This article develops the concept and procedures of a large-scale, autoethnographic research process termed Community Inter-Autoethnography . This is a research methodology in which multiple individuals conduct autoethnographies and collaboratively synthesize their positionings to produce negotiated, community-level understandings. The methodical argument is that there is a need for a research process that allows multiple voices across large social groupings to be heard in order to capture and understand diverse and shared positionings within that setting. As argued, this increase in scale answers historical questions concerning the representativeness and applicability of autoethnographic research. Building upon the expansion of single-person autoethnographies to collaborative studies (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez) and developments in science education toward the inclusive Research and Education Community (Hanauer et al.), the current article explicates how autoethnographic research can be used with a large number of participants across a community. In Hanauer et al. this approach is exemplified in a study that included 106 participants co-authoring a study of the professional identity of Course-Based Research lab instructors. Community inter-autoethnographic research provides a way of reaching community conclusions based on both diverse individual experiences and negotiated collective understandings.

This study explores how a human-centered design (HCD) approach encourages written communication researchers to rethink methodologies when studying wicked problems, particularly in healthcare communication contexts. We argue for “methodological mutability” as a strategy to address complex and evolving challenges in rural healthcare communication. Using design thinking principles, we investigated how generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning can enhance medical communication, streamline documentation, and improve telemedicine usability. Our research revealed that rural healthcare providers view effective patient-provider communication as their primary challenge. This finding led us to pivot toward exploring how AI applications can structure and enhance patient narratives. We advocate for researchers to adopt a designer mindset, integrating methodological flexibility to move beyond problem analysis and instead develop solutions. By embedding HCD, design thinking, and methodological mutability into research design, researchers can prioritize practical interventions when working in spaces beset by wicked problems.

Finding a research problem is the first and most consequential choice a researcher can make, but making this choice about what is not yet known can leave the researcher in a hazy world of uncertainty until the project takes shape. While each person needs to find their own path through the haze, I have found that four kinds of questions help me locate and design a useful research project: what is in front of me; how I add up what I and others have learned previously; how the project fits in various perspectives in and outside the field of writing studies; and how the study advances knowledge and/or aids with practical problems. Only when the answers to these four different questions come together, am I confident of the value of a particular study. Often it takes, however, some kind of unexpected catalyst to bring the project into focus.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

This study examines how diversity and inclusion are communicated in LinkedIn job advertisements as workplace communication texts. Using qualitative, discourse-oriented analysis of job advertisements from global hotel brands, the study identifies recurring discursive frames through which organisations construct inclusivity, including belonging-oriented language, celebration of diversity, formal equal opportunity claims, and well-being–focussed narratives. These discourses are realised through specific communicative signals such as non-discrimination statements, values-based cultural cues, identity-affirming language, and references to inclusive policies. The study proposes the Inclusive Recruitment Communication Process conceptual framework, explaining inclusive recruitment communication as a platform-mediated process linking discourse, signalling, and conceptualised applicant sensemaking.

This article’s author situates late 19th-century essays by Andrew Carnegie within the rhetorical history of business and professional communication (BPC). A close analysis of the essays reveals that Carnegie relied on rhetoric to shape his public image as a benevolent business leader during a period characterized by significant socioeconomic divisions in the United States. Three primary themes— wealth , labor , and democracy —emerge, which the author argues animated Carnegie’s reasoning and arguments throughout the essays. The author concludes by recommending greater attention to the rhetorical history of BPC in future research and teaching.

How do we envision the future in community? The authors in this issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric help us interrogate this critical question. At a time when humanity is being attacked and challenged on multiple levels across institutions and borders, the articles in this issue provide a small glimpse into how community work can continue grounding us as scholars, practitioners, and humans seeking ulterior alternatives.

This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

Volume 25, Issue 1, Fall 2026

This paper highlights the reflective experiences of five graduate students who emerged as practitioner-scholars in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) through their participation in the Spring 2025 graduate course, Writing Grants and Proposals, at Sam Houston State University. The semi-simulated, Better Sam Program assignment, grounded in a community-engaged and social justice framework, required students to develop unsolicited full proposals addressing local issues or opportunities within SHSU or the Huntsville community. This assignment challenged students to align their proposals with community needs while engaging in ethical, research-driven practices. Drawing on extensive community engagement, students developed proposals that were not only realistic and contextually grounded but also reflective of broader social justice concerns. The reflective process, guided by structured questions, encouraged students to critically analyze their proposal development experiences and consider the broader implications of their work for community advocacy and social responsibility. This paper presents these reflections, offering insights into how grant writing can be a transformative educational experience that fosters critical thinking, ethical engagement, and social impact.

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential–-institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, we examine the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, we argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.

Chicanx filmmakers are consciously aware of negative reproductions or unproductions (meaning no representations) of themselves in mainstream motion pictures. It is a fact that Chicanx are underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Although Hispanics represent 18% of the U.S. population and contribute 21% percent of U.S. box office revenue, only about 5% percent of actors in top Hollywood films are Hispanic (Ryan 2017). Hispanic representation behind the camera is just as dismal. Unsurprisingly, Latinas in the U.S. are near non-existent in the director’s chair (Smith, Choueiti, & Pieper 2018). In order to provide a counter-narrative or to fill the absence of Chicanx on screen and behind the camera, Chicanx filmmakers are called on, now more than ever, to produce films through any means necessary. By doing so, we may advance our own knowledge about ourselves, our culture, experiences, and history, which may contribute to a new generation of Chicanx films.

Review of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell.

Review of Postcomposition by Sidney I. Dobrin. Southern Illinois Press, 2011.

Review of The Language of Experience: Literate Practices and Social Change by Gwen Gorzelsk. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

This piece explores a recent change in pedagogy for a professional communication program at a U.S. university. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of the program’s service-learning curricula. Students’ pre-pandemic challenges are described and compared to their exacerbated struggles post-Covid, especially the impact of misinformation and artificial intelligence upon critical thinking skills. Service- learning clients’ struggles too are analyzed. Intersecting service-learning pedagogy with thought from public pedagogy scholarship can address these challenges by enhancing reciprocity in service-learning relationships. A nuanced understanding of reciprocity in service-learning roles can address power dynamics and break free from restrictive academic conventions, fostering a more equitable learning environment. The piece includes an example of how a revised service-learning curriculum in grant writing affected students’ critical thinking skills and enabled client partners to advocate for their organizations’ constituents.

This issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric includes perspectives from students, faculty, and community members who illustrate the power of community in classrooms, medical centers, churches, and kitchens.

Drawing from my experiences as a Haitian Church of God (HCG) member, this article explores multilingual linguistic acquisition practices that support literacy development among church members (of multiple generations) of the Haitian diaspora. I examine how languaging and translanguaging shape identity, expression, and resistance across generations in the HCG. By sharing five moments of multilingual linguistic acquisition, I show how academic pedagogical theories inherently unfold in HCG settings, revealing the church as a preexisting informal literacy space. This work recognizes HCGs as sites of linguistic resistance, where heritage languages are preserved, adapted, and passed down.

Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.

This article is a case study of the fatal consequences of epistemic violence perpetrated against members of the Black community during encounters with white “professionals” such as healthcare workers and law enforcement officers. Informed by my own family’s experiences of the healthcare system in the U.S., I analyze two public cases—the neonatal death of a renowned Black scholar’s baby, and the gruesome murder of George Floyd—as twenty-first century examples of how racialized rhetorics of knowledge-making threaten the survival of Black communities, including babies. Using Dotson’s epistemic violence as a critical framework, I theorize how the disregard for a pregnant Black woman’s articulation of pain at a hospital in the white side of town and the gasps of “I can’t breathe” in Black men’s encounters with white police officers instantiate the denial of Black people’s epistemic status about their bodies, highlighting the fatal consequences of such denials for Black lives.

To advance our understanding of how community engagement is actualized in writing classes, I use qualitative content analysis to analyze how community partners and community partnerships are described on all 26 English syllabi posted on Campus Compact’s syllabus library. The findings reveal a wide range of terms that English instructors use to describe community work in their courses, a diverse array of the types of projects that are taught, and the types of community organizations that instructors partner with, as well as a noticeable disconnect between students’ community projects and the course’s learning objectives and assigned readings. This exploratory survey of syllabi in the field of community writing offers an opportunity for instructors to notice trends in their own syllabi, and this article offers recommendations for how instructors can redevelop their syllabi to center community perspectives and community work on this important contractual document.

In this reflective piece, poet and Writing Studies scholar Saurabh Anand honors the legacy of Peter Elbow's student-centered pedagogy. Through a villanelle poem, Anand explores Elbow's enduring impact on his development as a teacher and scholar. Written in the wake of Elbow's passing, this poetic tribute from an Anglophone writer and writing center personnel working in the US highlights the enduring impact of Elbow's work on inclusive, writer-centered classrooms globally. The piece invites writing educators to reflect on how Elbow's legacy shapes their teaching practices today.

This article utilizes an empowerment framework to provide a reflection from social work professors on how they met the challenges of a Doctor of Social Work (DSW) program. The program began with student orientation and learning at a scholarship-intensive retreat designed to prepare students for academic rigor and enforce the importance of a cohort community. The authors present information about how the cohort empowered themselves and each other through nurturing community experiences and relationships. Furthermore, authors share their individual experiences as members of the DSW cohort community. This article will provide insights for structuring social work programs on building a supportive community within the graduate program whether it be in-person, online, or hybrid.

This article introduces and explores a cultural rhetorics project created by Clara Lechowski, a then-senior English Education major, with guidance from Alexander Slotkin, an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Clara’s honors project—a zine-style cookbook—blends storytelling, family history, and culinary tradition, code-meshing Polish and English to reflect the author’s Polish American identity. We situate Clara’s work within the pedagogical framework of the course in which it originated and present her zine as a model for culturally responsive writing practices. Her zine not only showcases recipes from her community but also serves as a rhetorical space where cultural identity, memory, and writing intersect. By sharing this work, we invite educators and students to see writing as a means of honoring and engaging with their own home communities.

Our lives are moving images and sounds. Shapes and textures. Rhythm and truths...

Front matter for Reflections Volume 24, Issue 1, Fall 2024 issue.

VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

Controversies generated by the subjugation of man by man do not come without questioning or challenges to such a drive that would transform one faction of the human race into beasts of burden as a result of the hue of the skin. Both the questioning of and challenges to that heinous system aim at reestablishing an ideal egalitarianism among men. This paper strives to shed light on how Quaker advocacy for polyvocality at the inception of slavery, during and after the “abolition” of the same, has come to be one of the places of memory from which HBCUs could tap and enrich their wealth of peaceful, nonviolent resistance to make Black voices resonate in the 21st century and beyond with committed writing and activism that speak truth to power.

In the fall of 2023, Jackson State University hosted the 5th annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. The goal of this symposium is to center the research and scholarship occurring in HBCUs within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. This special issue of Reflections highlights the work of those scholars who presented or intended to present at this symposium. The theme of the conference, Re-Imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a Woke White America, was intended to present ideas and scholarship that challenged white perceptions of wokeness and explored how this perception is rooted in anti-Blackness, and how Black scholars at HBCUs responded to this recent form off anti-Blackness.

In this article, we provide a reflection on a community storytelling project that took place at Kūtha Primary School, located in Kitui, Kenya in August of 2023. The project brought together faculty members at two Florida institutions in the U.S. with students and teachers at Kūtha Primary to develop and publish stories written by youth in grades sixth through eighth. By working together to develop the project objectives, mentor youth to write, edit, and illustrate their stories, and collaborate with a visual designer to publish the stories into a book that was shared with the community, our team learned about the value of collaboration and sustainability in developing transnational community-engaged projects. The article also emphasizes the need to embrace a multi-epistemological framework when developing and implementing community-engagement literacy projects.

The origin of self-efficacy and academic self-efficacy are essential for self-identity and must be pioneered within the public education comprehensive curriculum to enhance academic success for Black male students. If our systems remain stagnant without the promotion of self-efficacy, the Cave Experience for African American males will continue to impact their social-emotional well-being from kindergarten unto adulthood. Black males must gain a deeper understanding of their cultural and historical contributions to promote, preserve, and gain a perspective of what perseverance and progress looks like while embracing high academic self-efficacy standards.

African writers need to publish their own books in their own home countries. The silencing of ideas and elimination of dominant narratives from Black authors was not something that was supposed to happen. Black writers in the Diaspora and those on the African Continent want to tell a new and different story. Such an approach will allow new voices to transform negative coverage in Western media into a new form of reportage that tells a brand-new story. People of Color should not be left at the margin. It should not matter where an author comes from. The purpose here is to unearth biases that exist in publishing houses. This kind of external validation is not necessary. African literature exists within parameters that are drawn by someone else who is somewhere else. Somehow the literature that someone might read in the West (in regards to Africa) tends to emphasize violence and corruption with an inaccurate image of inferiority.

Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate the importance of resistance in my first- year writing courses as well as the role that exploring social justice continues to play in my pedagogy.

It’s an absolute honor to publish Volume 24.1 of Reflections, which features articles stemming from the 5th Annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. This symposium was hosted at Jackson State University, and the theme of the conference was “Re-imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a ‘Woke’ White America.” I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Wonderful Faison, Director of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research at Jackson State University, who served as editor of this special issue.

Articles in the Spring 2024 issue of Reflections engage with the concepts of positionality and collaboration. The authors in this issue recognize their own positionalities as researchers, and they also interrogate the interactions between their own positionalities and those of their respective institutions and communities. As community-engaged researchers, we should consistently recognize how our identities, and our positionality (how we embody and interact with the world), influence how we will be able to conduct research in community. I hope these articles help teachers, researchers, and practitioners to ask important questions about how power structures shape how academics collaborate, or should collaborate, with community partners across contexts.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 23, Issue 2, Spring 2024 issue.

This paper examines the written, spoken, and performed texts at The Alamo to quantify and analyze the white narratives that are presented. Through the use of a content and discourse analysis, we evaluate the rhetorical strategies The Alamo uses as it communicates Texas history to visitors. Our findings indicate that Anglo/white people are labeled as heroes and Mexican people are labeled as enemies. Narratives of Indigenous, Black, and Tejano people are virtually nonexistent in spite of the vibrant community organizations like the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation who are fighting for an accurate and thorough rendering of the site.

This article interrogates the political contexts leading up to the University of Arizona’s designation as a land grant and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a white settler teacher, I reflect on how researching this history helped me confront how increasing access to the university was met by exclusionary gatekeeping mechanisms that function more generally in higher education. While historicizing this tension between access and exclusion at the University of Arizona, I recognized how racist and classist gatekeeping mechanisms emerged in the nineteenth century in ways that are continually recycled in the composition classroom. This case study provides an example of the sort of local historical research that encourages educators to unearth the colonial and racist infrastructure of FYW born from nineteenth-century educational policies and engage with the collective responses of BIPOC student activists from the civil rights movement. In this way, composition instructors can interrogate their universities’ institutional history to reimagine the role they might play in creating a more socially and linguistically just future.

The Youth Research Council (YRC) is a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project in which high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, and university-affiliated professors and administrators collaborate on consequential, justice- oriented research projects in their community. In this article, twelve members of the YRC reflect on our reasons for joining and remaining active participants in this community-engaged research project. Our discussion and analysis of “what brought us here” and “what keeps us here” offers a window into strategies and struggles for cultivating transformational reciprocity and sustainability within research partnerships.

This study examines strategies for emphasizing collaborative writing in a community engagement project. Doing so can enrich students’ experiences with ethical community engagement. Successful collaborative writing provides students with competencies—rhetorical knowledge, confidence, understanding of transfer, and appreciation for diverse perspectives—that are key building blocks in supporting students as they deepen their engagement with social issues. Current research demonstrates how collaborative writing and community engagement experiences provide overlapping benefits. Pairing them has the potential to amplify students’ learning, including their understanding of their ability and responsibility to use writing as a tool to affect meaningful change.

This paper emphasizes the importance of mêtis—adaptable and responsive rhetorical action—in achieving responsible, sustainable, and access-based community action for social justice. It specifically connects this concept to disability and access, arguing that centering disability and the embodied material experiences of disabled people are central to sustainable, effective, and ethical civic engagement practices for all. By drawing on the author’s experience working with the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) in Orlando, Florida, this paper details the challenges encountered and the responsive decisions made, emphasizing how integrating disability-centered methodologies foster inclusivity and accessibility. Ultimately, this paper argues that a mêtis approach informed by disability perspectives allows for effective and ethical civic engagement that prioritizes access and empowers marginalized communities.

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx/a/o communities as people face interlocking global pandemics: “COVID-19, economic recession, global warming, and structural racism” (Solorzano, 2021, xvi). While popular discussions have focused on how these systemic inequities have resulted in learning loss, we have found the focus on school-based learning loss also obscures experiential knowledge students have gained from home, work, and community activities (Delgado Bernal, 2001; González et al., 1995; Pacheco, 2012; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014; Yosso, 2006). In this article, we, a group of working student-researchers of Peruvian, Mexican, and Bolivian heritage and our research mentors, share six digital testimonios that examine how we learned during the ongoing pandemic. This multi-authored, multilingual, and multimodal article uses digital testimonio (Benmayor, 2012; Medina, 2016) as methodology (Pérez Huber, 2009, 2021) to demonstrate how, in addition to any learning losses and barriers we had experienced in our formal education, we also learned from our lived experience of the pandemic and wish to see that learning valued in formal education.

In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign, one major assignment that asks students to work collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives. After doing so, I conclude by reflecting on the limits and challenges of doing mutual aid work in mainstream educational settings.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 23, Issue 1, Fall 2023 issue.

This article focuses on the lived experiences of multilingual writing teachers and presents what we, the authors, call “A Rhetoric of Accent Fear,” which introduces accent fear as a form of linguistic racism. Through this framework, we reflect on our stories of accent fear as multilingual writing teachers; we practice forming relational connections across our experiences; and we use this relational connection to offer strategies for other multilingual rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers to navigate these sites of tension and in turn, challenge students’ accent fears.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

In our changing educational environment, understanding the way students experience community-engaged writing pedagogy has become more important than ever. Following a semester-long qualitative study examining the reflective writing of students and conducting interviews with those students about their experiences, three students were invited to elaborate on their experiences with a critical community-engaged writing and oral communication course. This article will detail the course, discuss the role of emotion in community-engaged writing pedagogy, and share the experiences of these three students. Each student will discuss their experience with critical community-engaged writing, focusing on the impact, both positive and negative, of working in a group community-engaged writing and oral communication project and on the impact, both positive and negative, of previous life experiences and worldviews on community-engagement.

For Reflections readers, the lines between “teaching,” “research,” and “service” have always been fluid. The community-engaged work that some consider “service” is central to the research identity and trajectory of many Reflections readers. In the same way, Reflections readers also understand that  “teaching,” and pedagogy more broadly, takes place in many areas beyond a single classroom.

Review of Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change by Aimée Knight. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2022; 125 pp.: 9781646423149, $19.95 (pbk)

We offer an in-depth look at how a Black-led nonprofit, Life Pieces To Masterpieces (Washington, DC), stepped up to the challenges of 2020 – the devastation of the pandemic and of yet another wave of anti- Black violence. We place this story alongside scholarship about democratic education and the value of generative reciprocal relationships. While much of the scholarship focuses on university- community partnerships, we extend the analysis to look at the broader networks of relationships that nonprofits like LPTM cultivate. We argue that in the journey to equity and shared humanity, concepts like generative and transformative relationships need to account for the tremendous weight of systemic racism; this can be accomplished by explicitly centering the experiences and epistemology of Black communities. We show how these concepts were deployed and extended in LPTM’s activities from March–July 2020.

Reciprocity often forms the ideological core of community engagement, and discussions around reciprocity have encouraged researchers to pursue ethical and mutually beneficial collaborations with community partners. This article suggests that current conversations around reciprocity often presume a tacit level of difference between researchers and communities that they partner with, and that this unstated premise of difference obscures practices of reciprocity that emerge when academics and communities share similar identities or social locations. This article highlights two forms of reciprocity—deprioritizing academic outcomes and relational sustainability—that emerge when researchers work with their home communities or when their positionalities overlap. Attending more closely to similarity and positionality can add complexity to current vocabulary around community-based research and give language to the reciprocal practices that emerge when academics work with communities they are a part of.

