This article provides an overview of robust social justice work already done in technical and professional communication (TPC) to introduce the transformative paradigm, an action research framework articulated by Donna Mertens. Research articles in TPC offer examples of the axiological, ontological, epistemological, and methodological tenets of the transformative paradigm. Together with a measured discussion of the paradigm, this Methodologies and Approaches article responds to calls in TPC scholarship to articulate and practice methodologies resonant with the social justice turn.

Evidence of political gridlock abounds amid both the worst viral pandemic in a century and civil unrest against a pandemic of systemic racism at home and abroad. In the United States, guns are a co...

In 1919 Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, wrote the novella, Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South as a persuasive appeal to white Southern women in Greensboro, North Carolina. This essay takes an intersectional approach to argue Brown rhetorically appropriates the mammy trope within a combination of slave narrative and Southern romantic novella addressing white female Southerner’s responsibility to their Black counterparts. The result is a novella providing evidence of Brown’s conscious use of African American Southern identity disrupting white Southern moral superiority.

As a Latinx writer who has attended and taught at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in South Texas, I have been disappointed to find that much existing scholarship assumes sameness among us, oft...

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

Events following a display of archival photographs depicting a Navajo Civil Rights march that was sponsored by One Book/One Community of San Juan College illuminated racial tensions and competing injustices in the community of Farmington, New Mexico.These events are analyzed through a paradigm, indigenous-sustaining literacy, which could benefit common reading programs that conduct literacy work in communities with populations of indigenous people or border Native American reservations and are seeking to decolonize community literacy practices O ne late November afternoon, five members of the One Book/One Community (OBOC) committee hung archival photos of the 1974 Civil Rights Protests in Farmington, New Mexico, in a gallery space on the campus of San Juan College, located in Farmington.Several students stopped to look the 26 poster-sized photos selected by the committee from the Bob Fitch Photography Archive Movements of Change.The display was part of the OBOC programming associated with the committee's selection of the graphic memoir March (Lewis et al.), a retelling of Congressman John Lewis's civil rights activism.The committee recognized that March could provide an interesting connection to the 1974 Civil Rights protests in Farmington that resulted from the minimal sentencing of three white teenagers who had murdered three Navajo men and provide an opportunity for students and community members to explore this legacy and their situatedness in the community.The photos were compelling.One photo showed protestors marching down Farmington's main street.Another depicted a Navajo man holding a cardboard sign that read "veteran WWII.Holder Purple Heart.My son was kill [sic] by a white boy on the reservation." Three of the photos depicted protestors holding upside down American flags.Other photos showed groups of Native Americans facing off with law enforcement.Onlookers identified relatives in the photos and expressed their gratitude for showcasing an important moment in local history.Others stated they had no idea that there had been civil rights protests in Farmington and were glad to learn about them through the display.One onlooker, though, was not supportive.He said that the committee should not hang any photos near the glass display located in the gallery that is dedicated to veterans.Committee members agreed with the man, citing the need to be respectful.Still, displeased, he asked why the committee was displaying the photos.(Danielle), the director of the OBOC committee, explained the historical nature of the photos and the connection to the OBOC selection.She also explained

ecent social justice awakenings such as the "Me, too" movement and Black Lives Matter indicate a rising social consciousness that understands that perpetuating privilege is itself a form of complicity. In Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing, Rosanne Carlo fortifies movement against complicity as she decries current undertakings in rhetoric and composition that would discount expressivist writing as integral to the desired outcomes for writing in higher education. In particular, Carlo implores rhetoric and composition scholars to consider the ways in which the field's preoccupation with outcomes and professionalization ignore the material realties of class and race consciousness. Through a careful synthesis of theory, personal explication, and pedagogical example, Carlo offers insight into how a transformative ethos-rooted in place and the material-is central to writing that produces identification across difference.

he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education.As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents.I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education.Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

AbstractThis article examines the role of critical reading in a racial literacy-focused composition curriculum. The author draws on student-produced data to demonstrate how the racial literacy curriculum prepares students to explore the situatedness of language, how individual positionalities influence the construction and interpretation of text, and how sociocultural ideologies are represented and disseminated through seemingly innocuous or objective reporting. Broadly, this article offers strategies for teaching critical reading to help teachers of writing improve students’ rhetorical awareness and engage them more fully as participants in a textually mediated society.

