Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

This essay establishes a context for discussing how community literacy pedagogy can benefit from critical engagement with the rhetorical actions of a grassroots social movement. Drawing from ongoing community literacy work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, I detail the prospects of speaking truth to power in relation to composition studies’ ongoing skepticism of rhetorics of social protest. I end by arguing that there are central aspects associated with oppositional rhetorics that can be encountered in community literacy initiatives and used to support forms of social change often excluded from conciliatory rhetorics.

Bonnie Neumeier is a long-time resident and community activist in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Cofounder of several grassroots organizations addressing issues of poverty and oppression, she works incessantly to develop resources that support healthy activism and leadership capacity in justice work. As an active participant in the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement since its founding in 1970, she has worked to make affordable housing a top priority and a basic human right for all. In the following interview, Neumeier reflects on her activism, along with her experiences as a community educator working with college students.

Brenton D. Faber's spirited account of an academic consultant's journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change. Blending Faber's firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative book is among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell. Faber argues that an organization's identity is created through internal stories. When the organization's internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization's identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization's identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization's discordant narratives. Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change.