This article discusses the program and goals that were instituted at our new community-based medical school to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities (URM) as faculty. We rely heavily on mentorship of the students for their research, and also employ community physicians for teaching and to serve as role models for the students. In addition, we collaborate with nonprofit organizations in our community, and offer pipeline programs for URM students. The combination of these programs serve to provide a pathway to academic medicine for URM students.

I reflect on my year-long experience as a South Korean researcher conducting a community-based oral history of North Korean migration during my master’s degree. Against an historical backdrop of two warring countries and numerous divides between my interlocutors, the academic establishment, and me, I explore the methodological significance and challenges of conducting a North Korean oral history. In the hopes of greater solidarity and reflexivity, I discuss the lessons learned through this process and the need to keep resisting against established ways of researching and knowing.

Since joining Reflections as Editor in December of 2022, I’ve been learning first-hand how much work and collaboration goes into producing an academic journal. As a community-engaged researcher and practitioner, I approach editorial work as a community-sustained endeavor. Every piece of writing you engage with in this issue was made possible by a team of people: 1) The authors, their community partners, their institutions, their families and support networks; and 2) Our team—the reviewers and editorial board, as well as Associate Editor Heather Lang, Assistant Editor Alexander Slotkin, Design Editor Heather Noel Turner, Book Review Editor Romeo García, and Copy Editor Victoria Scholz. All of these people contributed their expertise, time, resources, and labor to bring you this issue, and to maintaining and expanding the legacy of Reflections as a community-driven journal. I’m so grateful to be a part of this team, and I invite you to join us by contributing your expertise by sending us submissions, serving as a reviewer, and/or writing to us to share an idea for a special issue. We are here and are very excited to keep pushing Reflections’ innovative work forward.

This article argues that latrinalia is an important and potentially beneficial source of public writing deserving of educators’ and researchers’ attention. I start by comprehensively reviewing the research record of latrinalia in order to demonstrate its status as a legitimate academic field while surfacing the major trends, questions, and fault lines of latrinalic scholarship. Then, after outlining how most research on latrinalia takes place on college campuses, I trace recent work on spatial practice which implicitly advocates for public discourses like latrinalia in order to make the case that bathroom graffiti is an important but often neglected source of public writing and rhetoric that aligns with contemporary conceptions of composition theory and holds pedagogic potential for the teaching of writing. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and unresolved questions of the field of latrinalia before sketching future directions for research. “The slight scratching of many of the Maeshowe Runes, and the consequent irregularity and want of precision in the forms… of what, it must be remembered, are mere graffiti.” (D. Wilson, Britanno—Roman Inscriptions: With Critical Notes, 1863)

In this paper, two African American administrators share their experiences navigating and negotiating the White patriarchal dominance at two large, Southern, predominately White institutions (PWIs). Analyzing and trying to make sense of their shared experiences led us to discover that their challenges navigating the patriarchal society stemmed from failing to adhere to White cultural norms that permeate the fabric of these institutions. Our understanding has also led to the development of strategies for existing Black administrators and women of color who aspire to advance within and become successful in the Academy.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 22, Issue 2, Spring 2023 issue.

In this article, we document how Twitter is embedded within the U.S.-Mexico border and used to reorganize the oppressive conditions perpetuated by the border’s sociopolitical history. We do so through a mixed-methods case-study of three polarized, yet tangled, activist movements on Twitter, each of which responded to Trump’s border wall plans and zero-tolerance policy that separated asylum-seeking im/migrant children from their families. The hashtag movements included the liberal #FamiliesBelongTogether supporters (FBT), Trump Republican #BuildTheWall supporters (BTW), and liberal Anti-Wall (AW) #NoBorderWall and #TrumpShutDown denouncers. Findings indicate how the liberal activist movements inherited systemic issues of the broader U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure. Overall, we call for TPC to continue developing research agendas that learn from social activist networks so the field can understand its role in shaping the broader media infrastructure.

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 weaves narrative, tweets, relevant literature, and conference session summaries from the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference. Topics include discussion of power, language, and a short guide for graduate students (predominantly first-generation) to assist with navigating virtual conferences. The article includes questions and ideas that scholars in technical communication may be interested in further exploring, and urges such scholars/instructors in positions of privilege to support graduate students. The reflections center a graduate student’s position as a white cisgender woman and first-generation college student exploring the uncertainties involved with attending and navigating power relations at a virtual conference. This positionality informs a reflection of sessions from panels such as the DBLAC Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Responsive Technical Communication Pedagogies and Institutional Practices, Critical Technical Communication Practices and Pedagogies, User-Generated Content and its Effects on the Technical Communication Profession, Technologies and Pedagogies, and more.

Although we had not shared ideas before the 2021 ATTW conference, we noticed during our panel that we had considerable overlaps in our pedagogical approaches and goals for encouraging students’ social justice advocacy. This reflection discusses those overlaps while acknowledging how our different positionalities affect our approaches. One takeaway of this article is deliverables from our presentations, including citation lists and illustrations that might help other educators. The other takeaway is seven of our overlapping pedagogical approaches (three that affect course structure and four that concern day-to-day interactions) that we hope will provide other TPC educators with ideas on how to adapt to students’ positionalities while fostering students’ ability to see themselves as social justice advocates.

Small-scale fishers comprise nearly all capture fishery jobs, bring known benefits to biodiversity management, and, until recently, have provided humanity with the large majority of its seafood. Despite these well-documented benefits, small-scale fishers face increasingly intense displacement because of the marine closure pathway for biodiversity repair that is forwarded in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework. In this paper, I analyze and contextualize conflated and extracted informational foci in marine science policy documents in order to illustrate that diminishing contexts for small-scale fisher value move through biodiversity policy texts to occupy priority positions in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.

Welcome to the 23rd ATTW Conference—ATTW’s first virtual conference! And thank you for joining us today, especially given the collective and personal trauma you’ve experienced over the past year. We appreciate you making and holding space for the important work happening in our community. Originally planned for Milwaukee, WI, the pandemic postponement of our conference has allowed us to convene online this year from all over the nation and beyond. I am grateful for the places and spaces that have held us up since last March and for the networks and ecologies that will sustain us and our technologies this week, including landbases, waterways, flora, and fauna.

This article intersects the US government’s imperialistic attitude with its ambivalent and sluggish behavior towards helping the island of Puerto Rico achieve disaster preparedness and recovery from hurricane events. To learn how Puerto Rican residents employed self-reliance and resiliency in the context of disaster to shift and extend past definitions of tactical technical communication, I triangulated US-based longform reports with a radio journalist’s logbook from Hurricane María. From the stories in these texts about how Puerto Ricans crafted communication, I conclude that this craftiness during disaster empowered the Puerto Rican community to enact post-Hurricane María political and social changes on the island.

This article reports on the three sessions of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference including the Keynote Address and connects them to three other sessions through the lens of social justice to navigate the intersections of language, access, material ecologies, and social infrastructures. Echoing the conference theme, I suggest that those sessions attend to material complexities and local conditions and help us recognize culturally and locally responsive approaches to discursive activities in research and pedagogy in the field of TPC and that this work helps technical communicators and educators sustain and advance disciplinary identities of which social justice scholarship is a central part. By using my reflections on the observed ATTW sessions, I conclude that we can adopt what I term ethical pragmatism as an actionable takeaway, which refers to practical approaches grounded in each community’s history, culture, and sociomaterial conditions.

This article interrogates the complexities of immigration encountered by international scholars working in higher education. Drawing on life history and lived experience, the article examines issues of marginalization, inequality, and discrimination. It draws from Black Feminist Care ethics to channel ideas for how to build resilience in the face of unrelenting restrictive policies that shape the daily lives of international scholars in the academy and jeopardizes their ability to succeed.

GitHub provides a project hosting platform and Git-based version control system for individuals and teams looking to develop and manage software and documentation online. Technical writers have long played an important role in this process, contributing the documentation infrastructure that organizes and sustains project development. As GitHub continues to grow in popularity, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) educators will need to devote more effort to researching GitHub while developing both critical pedagogies and industry best practices committed to design justice. This paper provides a primer for this discussion as well as tools and scaffolding designed to assist GitHub implementation in the TPC classroom.

In this collaboratively composed article, we both theorize and dramatize the act of paying attention to scalar dynamics. In particular, we draw on the concept of transacting scales in order to complicate how “ethics” materialize in technical and professional communication (TPC). Because ethics materialize in relation to particular contexts and events, in the second half of this article, we show affordances of our approach for TPC through case studies animated by personal stories. We hope this will encourage readers to stay attuned to the particularities of embodied experiences as we theorize with unwieldy complex systems. Our cases speak to international student enrollment, matriculation, and retention in TPC programs and also general education TPC pedagogy.

The paper, titled “Wikis as Third Space for Diversifying Access for Technical Communication,” introspects the process of building a wiki site that represents the translanguaging practice of the author who is a translingual—uses Bangla and English simultaneously. In response to recent calls for a social justice approach for the field of technical communication, it details the site’s translanguaging features—as such discussions are few and far between in the field. Seamless movement between languages as displayed in the wiki site demonstrates the everyday reality of translingual people. The wiki site’s different pages document a smart Bluetooth speaker that introduces the product and details the setup process. The site also features a users’ lounge page where new and old users of the device can share their experiences and thoughts. For the visual aspects of this translingual wiki site, the author argues to also manifest its transcultural aspect as it serves a reminder of the fact that languaging practices influence cultural thinking. The resulting combination, the author explains, morphs a person holistically, instilling a metalinguistic awareness in them. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates the dynamic and transformative nature of languaging and argues these conversations regarding diverse language practices and their powerful effects and meanings should take place in technical communication more often especially since it aligns with its urge to turn to social justice approach.