Despite the recent surge in social justice and decolonial scholarship, technical and professional communication (TPC) research remains a potential site of oppression. This article is meant to be a call to action; it attempts to (re)ignite discussions about what we value and how we express what we value. It encourages the field of TPC to be more responsive to the experiences and struggles of research participants—those we engage during our knowledge production process. I explore what I call oppressive rhetoric in TPC research with a specific focus on the term subjects in institutional review board forms and in the reporting of some TPC research about research participants. I assert that in spite of our best efforts in advancing the goals of marginalized groups and despite the forward-looking trajectory of progressive research, more work needs to be done to address oppressive rhetoric in TPC scholarship.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

NCTE/CCCC Cross-Caucus Present Tense Special Issue: “Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy.” Edited by Ersula Ore, Kimberly Wieser, & Christina Cedillo. This issue pursues answers for how BIPOC in the academy can build towards futures while on foundations of precarity. To this end, we seek 150-300-word abstracts from BIPOC scholars that address the question. All abstracts must be accompanied by an 25-75 author’s bio that includes institution, rank, department, and research interests. Please email abstracts and author bios to Ersula Ore at ejore@asu.edu by April 20, 2021 no later than 11:59 MST. Accepted submissions are due July 18, 2021.

This paper shows the development of an innovative teaching project conducted with students of two different degrees: Hispanic studies and modern languages and translation, at the University of Alcalá. This interdisciplinary experience sought to connect students taking their initial steps into poetry writing with translators approaching poetic translation for the first time. With this in mind, the creation of a bilingual collection of poems was proposed. Firstly, students in Hispanic studies would create some poems that could be translated, or rather recreated by the translation students. The main objectives of this interdisciplinary project were to promote creative writing, encourage group work, and increase students’ motivation – as well as to reinforce both the use of English as a foreign language and the practice of literary translation by crafting and subsequently translating original texts created by the students themselves. Moreover, the project is also beneficial for the enrichment and refinement of the education process in general and of poetry translation teaching practices in particular.

Keith Gilyard and Adam Banks’s book On African-American Rhetoric provides a roadmap for rhetoric scholars to engage, explore, and expand the study of African American rhetoric, a research field tha...

Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.

