (a dialogical view of communication). Through a case study of a highly recirculated issue of the Advocate, this essay demonstrates the productive possibilities and limitations of analogical reasoning.

ABSTRACTScholars across the disciplines have turned to theories of recognition to interpret recent cases of racial profiling, police brutality, and the militarization of the police in black communities. Social activists, too, have embraced the concept, staging recognition scenes to claim political legitimacy. I examine the rhetorical contours of five recognition scenes and the sociopolitical objectives that recognition is expected to perform: 1) dialectical recognitions, which showcase how recognition works hierarchically through dyadic configurations of structural inequalities; 2) intersectional recognitions, which break down the oppressor/oppressed binary through multiaxle identifications and analyses; 3) human rights recognitions, which attempt to hold liberalism accountable to its ideals; 4) recognitions in between, which draw attention to the limits of classical liberal and neoliberal logics of recognition and create alliances that may be impossible based on the logics of recognition; and 5) postracial recognitions, which invest in the temporal fantasy that race is no longer a structuring principle in inequality and fail to account for the power in which recognition operates.

“In what ways does Indigenous social justice work differ from other kinds of social justice work? And what are some of the complications in building solidarity between social movements that focus on a diversity of issues?”

“Through the rhetoric of brownwashing, the Obama administration embraces heterogeneity by including acceptable and exceptional migrants into US civic life.”

“Acts of “vandalism” and activism alter the perception of history, contesting our past and present, and illustrate that systemic racism pervades American culture.”

“Can rhetoric teach us to “read” White supremacy? Can it teach us why Roof murdered nine people?”

“Citizens and immigrants alike consume racial ideology on an almost daily basis, and we are repeatedly forced to think of ourselves in racial terms even if we did not do so before.”

There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race.Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers’ one an African American man, the other a White woman’ in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers’ investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations.

Current research suggests that attention to language variation in teacher preparation can promote equity and narrow achievement gaps, particularly for African American students. However, persistent ideologies about language and race can stymie teachers’ desires for equitable teaching.Teachers who take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation still struggle in the moments of enactment due to expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es). In this article, I conceptualize these struggles as linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) and use discourse analytic and qualitative methods to present illustrations of preservice English teachers’ LIDs as they grapple with deficit language ideologies in relation to course work about language variation. In the focal illustration, I use positioning theory to illustrate the LIDs faced by a student teacher when responding to a student’s blog writing that included features of African American English. The findings show how this participant and others hadlimited awareness of how they were positioned racially until the moment of teaching in which they struggled to articulate and enact linguistically informed principles; in some cases, this positionality led to avoidance of future discussions of race and language. The findings advance past scholarship through generative description of students’ internalized deficit language ideologies and teachers’ struggles with implementation related to valuing language variation. Findings show the affordances and limitations of code-switching for addressing language variation in classroom interactions and the need for preparation about when, how, and why to have conversations about language variation, including greater understanding of language-related ideological triggers.

Thus far, professional editing has not been researched extensively in writing research. This article zooms in on sub-editing in newswriting as a form of professional editing, addressing three research questions: (a) What are the ways in which a news article’s text is altered?, (b) Are some types of news article altered more significantly than others?, and (c) Are certain news article sections more prone to alterations? Merging the contextualized insights of fieldwork with a corpus-based discourse analytic research perspective, we trace the differences (viz. additions, deletions, translocations, replacements) between the “initial” (right before sub-editing) and “final” (published) version of six different types of news article, (frontpage, headline, long, medium, short, and news wire article) in a corpus sample of 30 broadsheet articles. Our findings are first that—contrary to popular belief that sub-editors mainly “hack away” at news stories, or merely “trim the fat”—additions prevail. Second, we found that most interventions occur in high-stakes articles. Third, we discovered the largest number of interventions in the “entry points” of an article, that is, where—according to eye-tracking research—readers stop scanning and start reading. We discuss our findings in the light of training for professional newswriters.

Abstract This essay analyzes Ralph Ellison’s 1943 “Editorial Comment” from the Negro Quarterly. In the editorial, Ellison highlighted the shortcomings of black America’s attitudinal responses to World War II; as a corrective, he offered “critical participation,” which entailed supporting U.S. and Allied principles while remaining vigilant against white supremacy. I argue that Ellison’s editorial signified more than just a meditation on wartime political strategies; it also marked the articulation of black community. Through a close reading of Ellison’s editorial, I contend that the text grounded black community in the enactment of self-conscious doubleness. Ellison’s appeal to self-conscious doubleness contributed to African American intellectual culture in that it outlined an innovative way for navigating the constraints of “double consciousness.” Rather than regarding doubleness as indicative of a static identity, Ellison engaged it as a source of dynamic rhetorical possibility.

Current historical research is shifting its gaze away from metalevel studies of the field that examine the discipline’s history on the national level toward archival histories and case studies of underrepresented individuals, groups, and movements that aim to shine a light on the darkened corners of our past and provide alternative or parallel narratives of the field’s development while also hinting at the expanse of rhetorical and disciplinary history yet to be uncovered. With this observational frame in mind, the author launches into a rich and detailed review of three recent books on the history of localized populations. Each of these books adds to the field literature on the idea of microhistories; on histories of rhetoric and public voice; on the education and professional preparation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women; and on race and racism during this same time period.

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

This article explores how the sociohistorical context mandates literacy and education for AfricanAmerican persons living in a small community (“Pinesville”) in the rural U.S. South. Applying a sociocultural lens to literacy, the narrative perspective proposed is used to assert that literacy experiences are historically continuous, and rooted in shared cultural beliefs that have existed for African Americans since slavery. Such a perspective also apprehends an individual’s life history narratives as culturally saturated and situated within collective “frames of memory” (Brockmeier,2002, p. 24). Through the presentation of data poems for Miss Sally Harris, I argue that Miss Sally’s literacy experiences reflect a collective, cultural commitment to using literacy for self-determination, creating new opportunities for oneself and others, and preparing persons to use literacy for societal participation. I then link these beliefs to three mandates for literacy and education within Pinesville: (1) using literacy and education to determine one’s life course; (2)forging intellectual and social pathways through literacy and education; and (3) facilitating others’education and preparing persons to use literacy for “the dominating culture’s institutions” (Harris ,1992, p. 276). I conclude by asserting the significance of life history and data poems for conducting person-centered literacy research. I contend that within communities like Pinesville, literacy and education exist synergistically and can be useful for addressing issues of equity and access.