In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors and students, we used a lesson study methodology in which a team of teacher-researchers collaboratively designed, observed, analyzed, and revised a sequence of lessons. We provide the larger context for our lesson study project, the lesson study structure including preparatory material for students, trauma-informed teaching strategies, and reflections on the lesson. To effect meaningful change and learning, we needed to have difficult conversations with students; this required us to acknowledge the presence of trauma in the classroom and then work to support the students who have experienced trauma. Finally, we offer a reflective critique of our experience as a heuristic for instructors to use as they implement and reflect on trauma-informed pedagogy in their own classes. Content Notice: The content of this article references rape and refers to violence against women in a way that relates to, but does not directly reference, transgender and non-binary individuals. We acknowledge, respect, and honor the many varied ways in which individuals respond to traumatic content. If you would like to speak with someone for support, please consider using the RAINN National Sexual Assault Crisis Hotline by calling their anonymous toll-free hotline (1-800-656-HOPE (4673)) or using the confidential online chat: https://hotline.rainn.org/online

This special issue contains articles, reflections, and discussions stemming from the 2021 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Virtual Conference, which was themed “Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication.” This theme was originally set for the 2020 ATTW Conference. When the conference co-chairs Ann Shivers-McNair and Laura Gonzales originally developed the theme for the 2020 ATTW conference, we drew inspiration from Dr. Cecilia Shelton’s (2020) call to “shift out of neutral” in our technical communication practices. At that time, we reflected on the ongoing racial violence perpetuated through police brutality across the world, on the border crisis that kept separate, and continues to separate children and families, and on a violent government administration that reflected the hatred too long ingrained in US nationalism. We knew that technical communicators could not and should not sit by idly and pretend to embrace a stance of neutrality amidst so much injustice.

Review of Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail, edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche.

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.

In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

Review of Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah.

This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.

“What is a zine? My definition: For me a zine is not just a self-made and self-published booklet but it is also situated within DIY culture. This means it is non-profit, non-commercial, low-budget, and non-competitive. Topics and style can vary but it’s important that zines remain accessible … (everyone can afford them) and to writers (everyone can make them). Zines don’t exist as little paper islands but they are connected and blossom within a mutually supportive zine community.” —Nina, Scissors & Chainsaws #2

On March 12th, 2020, faculty, staff, and students at Auburn University (AU) received an email announcing that the school would “transition from on-campus instruction to remote delivery beginning Monday, March 16 and continue through April 10 in response to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19)” (“Auburn University”). As all classes would be delivered remotely, students were told not to return to campus after spring break, leaving many of them to wonder if and when they’d be able to retrieve their belongings from housing.

This essay tracks Asian/American movements through the COVID-19 pandemic and through the discipline over time. Using a listing methodology with attention to space and place, we historicize how discourses of disease, contagion, and infection have been used to fuel yellow peril rhetorics in the service of anti-Asian racism since at least the 1850s, drawing connections between this history and contemporary anti-Asian racism in public spaces, in the discipline, and in academia. We conclude by revisioning how we move through disciplinary spaces, encouraging a situated recursive spatial movement as a way to advance an ethic of care and community.

The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.

Academic scholarship can often seem an indulgence. Often focused on a particular aspect of a particular debate within an even more specialized sub-disciplinary area, such scholarship seems distant from the actual concerns of the day. While this perhaps has always been somewhat true, the COVID pandemic has led to significant public questioning of the value of writing for academic journals and producing academic monographs. During the most difficult periods of the pandemic, Twitter and Facebook featured endless posts of individuals who have “put scholarship on the back burner” to focus on other public work, mental health, or to simply get through each day with their own or their family’s needs during such difficult times. It is, then, an odd experience to be editing a special issue on pedagogies and partnerships focused on addressing the COVID pandemic. Certainly, there have been points where, even as we labored on this journal, we wondered if time could not be better spent elsewhere, off the page.

As the emergency of the spring 2020 semester ended and the uncertainty of the summer began, we commiserated—in text messages, on Zoom calls, and sitting many feet apart in each other’s yards—about our feelings of disconnection and our inability to focus on anything other than the pandemic. The scholarship we had started before the pandemic hit seemed far less urgent in light of COVID. Instead of forcing ourselves to ignore the pandemic in our work and forge on with our existing projects, we decided to use our academic energies to face the crisis directly. Working from our expertise in reflective writing (Lesley) and public memory (Laura), we designed the Iowa State University Quarantine Journal Project (hereafter QJP).

After a period being away from our time editing Reflections, we were pleased to step in to fill the gap between the end of Deborah Mutnick and Laurie Grobman’s editorship and the beginning of Laura Gonzales’ term. It soon became apparent that under Deborah and Laurie’s leadership, Reflections had extended its scholarly profile, expanding categories of academic writing and readership. Laura will be in an enviable situation when her term begins in 2022.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention and separation of immigrant children from their families. On January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris, the vitriol of the past four years catalyzed an insurrection by Trump supporters, encouraged by Donald Trump himself, in which U.S. Capitol police were violently attacked and killed and lawmakers were chased and called to be hanged. Emboldened by their indignation and their immutable belief that Joe Biden’s win was the result of widespread voter fraud, the insurrectionists, mostly white people, many with ties to white supremacist groups, armed themselves with Trump’s combative rhetoric to launch a physical attack on our democracy.

Located in Austin, TX, Latinitas describes itself as one of the only bilingual tech organizations in the U.S. and prides itself for creating the first digital magazine made for and by Latina youth. In 2002, Latinitas was developed as a project by a group of undergraduate students in a Latinos in Media course at the University of Texas at Austin.  Founders of Latinitas saw a need for more representation and stories by Latinas. Prior to the organization receiving its non-profit status, the organization ran as a student-led group. Since 2003, the organization has grown and adapted to the needs of the community and has provided an assortment of writing, leadership, tech, STEM, and college preparation workshops for Latina youth in middle school and high school. Through these workshops and the online magazine, “Latinas discover their voice and develop media skills while building a solid foundation for their future” (Donelly 2017). In addition to serving 3,000 girls annually through a variety of workshops, their online magazine continues to be a key tool for sharing multimedia content that represent the evolving digital landscape and what it means to be a Latina[1]. The work by the magazine’s editors and writers support and circulate the organizational identity[2] of Latinitas. In this article, we focus on how Latinitas, as a Latinx[3] organization, challenges the deficit perspective of Latina youth while trying to keep up with a changing digital landscape.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

View On Being an Activist in your Hometown (mp4) online via Google Drive. See PDF for transcript.

Review of From Thought to Action: Developing a Social Justice Orientation by Amy Aldridge Sanford.

Review of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez.

We attempt to deliver our vision; a vision that depicts how theories by Gloria E. Anzaldúa can offer us ways to help people of color (whom we identified as broken under current political rhetoric) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems that can lead toward healing. We argue Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative, that ongoing process of making and unmaking, can serve to aid individuals with the greater public good of healing trauma—trauma that has been historically inscribed onto what we recognize as those bodies broken by systematic oppression. So, interwoven throughout this article, we highlight a variety of south Texas community members in an effort to connect with the communities we serve as educators. We feel that the work these individuals do as artists, writers, and activists connects well with Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

Who is an activist? What actions define a scholar-activist, an artist-activist, or community activist? How do community members, as non-academics, serve their community as advocates as well as intellectuals? And, finally, what is the impact that scholars and advocates make when they join with one another for social justice efforts within their respective communities? These are the questions that guided the work we present in this special issue of Reflections. This special issue will underscore how activism can work with academic life in the fight for social justice and change, so we invite you to take a closer look at activism and academia in community work.

In the midst of contemporary struggles to fight back against challenges to abortion rights, other important areas of reproductive justice work can be elided. One such area concerns Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which are non-profit (often religious) organizations that offer services like parenting classes, religious counseling, and material goods for newborns (i.e. diapers or formula), but many CPCs also present themselves as if they are comprehensive reproductive health clinics that offer abortion services. In Hartford, the four of us have been part of a larger coalition working to curb deceptive advertising practices at CPCs, and this article outlines both why CPCs are a central reproductive justice issue and how we have addressed them in our community. We argue that tactical, flexible coalitions that prioritize lived experiences of community members are key for making rhetorical interventions that advance reproductive justice. Thus, we present multiple perspectives of reproductive health partnerships—community partner (Erica), faculty (Megan), and student (Eleanor and Sam)—to analyze the role of public storytelling in coalitional activism focused on regulating crisis pregnancy centers.

“Yeah, so yelling at the nurse very clearly does not make this right. She’s just a messenger. There is a way to be diplomatic about it. I like to play the dumb part a lot: ‘You know, I really don’t understand… could you clarify this for me?’ That used to work a lot better as a workaround.” —Emily “Sometimes it’s more talking to myself and talking to the client, like telling them what I see is going on because I guess in that case, my hope is that the provider is hearing it and even if they are not responding, that they are aware that I see what’s going on, and I’m making my client aware of what’s going on. …I know they hear me: the provider can hear me, and the nurses can hear me.” —Margaret “My client is completely bewildered, she is in pain. So me in that moment, I just put my hand on the nurse’s hand that had her breast, and said, ‘could you please not do that?’ And that’s all I said in that moment. And the nurse, she looks at me and she rolls her eyes, but she let go, which is what was important to my client. Afterwards my client said, ‘thank you for that.’” —Malika

Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2020 issue.

Discriminatory policy structures related to segregation, criminalization, environmental regulation, and loan financing intersect to create severe racial inequities in reproductive health. These structures, and their material consequences for human lives, are constituted and perpetuated through discourse. Dominant narratives (DNs) provide stories that naturalize inequalities and are repeated until they become “common sense” by cultural members. The Reproductive Justice Movement (RJM) was founded by women of color activists and scholars to change oppressive structures and to promote the reproductive and human rights of all people. RJM activists have used personal stories as a resistive tool, recognizing that resistive stories can destabilize the taken-for-granted nature of DNs and the violent structures they uphold. In this article, we perform a Critical Narrative Analysis of three personal stories shared by reproductive healthcare providers to understand how their stories can perpetuate and/or resist oppressive DNs through their construction of marginalized patients as characters. We found that, in constructing narratives of patients, participants relied on three main DNs: Western Modernity, White Supremacy, and Neoliberalism. Drawing on these DNs, providers characterize patients as: Good or Bad (M)others, Victims, and Adversaries. Our goal is to show that narratives created with providers are political texts that constitute understandings of patients’ reproductive lives. We conclude with a re-telling of one narrative to emphasize the goals of reproductive justice and highlight the importance of re-framing the inequitable present in order to imagine equitable futures.

