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.

Influenced by ecological theories of writing, the author proposes a new model for writing curriculum design and community-based projects. The article provides a project of the Writing Initiative for Service and Engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder as an example of programmatic engagement with a community issue using an ecological methodology.

We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on "Building Engaged Infrastructure." Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015 1 and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations.This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring.This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action.According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was "to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures-an engaged infrastructure-to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded." 2 In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing.For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely.The same is true for what counts as writing.An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex.However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call "community writing." Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 "Imagining Community Literacy" meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 "Writing Democracy" conference in Commerce, Texas 3 , or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world.We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work.In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official "Position To this end, they hosted a conference of about 150 librarians, public historians, community leaders, and teachers and scholars from our field and beyond at Texas A&M-Commerce in March 2011 and have held pre-conference workshops at the CCCCs every year since.In July 2012, Michelle Hall Kells hosted about 25 leading scholars in community literacy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities.Clearly, the desire to establish a collaborative unit of some kind is high.3.

Veronica: I bet that a bunch of our readers either have community literacy projects that they're working on or are thinking of launching, and they're wondering, how do I fund the work I do, and how do I explain it in ways that make sense to people outside of writing and rhetoric studies?So to begin, could you tell us a bit about your

tatiana Jefferson's face shows on the large screen. Carmen Kynard looks straight at the audience packed into the Irvine Auditorium at University of Pennsylvania and asks us to consider how our teaching, our research, and our activism respond to the life and murder of Jefferson, a 28-year old Black woman fatally shot by police in her own home a week earlier. Kynard posed this question during her keynote address at the third biennial Conference on Community Writing as part of her overall challenge to community writing and literacy scholars, teachers, and activists not to confuse the job with "the work. " In her essay "' All I Need Is One Mic': A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff), " which expands on her keynote address, Kynard argues that a Black feminist imaginative is essential for dismantling white supremacy in our classrooms. Since Kynard's keynote in October 2019, many, many more Black people have been murdered by police, in the streets and in their homes. The antiracism protests happening daily in cities across the country as we write this Introduction in Summer 2020 only heighten the urgency of Kynard's question. How, in everything we do, are we addressing white supremacy and the unrelenting violence against Black and Brown lives? Through a series of meditations and counterstories, Kynard navigates her own and imagined classrooms to investigate why she has "been sent" to do the work she does. Her advisor, Suzanne Carothers, urged Kynard, "do not confuse the WORK with the JOB. " Ultimately, Kynard finds a violence in universities that we must counter through radical and disruptive antiracist work, which we must do often in spite of job requirements or the professionalization obligations that Kynard calls "the hustle. " In fact, "the work, " the real work of justice, "the healing and regenerative practices" we're called to, may in fact run counter to our jobs insofar as these jobs are tied to the violence of institutional, linguistic, and pedagogical racism. How do we center Atatiana Jefferson in our work? Celebrated, award-winning artist Michelle Angela Ortiz has spent the last twenty years as a public artist, community arts educator, activist, and filmmaker, using art as a tool for social change and cultural expression. In "Amplifying Community Voices through Public Art, " her CCW keynote address originally delivered at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ortiz shows us and explains several of her large-scale mural projects from around the world. In places as varied as Philadelphia, PA and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ortiz has worked alongside populations such as patients living with mental illness and farmer's market vendors. Ortiz explains how through word and image, her murals highlight the culture and memories of indigenous peoples in the United States and immigrant families separated from one another. In this essay,

As a WPA and a service-learning director and practitioner, the author suggests connections between food studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and critical service-learning theory that involve mobilizing students to join in or help lead community efforts surrounding the local, organic food movement, food justice, and food literacy. The study is framed by questions of how composition instructors can create courses around issues related to the global food crisis to embed students in community-centered food literacy initiatives, and, more generally, how practitioners and WPAs can effectively promote and explain community-engaged pedagogies to higher-level administrators who question the value of the practice.