This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

The following essay is a collective reflection in which the authors revisit the themes they raise in the edited volume Unsustainable, ask new questions, and suggest, again, that long-term sustainability might not be the most appropriate goal for every university-community partnership. Still, relationships, with all their variability, remain the lifeblood of community writing work. Just as the Conference on Community Writing (CCW) was a welcome opportunity to reconnect with old friends and learn new names, our programs are built on the strength of the relationships we build in the community and on our campuses.

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Books reviewed: Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics by Laurie E. Gries. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 324 pp. Dialectical Rhetoric by Bruce McComiskey. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 228 pp. Hospitality and Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession by Richard Haswell and Janis Haswell. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 232 pp.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 1, Fall 2012 issue.

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 note on what led us to make that decision.

Paula Mathieu is an associate professor of English at Boston College, where she directs the First-Year Writing Program and the Writing Fellows Program. For more than a decade she has also worked with the international movement of street newspapers, local publications that provide income and a public voice for people who are homeless or living in poverty. With David Downing and Claude Mark Hurlbert she co-edited Beyond English Inc: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy (Boynton/Cook, 2001). In 2005, Mathieu published her seminal text (in my humble opinion), Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. In 2007 she received the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award. She has published articles in College Composition and Communication (CCC) and in The Public Work of Rhetoric with Diana George. Mathieu is a CCCCs executive committee member and has been a member of the Reflections Civic Scholarship Outstanding Book Award committee for the past two years; she graciously agreed to conduct this interview at my request.

Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Editors Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon, with Amy Hilgendorf. Temple University Press, 2009.

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

(1999). Economic citizenship and the rhetoric of gourmet coffee. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 112-127.