A school security guard stops a visibly pregnant young woman leaving school grounds to ask, “Do you even know who the father is?” A fellow shopper steps in front of a young mother’s grocery cart to point out, “Well, your life is over before it has even really begun isn’t it?” An Uber driver turns around to inform his passenger, “You look too young to be having a baby! What are you going to do?”

In this toolkit we offer tools and guidance for critically analyzing notions of Motherhood in order to promote reproductive justice. As champions of reproductive justice we are committed to doing the work of recognizing and undoing the inevitably oppressive ways we and those around us have been encultured into making sense of “Motherhood.” This work includes engaging in critical analysis of how those who hold authority in such constructions, such as healthcare providers, may implement more racially just conceptualizations of motherhood. We developed the methodology described below through extensive research on narrative analysis and through our e orts to make sense of our interviews with reproductive healthcare providers (HCPs) who spoke about the intersections of race, policy, and health.

Looking for ways to spread the information provided in this Toolkit? Let’s take it to Twitter. Below is a tweet for every article featured in this issue of Reflections.

Inforgraphic about the human right to maintain personal control over our bodies, life decisions, sexuality, gender identity, and the choice to reproduce.

In a sociopolitical context that continues to constrain reproductive agency, many organizations, media, and people construct pregnant or mothering teenagers as “things that are other than it should be” and many young mothers report being talked to as if they were a defect that must be addressed. People who experience dominant discourses of “teenage pregnancy prevention” are prompted to immediately respond to the rhetorical exigence of pregnant and parenting teen bodies. When visibly young pregnant or parenting people venture into public, they face an unpredictable and potentially hostile rhetorical arena. In this article, I reflect on a community-based workshop I facilitated in Boston from 2015-2019 at an annual one-day event for young parents called the Summit for Teen Empowerment and Parenting Success. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theories of interruption tactics, this workshop prepares young pregnant and parenting people with researched information and scripted responses they can use to interrupt and transform everyday moments in public places when strangers read their bodies as problems to criticize or loudly bemoan. However, findings from the surveys circulated at the 2019 workshop indicate that what participants value most about this experience is the opportunity to share and relate to one another’s experiences of reproductive injustice. This article offers feminist rhetoricians, community literacy scholars, and other scholar-activists an approach to sharing research findings and facilitating discussion in a useful way with those who embody exigences of reproductive justice.

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.

In the midst of contemporary struggles to fight back against challenges to abortion rights, other important areas of reproductive justice work can be elided. One such issue area is Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which are non-pro t (often religious) organizations that o er services like parenting classes, religious counseling, and material goods for newborns (i.e. diapers or formula), but many CPCs also present themselves as if they are comprehensive reproductive health clinics that o er abortion services. In Hartford, the four of us have been part of a larger coalition working to curb deceptive advertising practices at CPCs, and this article outlines both why CPCs are a central reproductive justice issue and how we have addressed them in our community. We argue that tactical, flexible coalitions that prioritize lived experiences of community members are key for making rhetorical interventions that advance reproductive justice. Thus, we present multiple perspectives of reproductive health partnerships—community partner (Erica), faculty (Megan), and student (Eleanor and Sam)—to analyze the role of public storytelling in coalitional activism focused on regulating crisis pregnancy centers.

More often than not, coming to the end of things is bittersweet. As we look back on our three years co-editing Reflections, we are proud of the issues we published, the authors we came to know, the amazing editorial and production team we assembled, and the effort we put into developing a set of tangible guidelines to pass along to our successor(s).

In this article, we share the example of our recent community-based performance project on reproductive justice, We are BRAVE, to serve as a model of how community-based performance can be an embodied strategy for social change. We draw from the work of scholars of feminist rhetoric, community- based performance, and reproductive justice. This case study examines elements of the community-created script to demonstrate how we knit together intersectional narratives of reproductive (in)justice that challenge and expand a mainstream discourse of reproductive rights and move towards a broader vision of reproductive freedom. The We are BRAVE project was a form of cultural work that went alongside other grassroots organizing e orts to persuade both legislators and constituents to think about the significance of abortion and to engage with more complexity around intersecting identities and issues that impact our reproductive lives. This strategy was used to frame groundbreaking legislative work. In sharing the example of We are BRAVE, we show how using community-centered, performative storytelling as embodied rhetoric can be an effective mode of public and political persuasion.

In this article, we share the example of our recent community-based performance project on reproductive justice, We are BRAVE, to serve as a model of how community-based performance can be an embodied strategy for social change. We draw from the work of scholars of feminist rhetoric, community-based performance, and reproductive justice. In sharing the example of We are BRAVE, we show how using community-centered, performative storytelling as embodied rhetoric can be an effective mode of public and political persuasion.

Front matter for the Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice in Public & Civic Contexts Special Issue, a Toolkit.

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).

An Annotated Bibliography on Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice is a project motivated by several overlapping exigencies. When we began our collaborative research and writing for this project in the fall of 2019, we were unaware that in the months to follow we would face a global health pandemic, accompanied by the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“An RJ-informed model of rhetorical analysis, thus, actively seeks out objects of study that lie outside dominant legal and institutional contexts. By engaging with artifacts from the margin, rhetorical scholarship can mount more poignant critiques on oppressive networks of power, and further illuminate possibilities for coalition across different social movements.” —Shui-yin Sharon Yam, 2020

This article examines the tactics doulas deploy to support birthing people in a hospital setting, where both the doulas and their clients are marginalized. In order to cultivate and preserve calmness in the birthing room, doulas mobilize what I call “soft advocacy” to avoid overt confrontation with medical staff, while promoting their clients’ preferences and interests. “Soft advocacy” entails affective management of all stakeholders in the room, strategic body positioning by the doula, and descriptive narration that holds medical staff accountable for their actions. These tactics are transferrable outside the birthing room and can be deployed by advocates who want to protect their clients’ interests, but cannot afford to overtly challenge the status quo.

As we write this introduction, George Floyd’s body has just been laid to rest, protests in large and small cities around the world continue to call for the end of police violence, and the Minneapolis City Council has approved plans to defund the police. In addition to these social movements, Safer at Home orders have expired, and COVID-19 cases continue to spike in states across the nation. The suffering of Black and Brown communities is on display, and racial justice advocates are demanding action from non-Black folx. No longer can white supremacy maintain its silent power.

On December 15, 2019, I sent this article to the editors. On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was followed and murdered as he jogged in Brunswick, GA by two white men who believed him to be a robbery suspect. On March 13, 2020 former EMT Breonna Taylor was shot at least eight times when Louisville Metro Police executed a no-knock warrant.

Reproductive justice is an all-encompassing theoretical approach for solving community needs associated with the right to have children, the right to health care, and the right to safe environments for children and families. My work as an RJ activist addresses the need for safe environments that are free of gun violence, police brutality, and access to support systems that nurture Black mothers with pre-and post-natal care. As such, my tool kit is for scholars whose primary focus is on using rhetoric to effect change in the school system as well as in maternal health.

This article describes a case study of an inclusive Summer Lunch Program, focused on nutrition, community engagement, and literacy programming. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally-funded, state-administered program designed to meet the needs of children from low-income families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. The most tangible outcome of the program is the food and the literacy programming provided to students during the summer months. Secondary outcomes include the development of new social skills, preparation for new educational experiences, less “screen time” for children, and learning about the community and the people in it.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2020 issue.

Review of Writing Suburban Citizenship: Place Conscious Education and the Conundrum of Suburbia, edited by Robert E. Brooke.

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.

This essay recounts the origins of Reflections and considers the first seven years of the journal’s publication from the perspective of its first editor. Arguing that Reflections serves as a barometer of changes in our field, the academy, and the production of knowledge over the past two decades, it recounts the journal’s initial mandate to provide a forum for communication and inquiry and characterizes the unique ethos of the journal. It assesses the generative role of special issues in using a community organizing approach to publication to connect scholars, practitioners, and participants around a theme, developing many of the now-thriving subfields of community-engaged writing. The journal, it concludes, thanks to its inclusive, experimental, and multigenerational approach and deep roots in communities where we have built lasting relationships, provides a mirror in which we can see our field deepen our questions and extend our reach. It celebrates Reflections for cultivating the brave space we continue to need to collaboratively and critically craft our crucial places within and beyond the university.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

We are thrilled to introduce this 20th anniversary issue of Reflections. Our tenure as coeditors has taught us a great deal about the journal, the growing subfield of community-engaged writing, and the pleasures and pitfalls of editing a biannual publication. As we embarked on editing this issue, we assumed we would learn a lot about the journal’s history, but we could not fully appreciate what that meant until we began to review submissions. The first round we got were in response to a call for articles directed mainly to those with a close association with the journal—former editors, contributors, board members, reviewers—or whose own career paths were influenced by reading it. These articles and several interviews, shorter pieces, and a dialogue provide valuable perspectives on the journal.

The unique perspective that adult learners have on writing and its instruction in low or no-cost education programs offers valuable information to both instructors of written components in these courses and to scholars exploring how writing in adult education functions as community literacy. After conducting interviews with instructors and students at six adult education programs, I identify significant tensions between the ways that instructors perceive their students to experience writing and the ways students describe their own writing experiences, particularly in the areas of process, enjoyment, and feedback. After situating low and no-cost adult education programs as sites of community literacy, I explore these tensions and propose that they contribute to and arise from instructors’ understanding that personal development through writing occurs with free-forms such as journaling, whereas students experience these benefits through prescriptive modes such as note-taking, rote copying, and dictation. I introduce a concept called the “curriculum of the self” to identify students’ use of prescriptive modes to enjoy and engage with writing, and I end by situating this concept in other tensions inherent to and ongoing in community literacy, including “turbulent flow” and sustainable practices of reciprocity.

In our call for submissions for the Reflections’ 20th anniversary issue, we invited shorter considerations about the journal’s impact to be published as a textual roundtable. As is usually the case, we got what we asked for: a number of short pieces that praise, situate, look backward in order to predict going forward, illuminate, and otherwise comment on the journal’s history, contributions to the field, weaknesses, and strengths. Below are several of these commentaries in conversation with one another. Together, they provide a glimpse into the journal’s past and begin to imagine its future.