Alva Noë, who is a major figure in establishment philosophy, has been producing work that speaks directly to rhetoric in new ways that are important. This “In Focus” project explores how so, with the help of Carrie Noland on dance, Thomas Rickert on music, and, in a previous issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric 53.1, Nancy Struever on the basics of human inquiry including pictorial, which she thinks almost nobody gets right except for R. G. Collingwood, and perhaps now Noë. In each case you will see how “rhetoric” must be stretched by way of these lateral artistic, and at the same time essential, projects in the discipline per se.“Rhetoric” in these considerations is certainly not a vague notion that the things we do have persuasive goals, or audiences, for example. Though complicated in this discussion with Noë, “rhetoric” has precise meaning it's the job of this introduction to clarify, because it goes to our basic situation and it does so in a way that's unfamiliar.In Varieties of Presence (2012),1 Noë makes the argument for a rhetoric of experience explicit. Starting with the example of traditional art like song or a painting, Noë explains how mere perceptual exposure is not yet aesthetic experience. Only “through looking, handling, describing, conversing, noticing, comparing, keeping track, [do] we achieve contact with the work/world” (125). But this kind of contact with the world is not neutral; following Kant it falls in the domain of “ought”: our response reflects our sense of how one ought to respond to a work of art for instance. Hence rhetoric as persuasion: “aesthetic experience happens only where there is the possibility of substantive disagreement, and so also the need for justification, explanation and persuasion” (126). Is such persuasive rhetoric relevant only to traditional art forms per se? No—and this is Noë's bold move: he is really working on perceptual experience “tout court,” with art recapitulating the basic fact about perceptual consciousness and serving as a model or “guide to our basic situation.” “Perception is not a matter of sensation; it is never a matter of mere feeling,” Noë summarizes. Instead perceiving is “an activity of securing access to the world by cultivating the right critical stance,” or even more directly: human experience has a “rhetorical structure” (128). How do we miss this according to Noë? “The big mistake,” explains Noë, “is the overlooking of the aesthetic, or critical, character and context of all experience. There is no such thing as how things look independently of this larger context of thought, feeling and interest [classical rhetoric would similarly list the goals of rhetoric: docere, movere, delectare]. This is plain and obvious when we think of the experience of art. It is no less true in daily life” (129).Though resonant with the work of Struever and then with her major reference point Collingwood, or with John Dewey as Noë points out himself, this is a major reorientation of philosophy and rhetoric. It puts philosophy right next to other human activities that include the arts like dance, music, and painting. And it does so not as the addendum after basic human activities have wound down. On this mistaken model, philosophy and the arts including linguistic arrive only belatedly, after the real work is finished on the ground. Instead, according to Noë, these artistic and thoughtful activities are exactly what make us human in the first place, as they are the inherent possibilities that shape human activity from the outset: no language without the probing possibilities, like irony, that bind up language in a world flexibly, no music without the capacity for musical reflection that offers up the audible world one way not another, no dancing or for that matter movement without the possibility of the arts that put on display dancing and movement, indeed giving us the very world where things including us get moved around. Movement at its most immediate, to pick up this last example, is always already choreographed though not mechanically so—as Noë explains in his reply it is precisely the choreography that at the same time “sets us free,” opening up the distance whether more habitual or more explicitly mindful that makes the activity human in the first place. Rhetoric, then, names the inflection points—of movement, of language, of philosophy and the arts—that make the human situation what it is, with the scholarly activity we call “rhetoric” offering a kind of field guide to the environments in which we are.But, finally, are these environments just ours? They can't be. They are shared fundamentally, though not in ways that Noë explores in this project, despite the fact that he is trained, we should recall, as a philosopher of biology.Gesturing thus to an opportunity beyond this project, I conclude with biologist Joan Roughgarden, who helps us see how environments are shared across species, even down to the rhetorical structures that give particular environments their shape. Instead of selecting sexually for ideal types, argues Roughgarden in her groundbreaking work Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, a species needs “a balanced portfolio” of genes to survive over the long term (2004, 5), and sex, which entails a very wide (but not indefinite; 177) range of behaviors—reproductive and otherwise—is the social activity that continually rebalances a species' overall genetic portfolio in the context of dynamic environments. Instead of offering only background noise, indeterminacy of the sign (as we might call it from the semiotic or rhetorical perspective, where X is somewhere between attractive or repellent, pro- or antisocial, praise or blameworthy, and so on) is compatible with biodiversity precisely insofar as it constitutes the social. Antisocial eugenics and cloning are Roughgarden's counterexamples; just like the computer scientist knows that focusing only on the code while ignoring the execution environment is a mistake, cloning biologists who focus on the nucleus of the cell while ignoring the cytoplasm make the same mistake insofar as they have ceased to work ecologically (311).Then back to Noë at last, it is worth thinking at some point about the ways in which his activities that “put on display” are a subset of a more general biological capacity to triangulate, in environments that are always dynamic and often threateningly so. Now with the help of Struever, Noland, Rickert, and Noë, we can at least start thinking differently about the rhetorical opportunities our current environment offers.

Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...

