Drawing from a qualitative study, this article advocates for challenging myths about the traditional graduate student. We discuss how these myths create a sense of unbelonging for graduate students, and we call attention to the exigency for transforming graduate programs to validate and sustain students’ diverse literacies and linguistic resources.

This symposium builds from our discussions about communities, academia, activism, and access as four faculty members with different positionalities and perspectives to advocate for the protection of relations in the face of universities’ demands for access to peoples, communities, and lands. In each of four individually authored reflections, we recount our experiences working with and being in community as part of our academic practice. We extend from work in disability studies to explain that while access is generally understood to be good, and often is, access can also be the precursor to exploitation. We argue that to mitigate that risk, we can take on a positive gatekeeping function as part of being in community with care.

This article builds on the authors’ 2021 ATTW keynote, “The Power of Language in Building Confianza with Communities.” It emphasizes the importance of maintaining confianza (trust/confidence) over time and encourages researchers to share results in accessible and usable ways for community members who participated in their projects. Drawing from their work with a group of promotores de salud (health promoters) and the promotores’ work with the 2020 Census, the authors share guiding questions for both community leaders and researchers to consider when engaging in projects together. Ultimately, they discuss the importance of planning for a “dissemination phase” that leaves behind herramientas (tools) and does more than simply share information without regard for how community members may want to access and use that information in the future.

This article presents a narrative about community-engaged research, promotores de salud (health promoters), reproductive justice, and confianza. Confianza is often translated as trust or con dence, but this piece discusses the dynamic ways that it can function beyond the literal translation in research and community education. The co-authors discuss how they developed relationships with each other, community members, and the promotores de salud who work with Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI). This piece also describes how the PPWI promotores program began with a focus on community interests and how reproductive justice became a central part of its curriculum. Ultimately, we argue that confianza is an integral component to reproductive justice research, and as such, we encourage researchers to consider the role of confianzain their own work when pursuing community-engaged partnerships.

U.S. Latinx communities face increasing challenges in a political and social climate that threatens their reproductive and human rights. Recent reports have demonstrated numerous concerns for reproductive justice: stress and preterm births have increased for pregnant Latinas since the 2016 presidential election (Gemmill et al. 2019), immigrants are avoiding reproductive healthcare for fear of deportation (North 2019), and pregnant immigrants in detention centers are experiencing miscarriages and inadequate care (Bixby 2019).

With increased interest in community-engaged course design, instructors across the United States are looking for ways to encourage their students to become more connected with their local contexts and the larger communities surrounding their university’s walls. Moving beyond a “feel good” approach to making college courses more meaningful, I think it is crucial that educators recognize the need for explicitly anti-oppressive and anti-racist approaches to education in our world today. As anti-immigrant sentiments and white nationalist hate crimes surge in the United States alongside an explicit anti-Mexican rhetoric guiding policies with the current administration, there is a kairotic urgency to de-center whiteness in our curricula, to support community-based organizing in Latinx and other marginalized communities, and to recognize oppression within our own practices and institutions.

Through conversations with medical interpreters who work in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this dialogue piece illustrates multiple ways that medical interpretation can be further considered as a method and practice within the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). By sharing specific methodological frameworks for researching medical interpretation, the authors introduce possibilities for how RHM research can continue to engage in work that extends beyond English-dominant communication.