The research in the area of community literacy has flourished along the lines of activist and curricular work. The field explores these lines in journals such as Reflections and Community Literacy Journal, a bi-annual conference The Conference on Community Writing, and with the formation of a non-profit professional society The Coalition of Community Writing. It has been nearly ten years since Ellen Cushman and Jeffrey T. Grabill published their special issue on “Writing Theories: Changing Communities” in Reflections. In the introduction, Cushman and Grabill called for attention to the use of “community,” especially in these activist and curricular areas, a question we wish to pursue further now.

Review of In Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, edited by Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek.

This interview is not the first in Reflections for Tom Deans, a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Connecticut. His first interview appeared in issue 1.1 of Reflections and focused on his work as chair of the recently created CCCC national service-learning committee dedicated to creating “disciplinary momentum” around service learning. He has a career-long interest in community-engaged writing and research, and served as both a Senior Editor and the Book Review Editor for Reflections over several years. In this interview, he reflects on the beginning of Reflections, the emergence of composition’s interest in service learning, and the growth of institutional support and recognition of community engagement. Overall, he finds that despite its early modest aspirations, the field’s trajectory has resulted in a large amount of exciting and important work, and provided a “real viable pathway” for educators who want to build a career around community engagement.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move from an “informal” to a “formal” academic structure also echoed the emerging status of community partnership scholarship in the field. Increasingly, academic and community-based scholars were finding that interest in such work was expanding beyond the capability of traditional journals and series to publish. Reflections’ expansion was designed to meet that need and to provide it a formal “disciplinary” space. Indeed, this moment also marked the emergence of Community Literacy Journal. And it speaks to the ethos of community partnership work that, since that time, the two journals have fostered a collaborative ethos, both finding a home in the Coalition for Community Writing.

As the reach of community engaged writing has expanded, it has come to offer a uniquely powerful contribution to a college education, well beyond service. We have the opportunity to make a visible, cross-disciplinary case that embraces this remarkable diversity in a compelling public argument—one that can link vision with new evidence of genuine educational consequences for students. This paper sketches a framework for both articulating that social, ethical, and intellectual contribution and supporting it with theory-driven and data-based evidence of shared, valued outcomes.

In this interview, Paula Mathieu reflects on the twenty-year history of Reflections. She discusses how the journal has influenced her teaching and research, and she talks about being the co-editor of Reflections as Rhetoric and Composition was developing newer understandings of community-engaged relationships and practices.

Reflections offers a plethora of stories, strategies, and applicable content for community-based writing projects as well as considerations for our pedagogy within institutional walls. In this piece, I, a first-time contributor, reflect on a few of my own endeavors in community-engaged work over the last decade alongside a reading of this journal and its continued impact on my pedagogy and research. Specifically, I discuss the value of community engagement efforts for graduate students developing as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Through this writing, I contribute to and build upon the ongoing knowledge-making practices at the heart of this journal.

Co-authored by a nonprofit administrator and an English Department faculty member, this contribution discusses the creation of a community partnership for jail-based education and writing projects. By starting small through student internships directly with the nonprofit, manageable, programmatic development followed that included class-based community writing projects, capstones, and onsite workshops engaging graduate and undergraduate students. Seeking to provide insights for new program developers as well as experienced leaders, this article reflects on the value of taking what Paula Mathieu describes as a tactical approach to partnership growth that begins with small-scale projects to maximize reciprocity and impact in order to first construct of a strong, sustainable foundation. Through descriptions of the evolution of this partnership, best practices for communication, addressing challenges, and expanding projects are outlined. Insights about this partnership reveal possible student-engaged activities and assignments, as well as the complexities of jail and prison writing. Reflections by students and community partners affirm a range of opportunities and the value and impact of internships, service learning, and community-writing when working directly with nonprofits, rather than with jails or prison administrators.

In responding to conversations on engaged infrastructure, racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments), a community writing project at Towson University in the Baltimore metro area, where students are a primary, if not the main, source of research, grantwriting, and grants tracking for partner organizations via classwork, paid internships, and parttime employment. I problematize and locate this work within the nonprofit industrial complex and discuss the structure and functioning of grassroots organizations and how their particular milieu lends itself to projects like G.I.V.E. The project views equity as way to “return stolen resources” (Marcus and Munoz 2018), acknowledges the legacies of injustice in our communities, places students of color in leadership roles, and prioritizes work with under-resourced organizations that are led by folks from the community itself.

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class predominantly made up of immigrant students. The videos spotlight the students’ personal experiences with immigration, incorporate multiple languages, and explore themes such as cultural diversity and welcoming immigrant students into the classroom. Following the creation of the videos, the college students participated in a video chat with the third graders. This article offers an overview of the video project, student reflections, and guidelines for future pedagogical implementation. In addition, I reflect on the importance of pedagogical flexibility in the classroom and the ways in which multilingualism can expand our understanding of multimodality.

This article analyzes the capacity for public art to build a “métis” infrastructure (Grabill 2007) capable of supporting local experiential and performative knowledge about the environment. The article describes the work of UPPArts, a small, nonprofit arts organization focused on promoting environmental awareness. Their long-term cultivation of partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, and community residents resulted in a robust collaborative arts program that engaged the public in making “nonexpert” (Simmons and Grabill 2008) knowledge based on the embodied experience of living within a contaminated urban watershed. Using field research conducted over the course of the author’s work with the organization, the article presents a thick description and rhetorical analysis of UPPArts’ annual culminating event, a parade known as the Urban Pond Procession. The article argues that the representation and performance of community knowledge in the form of community-made arts projects like the Urban Pond Procession helped mobilize a community into a public that could advocate for its right to environmental remediation and protection. The lesson of UPPArts is that the material dimensions of artistic method matter. The close attention that art-making forces us to pay to how we use materials to make things with each other can reconfigure social relations around the idea of a watershed as a rhetorical common-place (Druschke 2013).

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attaintment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of heuristic tracing, a generative assessment strategy, which can be used to make visible the experiences that can not only support students’ learning gains but also value the engagement of all service learning participants—including instructors and community partners. Heuristic tracing can help stakeholders better understand the habits, attitudes, and experiences of learning that are central to service learning pedagogy.

We write this introduction for our fourth, coedited issue of Reflections at a historic moment between the passage of two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the House and his possible (theoretical) removal in the Senate. This conjuncture comes just two months after the third Conference on Community Writing took place in Philadelphia in October. As coeditors of one of two affiliate journals of the Coalition on Community Writing, we had eagerly anticipated the conference and commissioned an article to review the conference as a way to take the pulse of community writing on the cusp of the 2020s (see Hubrig et al. in this issue).

Review of Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies by editors Douglas M. Walls & Stephanie Vie.

Review of The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission by Herb Childress.

Review of Community Literacies en Confianza By Steven Alvarez.

April 15, 2013 started out as a beautiful spring day in Boston. It was Patriots Day, a local holiday and a day reserved for the world’s oldest marathon. I was at my mom’s house, an hour away from the finish line, when a friend messaged me about explosions. The message came with a link to a local news station. I turned on the tv and sent the link to another friend in California. “One of the reports says two explosions,” my friend would respond. “If that’s correct, it’s definitely an attack.”

This essay presents a polyvocal review of the 2019 Conference on Community Writing. It is composed of a series of vignettes and reflections written by the authors, community partners, conference organizers, educators, and others who attended the conference. Together, these reflections examine a central theme of the conference, “the work” of community writing, by attending to four questions: 1) What is the work of the Conference on Community Writing, and what does it tell us about the state of the subfield of community-engaged writing?; 2) What spaces does the conference encompass, and who is included in these spaces?; 3) What are the material realities that enable and constrain our work, in and beyond the conference?; and 4) What work is unfinished, and what will sustain us as we tackle it? The polyvocal essay presented here examines these questions through multiple positionalities within community writing studies, ultimately arguing that attending to the diversity of voices, stories, and perspectives in community writing must guide our efforts to understand community writing as a field and imagine its future work.

Over the last roughly twenty years, or between 2000 and 2019, scholarship on community writing has built upon a focus on service-learning composition courses to include the roles of writing and rhetoric in community engagement more generally, including necessary inquiry into the ethics of community engagement altogether. In this time, the longer-term effects of service-learning writing courses, specifically on college students, have gone unexamined. This study looks at three former students who took service-learning composition courses at the University of Connecticut to determine what, if any, long-term effects the experience had on them. The three former service-learners differ in how they recall their experiences, but they overlap in key places, such as their awareness of rhetoric as social, their commitment to effecting community change, and their belief that the service-learning experience affected them in subtle ways that nonetheless influenced their approaches to community action. This three-participant study, part of a larger project based on retrospective interviews with students formerly enrolled in service-learning courses, shows that such courses may not create dramatic change in students’ rhetorical awareness or approach to community action, but the subtle changes they can promise informed the subjects in my study in unexpected ways over time.

Communities are in constant flux, shifting within a network of people, things and spaces; yet it is not uncommon to see a universal narrative emerge within the local commonplace of our towns and cities. These narratives are often too simplistic, avoiding the dynamic array of rhetorical flows that are circling through the social, material and historical realities within a communities’ actual network. During my time working in Jamaica Queens, New York, I witnessed the strong dissonance between the common narrative told in Jamaica’s local news outlets and the experience I had in its actual spaces. My manuscript explores this dichotomy by describing a recent walk I had through Jamaica’s streets, traversing its unique landscape while reflecting on my own subjectivity in the process. In doing so, I argue that rhetorical agents have the ability to support or subvert these universal narratives. However, one must also consider how our spatial encounters reinscribe the fluid and often precarious positionalities we find ourselves in as we move through different spaces over time.

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices to lobby the Tennessee General Assembly for in-state tuition for undocumented students at Tennessee public universities. Responding to the political moment of uncertainty surrounding DACA and immigration policy, we designed a course focused on meaningful projects designed for public dissemination and presentation, and our group-based learning approach allowed us to meet both institutional learning outcomes for effective writing and research, as well as softer outcomes for socializing and professionalizing first-generation and DACA students. This course offers a model for other community-engaged writing courses to support student efficacy and student persistence.