AbstractIn 1925, Herbert Wichelns published The Literary Criticism of Oratory. By many accounts, the essay would become the founding document of the academic study of rhetoric and public address. However, in that same year, historian Carter G. Woodson published Negro Orators and Their Orations, which focused on the study of the African American oratorical tradition. In this essay, by way of speculative history and using my sanctified imagination, I wonder what an alternative or speculative history would look like if we can conceive Woodson as challenging the dominant (exclusively white) notions of public address and rhetorical praxis. By paying particular attention to Woodson’s introduction in Negro Orators and Their Orations, I submit that not only would we have been introduced to the richness and power of the African American public address tradition earlier but, more importantly, who we start to see as scholars and what we call scholarship would be different as well.I examine this by first, offering an examination of Woodson’s text, paying close attention to the introduction, where Woodson develops his theory of oratory. Second, I examine the African American rhetoric and public address scholarship between 1925 and 1960. Finally, I offer a speculative history of what could have been and what we can still do if we would include some of these voices and their scholarship in the public address canon.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

AbstractWhile many have critiqued the racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced nature of comedic rhetorics, few have considered how identity-based comedy, particularly racial comedy, functions productively, rather than merely oppressively. Studies of comedic rhetorics have primarily focused on Black and white comedians, but the increasing number and variety of popular comedians of color demands investigation into how comedians from different racial backgrounds use humor to rhetorically articulate the boundaries of their racial(ized) identities. This essay theorizes comedic rhetoric, particularly stereotypes in comedy, as a constitutive form of rhetoric that can articulate generative racial identities as they exist within the ambivalent spaces of in-group stereotypes. By pairing polysemy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, and Tina Chen’s theory of impersonation to analyze the standup performances of Asian American comedian Ali Wong, this essay ultimately represents a necessary intervention into understanding racial comedy and stereotypes as potentially productive sites for examining racial identity.

AbstractThe pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

Abstract In this article, the authors draw on their personal experiences as mid-career administrators and scholars of color to consider both the structures that limit, and opportunities for equity and social justice in, academic institutions. Although the primary logics that shape academic institutions serve to marginalize certain types of scholars and scholarship, they argue that institutions also contain gaps and contradictions where resistance is possible and from which alternative structures can be built. They identify and define three critical practices—storytelling, structural transformation, and allyship—that administrators can use to create a more equitable academy. The authors discuss why they believe it is important to invest in administrative and professional association service, where they have witnessed the gaps that make transformation possible, and how they have implemented critical administrative praxes.

This article focuses on how Street’s naming and delineation of the concept of “literacy practices” and the “ideological model” of literacy enable us to see and understand the literacy work of two 19th century African American women “literacy workers.” It introduces and provides an overview of the work of Frances (Fanny) Jackson Coppin and Hallie Quinn Brown and seeks to add early Black feminist voices of literacy workers in spaces often left out of dominant discourses around literacy. This article reveals how literacy for African American was, and is, tied to political, and social survival of a people.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

When we began drafting this issue introduction, extending from a previous introduction in which we committed “to do more and better in cultivating, sponsoring, publishing, and promoting scholarship that addresses racism and interlocking systems of oppression as public health (and/or other health or medical) issues,” we knew we wanted to continue to foster a space in which RHM scholars could ask new and newly exigent questions born out of the rupture of our current moment of swirling, interconnected crises, some longstanding and others novel.

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE instructors a willing audience for critiquing the structural oppression inherent in literacy and for valuing dialectical, linguistic, and genre diversity. This snapshot focuses on a faculty writing retreat that emerged out of a WAC/ CE partnership and demonstrates how such partnerships can open the door for critical WAC pedagogy.

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression—a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I argue that we need to recognize that mass incarceration has created a new a racial caste system and is the root cause uniting many social problems. Mass incarceration and neoliberalism work together to exclude millions of people from economic and civic life, stain them with moral condemnation so that they remain invisible to the majority, and divert public attention from the flaws in our political and economic structures. I use examples from a local nonprofit to illustrate how this framework offers a new approach to servicelearning and public writing.