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form of community engagement. The case study presented here, which focuses on local activist writing (broadly conceived) in response to the Flint water crisis, illustrates one possibility for how activist archival research might be undertaken. Specifically, it highlights the tactics of black and working-class community members who joined together to make apparent how water contamination was affecting their own bodies, families, and communities through complex, multimodal interventions online and in the Flint community. Furthermore, this article emphasizes why such research is necessary and important, particularly when the embodied, scientific, and cultural knowledges of marginalized community members are represented little, if at all, in mainstream media coverage and normative rhetorics of risk.

Review of Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics by editors Jonathan Alexander, Susan C. Jarratt, and Nancy Welch.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2019 to 2020 issue.

Review of Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion By Candice Rai & Caroline Gottschalk Druschke.

Reflections call for submissions for Volume 21, Issue 2, Spring 2021.

Common in higher education in prison (HEP) and writing studies research is the idea that writing and education are transformative for incarcerated populations. While we believe that both can be powerful tools for reflection and social change among people on the inside, the prevalence of such transformation narratives can contribute to stereotypical depictions or understandings of incarcerated people and their literacy practices. Drawing upon our experiences with the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program, this article argues for expanded recognition and study of literacy practices, genres, and prison education beyond those typically discussed in HEP and writing studies scholarship. In doing so, we draw on the work of Martinez (2017) to present four personal scenes of writing and education as counterstories that intervene in master narratives about how incarcerated students are transformed by literacy. This approach not only grounds our work in methodology that values the lived and experiential knowledge of marginalized people but also enables us to push back against stock stories of prison writing that might inadvertently stereotype incarcerated students. Through telling our stories in this article, we call on academics to join us in composing different stories about incarcerated students that honor the complexities of our multiple identities and literacy practices.

Review of Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers by editors Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson.

I’m a song that has yet to be sung, My melody is struggling to be played, My lyrics are unwritten, wanting of an unfamiliar page.

This essay represents Christopher Malec’s original research and writing, with slight final edits completed by Wendy Hinshaw on his behalf.

Review of The Named and the Nameless: 2018 PEN Prison Writing Awards Anthology.

When I first stepped into an official college classroom inside prison, I had no idea that my writing had value. I was always told that I was an articulate person, an attribute that made me stick out amongst my peers in and outside of the correctional facility. I took on the habit of quickly learning the local vernacular to better camouflage my love of complex, formal language. Yet, those pesky, multisyllable symbols still managed to sneak out of my mouth and into my conversations at the most inopportune of times. Slurring or mincing words could not mask the slip of “multitudinous,” “ambivalence,” or “fruition” from my everyday speech. In the classroom, however, as I began to write academic papers, I realized that my grasp of the formal constructions of the English language that came so naturally to me gave me a clear advantage in speaking the local lingo of education.

This analysis uses a critical race framework from African-American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping those economies, the analysis then turns to Jennifer LeMesurier’s account of somatic metaphor (2014) as a storehouse of rhetorical knowledge, and what John Protevi describes as, “a personal political physiology [capable of shaping] institutional action” (Protevi 2009, xii) to explore how such bodied knowledge scales from the personal to the political. This revised sense of the continuum between affect, ritual, and the political might, in turn, provide prison-based scholar-practitioners with a new vocabulary for understanding our own subjectivities as they shape our carceral encounters, our activist impulses, and the scholarship that ensues, in a way that avoids retrenching discourses of whiteness, and painting prisoners as what Toni Morrison might call, “some suffering thing” (Morrison 1993, 3-4).

In this essay, the authors describe a collaborative, community-engaged graduate seminar in which students and incarcerated writers worked together to write promotional brochures for WordsUncaged, a prison writing program. Drawing on reflective writing from graduate students and incarcerated writers, the authors apply a hospitality framework to articulate participants’ learning and growth. The public nature of the writing task grounded the experience in tangible results, and the circulation of the brochures beyond the classroom led to specific rhetorical growth as participants worked towards a common purpose. The collaborative nature of this learning process also led to different interpretations of voice and language representing individual and collective experiences. This collaboration resulted in a reciprocal humanization for students and incarcerated writers, as students’ rhetorical decisions emphasized their incarcerated partner’s humanity and, simultaneously, the incarcerated writers felt recognized as human beings. While acknowledging the constraints and limitations of this sort of community engagement, the authors argue that the collaborative and public facets of this experience were central to creating meaningful growth for all participants; indeed, the different ways in which graduate students and incarcerated writers experienced this growth reflect the complex realities of the partnership itself.

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical approach are identified, as well as the opportunities they offer to understand the risks and complexities of writing in prison. These differentiations in literacy practice highlight the necessity of building relationships among and between incarcerated LGBTQ+ people in prison literacy initiatives, and situate the conclusion that prison abolition’s demonstrated commitment to transformative social relations has a direct application to understanding and shaping prison literacy programming and practice.

we’re all pets chained like Pandora charms circling God’s righteous wrist i remember she said this as she dangled around with her head down like a pay phone off the hook in an empty booth...

It’s rather wonderful, I think when Friends are made of pen and ink, a piece of paper, blue or white And someone decides that she will write.

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over building academic skills. The yoga students shared reflective writing on yoga-related topics—from philosophy, to tips and modifications for poses, to personal experience—in a monthly newsletter called “The Om Exchange.” The sound of “om” in yoga symbolizes the universal “oneness” of all living beings. The purpose of the newsletter was two-fold: to support reflective writing for deeper engagement with class material and to connect with the larger yoga community beyond classroom walls. While the yoga students only met in person once, the newsletter enabled them to build a sangha, or a local community with shared values that offers members motivation, guidance, support, and accountability in practicing those values. I suggest that the intersections between contemplative practice and feminist rhetorical listening facilitated these students, who may appear distinct, in finding “oneness” with each other; with its focus on building community, this writing project affords visibility to the power of forming partnerships around explicit shared values through the lens of sangha, and offers transferable methods for more conventional community literacy projects. A contemplative approach fosters social and emotional learning, including civic and democratic values, that bridges institutions, cultures, and differences for a more equitable society. As one incarcerated yoga student reflected: “If what we do for the good inside these walls doesn’t reach beyond these walls, then what’s the point—[this partnership] is the point and a start.” Read more at https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/19Sp_KINE_1410-1_Yoga/.

Review of Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World By Baz Dreisinger.

Review of Feeding the Roots of Self-Expression and Freedom by Jimmy Santiago Baca, with Kym Sheehan and Denise VanBriggle.

The articles centers on haunting genealogies and literacies. It asks the question, what lurks in the beyond and that is already present in and around? Working at the tension between inheritances and responsibility, I argue that a framework of hauntings invites a modality of a different kind of “scholar.” It calls for a careful reckoning, prompting an ethical injunction, one that demands of the “scholar” to learn how to address oneself to and work towards becoming a scholar of hauntings. Throughout, I assert that future without a place for hauntings is like a responsibility absent of a careful reckoning. The article concludes with a final question, “Are we ready to be a different kind of scholar?"

The future of higher education in prison remains a pressing question more than twenty years after incarcerated students were denied access to Pell grants. We are still considering questions about who should be incarcerated and why. The forces were different in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, but we still have much to learn from those who labored in prison literacy classrooms in those times. This project, based on oral history interviews with six teachers who taught in writing workshops and higher education in prison programs in the 1970s and 80s, a time when prison arts, education and literacy programs were undergoing drastic shifts resulting from social, political and cultural forces, can help us understand the evolving nature of this practice. Additionally, the interviews can help us understand how these teachers’ experiences of teaching in prison at a time when carceral environments were often dangerous and challenging reflect and refract the prevailing narratives of literacy at the time. As Stanton, Giles and Cruz note about their investigation into the history of service-learning, “we should build on the insights of those who have confronted these challenges before” (xiii). This project provides not only reflection on these experiences and the ways they can help us understand the past and future of literacy teaching in prison, but access to insights that are, because of the marginalized nature of this teaching, in danger of being lost to history

To explain my task is to know any vision, My task has come with much pain & suffering...

Think about your reading life. What piece of writing has “taken the top of your head off,” to use Emily Dickenson’s phrase? Write a reading narrative in which you enter into dialogue with this writing—feel free to quote it. How has this reading experience changed you and helped you to redefine your life and your mission as a writer?

"This workshop is our connection to the outside world. A chance for us to be heard, something that teaches us how to connect through our writing.' —SpeakOut writer "Miami inmates are what becomes of the chicken before I fry it up." —Thant T. Lallamont, Exchange for Change writer

Kathie Karreich reflects on her experience as a writing facilitator in South Florida prisons. Two South Florida prisons sit on the edge of the Everglades. Klarreich, founder of the prison writing organization Exchange for Change, examines her own relationship to, and that of, the endangered lives on both sides of the razor wire, and the haunting and fortunate experience of her crossing so frequently between them.

This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork, and research about the issues that have shaped their lives. Through the reflections of the participants and sponsors, common themes—such as navigating dynamics of stereotypes and authority, reframing narratives of transformation, and building connections through both empathy and alterity—emerge. This article explores the opportunities and complexities that emerge when unincarcerated university students and incarcerated writers collaborate to create a project to help reshape rhetorics not only about addiction and recovery within a carceral setting but also about the potential of a liberatory experience within such a setting.

Review of Don’t Shake the Spoon by By Exchange for Change (Ben Bogart, editor).

Review of Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison by Patrick W. Berry.

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both in legal studies and rhetoric and composition. The authors of this article have been working together for the past three years in a weekly writing workshop for former “lifers”—individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; in this setting, parole board writing comes up often in free writes, discussions, and formal compositions. In fact, some participants have brought the pieces they read to the parole board to workshop for discussion and even continued revision. The article analyzes this prison-writing genre with participants of the workshop who coauthor the piece. We argue that the writing and rhetorical performance required of prisoners when they face parole boards enacts institutional and rhetorical constraints while simultaneously carving out new spaces for freedom and resistance. We examine how the parole board has shifted to a standard based on evaluating an inmate’s “insight” into their crimes (as opposed to being evaluated solely on their originary crimes), and we show the ways that this shift engenders new tensions between 1) writings that affirm existing power dynamics and narratives of responsibility, accountability, repentance, and transformation and 2) writings that subvert and resist dominant discourses and challenge existing power dynamics. Thus, this carceral writing process is at once coercive and subversive, oppressive and empowering, restraining and liberating for those who participate in it.