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

This article describes an undergraduate health sciences course where students propose a community-level intervention that addresses a local health disparity. Students use community planning principles and health equity concepts as a final project in their 8-week online community-engaged course. The student-proposed project engages a community in health education or promotion-program planning and allows for faculty assessment of pedagogical decisions. A curricular commitment to health equity enhances the capacity and competency of learners to address the structural inequities that fuel pervasive health disparities among socially disadvantaged populations. Ethnocultural empathy or racial/ethnic perspective taking is used as a measurable competency. The final paper requires students to describe how the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) have shaped their proposed community intervention. They are also asked to offer recommendations on how to best mitigate the racial bias that may show up in community-based interventions.

This article describes and reflects on a collaborative, in-class activity that asks students in a business writing course to analyze the intersection of language, values, and social justice through a rhetorical analysis of corporate mission statements. The activity looks at how mission statements, as a genre, work to construct an ethos of civic engagement targeting a specific audience. Students reflect on values embedded in mission statements and compare these values with corporate action. Students then work in groups to create their own mission statements that direct their research and teamwork for their other, collaborative course projects. I offer this activity focused on mission statements as a concrete way to discuss social justice, values, and civic engagement in a business writing course; specifically, students explore how language impacts social justice and structural (in)equality.

This research assignment invites students in a first-year writing preparation course to explore topics of social justice through protest art. The course is taught at a small, private liberal arts college in a course for “emerging writers.” I have taught this assignment at a predominantly White institution (PWI), in a course where the majority of students are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Students choose a work of protest art from the campus library special collections, frame the social justice issue it addresses in a local context using local sources, and then write an essay that puts that research in conversation with their own story. Finally, linking public history to civic engagement, students create their own protest art as a community call to action. The multimodal, local, and personal nature of this writing assignment creates opportunities for students to see the connections between their emerging identities as writers and civic actors. This assignment can create space for students to use their multilingual identities to speak back to the structural inequality within our institution, developing confidence in their own voices to call for meaningful change.

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

This article has been written about, and with, the Swintec 2410cc, the typewriter model approved for incarcerated writers in the State of Nebraska and many other prison systems across the United States. The co-authors, one of whom is currently serving a six year sentence, relate their personal experiences with typewriters and typists as well as connect functions described in the Swintec User Manual to issues in community literacy. The "Left/Right Margin" function reflects some of the institutional and material constraints prison typewriters face; "Impression Control" invites us to think about the forces and functions governing representations of prison and prison writing; this writing tool and the environment for which it was designed, demand one submit to the process of "Corrections". Finally, this typewritten performance models and attempts to enact critical literacy and social justice from within and beyond the typewriter's cage.

Effectively addressing wicked problems requires collaborative, embedded action. But, in many cases, scholarly commitments, social justice, privilege, and precarity collide in ways that make it difficult for community-engaged scholars to ethically navigate competing duties. This article presents our efforts to support reciprocal community engagement in addressing cancer- obesity comorbidity and risk coincidence in underserved communities. Partnering with community healthcare professionals, we conducted an adapted Systems Ethnography/Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) study. SEQM offers an alternative ethical framework for community-engaged research, one that supports reciprocity through enabling participant-centered community self-definition, goal setting, and solution identification.

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

his conversation/article resituates the concept of reciprocity, as it has been theorized and enacted in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, within a larger framework of social justice, one that recognizes legacies of struggle, survival and perseverance. When situated within the Filipinx indigenous notion of kapwa, reciprocity takes a temporal turn not only in recognizing that building trust and reciprocity happen repeatedly over time but also in recognizing how enacting reciprocity extends beyond initial research contexts, participants, and outcomes. Enacting reciprocity requires slowing down in time and working with others in social justice work strategically, tactically, and repeatedly over longer durations. To see ourselves as reciprocal beings means that we continually see ourselves as members of a larger community invested in making structural asymmetries legible and open to deep revision.

Relying upon the work of a nonprofit, Food Security for America, this snapshot report explores how internships with undergraduate and graduate students offer opportunities to establish trust and understanding between university partners and community partners, particularly at the start of a relationship or project. The goal of this piece is to provide a framework for reciprocity, as well as exploration of projects for practitioners and stakeholders initiating relationships or interested in ways to incrementally expand existing partnerships with organizations and communities addressing critical food and environmental justice issues. It places the voices of graduate and undergraduate interns and leaders within a national nonprofit in conversation to better understand issues of activism and social justice that can be served through community writing and research initiatives connecting students and nonprofits. Approaches to assessing specific projects and participant engagement set forth a model for measuring the value and impact of internships in community-engaged work.

Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

Despite a tradition of theorizing rhetorical aspects that have only recently become popular in the field (for example, embodiment, materiality, spatiality, ecologies), African and African American rhetorics (A/AAR) are infrequently invoked in the U.S. Four tenets of A/AAR—that rhetoric is ecological, communal, embodied, and generative—capture dynamic and often overlooked qualities of public memory places. The International Civil Rights Center and Museum International Civil Rights Center and Museum. “About.” Sit-In Movement, 2018. Web. [Google Scholar]in Greensboro, North Carolina employs these tenets to create a powerful experience and encourage visitors’ social engagement. A/AAR counter hegemonic rhetorical traditions and rearticulate public memory as integral to social justice.

This article examines the 1893 lynching and suffrage rivalry between Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard in the WCTU and the racial tension generated between its Black and white members on sisterhood. It uses rhetorical analysis and frame theory to illustrate that Wells’s and Willard’s rhetorical conflict is disturbingly related to the present. Finally, the article argues that patriarchy is a resilient specter that haunts womanhood.

The Truman Commission created the modern community college in 1947 to democratize our system of higher education in America. Before this moment, higher education was thoroughly segregated by race, class, and gender. The modern open-admissions two-year college cannot, therefore, be understood simply as a convenient, low-cost alternative to four-year colleges. It is—by mission and mandate—a social justice institution.

This article explored a community-engaged, first-year writing course that partnered students with student activist groups on campus at Northeastern University in Boston. Their placement with peers connected them with the campus network and illuminated the ways that they could advocate for social justice in their new community. Students wrote in multiple genres as they attended the meetings and events of different groups involved with environmentalism, food justice, adjunct rights, and more. As students connected their social-change work to the classroom, they learned more about different genres of writing, from scholarly inquiries to multi-modal “deliverables” supporting their student groups. These final “deliverables” included posters, videos, prezis, banners, and even original music to be played at meetings or events. The fact that student worked with peers alleviated some common challenges of community-engaged learning, such as a sense of saviorhood. Instead, students felt a sense of civic investment and developed rhetorical flexibility that they implemented in the classroom and with their groups. Students found the course meaningful and valued the opportunity to get involved with campus activism. As they developed as activists and writers, students felt that the classroom and community spheres overlapped and informed each other.

Using a classroom experience teaching Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing alongside a contemporary controversy over racial identity, this article explores the value of literary study for intervening in student attitudes toward core curriculum requirements. The author argues that literature is uniquely situated to teach the skills colleges most want students to acquire in their general education curricula, in turn providing a crucial method for responding to the “crisis” of the humanities in higher education today.

With the massive shift to remote work, what does researching home-based workplace writing look like? We argue that the collapse of traditional work–life boundaries might allow for a renaissance of feminist research methods in technical and professional communication, specifically because the home is a domestic space largely associated with women. Inspired by methodologies like apparent feminism and examinations of positionality, privilege, and power, the authors suggest three research methods that help capture the intricacies of blurred personal and professional lives: time-use diaries, embodied sensemaking, and participatory data collection and coding. These methods seek to illuminate the invisible work of women, as well as the diversity and range of experiences of home-based workplace communicators.