Applying the framework of coalitional rhetoric, this paper seeks to consider the rhetoric of prison literacy work and its implications for university-community relationships. Through an examination of four academic publications— three peer-reviewed articles and one published conference paper—that advocate or reflect the possibility of coalition-building between prison education programs and prison abolition. The selected texts represent how scholars of prison literacy and public rhetoric bridge abolition and prison education ideals by (1) mobilizing other scholars to join the prison abolition movement as well as (2) making a case for how prison education programs can contribute to the prison abolition movement. This essay explores how activist prison education scholars employ and adapt coalitional rhetoric within their scholarship, such as publishing incarcerated students’ writing to challenge dominant narratives, encouraging students to critique the PIC through critical pedagogy, helping other prison educators recognize the ways in which we are complicit, and much more. Considering the role of coalitional rhetoric in our work suggests the continuation of such coalition-building in directing prison education work to create social change beyond the university.

Back matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018-2019 issue.

Review of Sites of Transition: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric by Laura Gonzales.

This essay presents the trajectory of a syllabus statement on linguistic and cultural pluralism and its role in the articulation and revision of a pedagogical approach that foregrounds students’ linguistic diversity and partnerships with local communities. In recounting the steps and stakeholders involved in crafting the statement, the author argues that this statement functions as an activist text. The author also contends that the field of composition studies should take on an activist agenda when it comes to language rights. Composition studies needs to go beyond merely accepting language pluralism to actively engaging and dismantling oppressive discourses and normative practices. By establishing explicit values and ideologies, the linguistic and cultural pluralism statement has the potential to promote and foster a culture of cross-cultural and global perspectives in the classroom through students’ ties to local communities.

Editors’ Note: With this interview, we inaugurate a regular feature of the journal focused on interviews and articles about community-based writing projects unaffiliated with higher education. Discovering the genesis, evolution, and meaningfulness of such projects illuminates theories and practices of writing as a potentially transformative social activity that fosters creativity, communication, equity, and justice. It broadens our understanding as researchers, teachers, writers, students, and community members about what, why, how, and to what end community-engaged writing provides a compelling ground for educational, social, cultural, and political dialogue, personal growth, and collective inquiry. We envisage rich descriptions and investigations of the phenomenon of the written word as a liberatory tool that helps realize individual potential and promotes democracy, equality, and inclusiveness. We are delighted to begin this series with an interview with New York Writers Coalition Founder and Director Aaron Zimmerman. A former co-chair of the Board of Directors of Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA), Zimmerman has been leading creative writing workshops using the AWA method since 1997. He has an MA in creative writing from City College, where he has also taught creative writing. His novel By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead (Spuyten Duyvil) was selected in 2003 by Poets and Writers as “new and noteworthy.” His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Brooklyn Rail, Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, Jeopardy, and Mid-America Poetry Review.

This paper traces strategies and successes—for both students and community partners—in the implementation of service learning within my English 353: Chicana/oLatina/o Literature classes at California State University Channel Islands. In order to bridge university culture and the farmworker communities that work and live alongside the university, in consultation with community partners, we created bilingual reading circles where students went in to read and discuss works of Chicana/o literature with residents in low-income farmworker housing. Using a critical framework of Freirian pedagogical practice in the classroom and in the community, I explore how first-generation Latina/o students’ participation in service-learning enabled them to counter a cultural deficit model of thinking about farmworkers. In the process, students learned how to value their own rich cultural wealth and the familial assets they bring to the university and society as a whole.

Since the 2016 U.S. election, faculty, staff, and students at more than 200 colleges and universities have petitioned for their campuses to be declared as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants, a preemptive move that pits academic institutions against federal authorities. Like many in academia, I first became aware of the sanctuary campus movement in the weeks following the 2016 election, when a link to a petition arrived in my inbox. Around this time, I began to encounter news stories about the movement and its various manifestations (Cleek 2017; Machado 2017), as well as indications that the movement was provoking conversations about the relationship between higher education and the broader civic tapestry (Xia 2017), the history of sanctuary spaces (Allen 2016), and the contemporary legal complexities of creating such spaces (Olivas 2016).

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile and modern enough to reach a wider public, and whether it was feasible to become an open-access journal. It is with a greater appreciation for the modalities and complexities of the world of publishing that we are delighted to announce the renaming of the journal to Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, the redesign of the website (many thanks to our new website editor Heather Lang), and the movement with this issue to open access (print subscriptions will be honored through 2019).

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

Conversation between Jessica Pauszek, Charles Lesh, Megan Faver Hartline, and Vani Kannan.

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.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018-2019 issue.

Through a case study of a community organization, The Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, I present a new framework for circulation strategies. The organization composed and distributed research reports on the gendered inequalities in their local economy, which they aimed to circulate locally. However, they encountered local publics that often resisted discourse on gender and gender-related issues. So, the organization developed a strategy focused not on circulating their work, but on challenging the discursive norms of their local publics that structured circulation and engendered the resistance. My case study reveals new ways to research and strategize circulation—aiming not to circulate texts or disrupt ongoing circulation but to challenge and/or make anew the norms that structure circulation.

Call for papers for Reflections Special Issue: Prison Writing, Literacies and Communities, coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi.

Activists and change agents have long used all of the tools and resources available to them to accomplish their goals: they’ve used their voices (rallies, canvassing, lobbying politicians, even talking with friends about causes near to their heart); the written word (letters to the editor, posters, flyers, and community newspapers/ zines); their bodies (strikes, marches, sit-ins, die-ins, even riots); images (charts and diagrams, hopeful and graphic photos—from aborted fetuses to photos of the young, black, brutally murdered Emmett Till lying in his coffin—memes, and graffiti); and they’ve used technology in whatever ways it has been available to help further their cause.

In this article, we tell stories from our own research experiences to demonstrate the need for a set of methodological tools within Rhet/Comp that is more fully responsive to the ethical challenges of working with traumatized communities. Drawing on feminist and indigenous approaches, we propose a methodological toolkit for trauma-related research to reduce participant risk. In so doing, we situate shared ownership within a research as care framework and suggest five pillars for conducting trauma-related rhetorical research: (1) mediating academic use, (2) responsivity to re-living trauma, (3) recognizing participant motivations, (4) collaborative meaning-making, and (5) accounting for identity evolution. In sharing our stories about our research and the complications involved in negotiating researcher-participant dynamics in traumatized communities, we hope to help other researchers more effectively navigate similar territory in their own work.

This essay offers new ways of understanding the connection between literary studies and community engagement by focusing not just on the content of literary study, but on one of the central methods. I argue that the practice of “close reading” a literary text—Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party in particular—can illustrate the integral relationship between a discipline’s content, its methods, and its relationship to community engagement. Close reading pushes students to appreciate more than a literary text’s stories and themes; it impels them to be systematic about the ways in which they arrive at meanings, self-awareness, and social insights, and to recognize the cultural practices, assumptions, and rhetorical structures in which these emerge.

Scholarship in community writing and service-learning has called attention to the lack of community partner voices in the assessments of writing partnerships. This article foregrounds those missing perspectives by reporting on the consequences of a community literacy program, Writing for Change, from the perspective of the high school youth involved. Analysis of high school student interviews and letters demonstrates myriad benefits of the partnership, extending from personal growth to a heightened sense of social responsibility. However, our study also reveals disconnect between participants’ development as writers and rhetoricians and their perceptions of that growth and its relevance to their academic work. We ultimately argue for the importance of building connections between the rhetorical activism often forwarded by community literacy programs and the “school literacies” that youth associate with writing.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2018 issue.

Review of Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class by editors Genesea M. Carter and William H. Thelin.

Review of Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African-American Literacy by Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy.

This essay proposes that a “governmentality” framework applied to literacy sponsorship in refugee communities can help identify and critique competing agendas of control. By drawing on interview transcripts collected from an after-school program for refugee youth, the essay offers a glimpse of the different perspectives that shape tutor and aid worker discourse. Some of these discourses deceptively appear to be more “acceptable” than others, while sponsors can seem to be limited in their range of rhetorical strategies for talking about their work with refugee students. Michel Foucault’s (1991a) theory of governmentality shows how such discourses do not necessarily emanate from sponsors themselves, as if they are a central location of authority, but from power relations that are diffuse and contradictory. By examining these relations, a governmentality framework can help teacher-scholars in the community identify alternative discourses to those that shape the sponsor-sponsored paradigm.

As our first volume as co-editors of Reflections goes to press, we look back at the journal’s achievements and forward to shepherding it through an exciting period of growth in the subfield of community-engaged writing. We are at once committed to upholding its history of quality, cutting-edge scholarship—which has contributed significantly to new ways of viewing, practicing, and theorizing community-based writing—and eager to break new ground. Not least, we are keenly aware that we follow a Reflections editorial tradition of excellence and innovation in advancing knowledge in community-engaged writing.

Review of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (2017a) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (2017b) by Steven Alvarez.

For many, the results of the 2016 election brought a shock and much-needed wake-up call, as residents of the U.S.(and other nations across the world) faced a reality that can be easy to forget and ignore: White supremacy still reigns, both in the U.S. and abroad. While the results of the election appeared to surprise residents and poll analysts alike, for many marginalized communities, the election of a President with a history of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia was merely another reminder of the discrimination embedded in our daily realities; a reminder that as marginalized people living in the United States, our fight for survival and agency is far from over.

This paper presents some of the difficulties and challenges that a writing instructor faced when integrating themes of race, gender, and sexuality into her pedagogy, as well as strategies that she developed to address those challenges. The author discusses the merits of building a pedagogy from what Alcoff (2000) refers to as “social location,” despite evidence that women in academia are already subject to gender bias in the classroom. Finally, the author presents a feminist writing pedagogy developed from her research on YouTube’s beauty community, a diverse community that includes many women of color entrepreneurs, in which she asks students to use their experiences, rhetorical knowledges, and feminist theories to question the nexus of professionalism and identity. A sample assignment is included.

The image depicts a person nearly naked. They are light skinned, with red facial hair and dark body hair. They wear a purple powwow dance shawl over their shoulders and are seated behind a large chemistry flask. They have a serious expression on their face, and their eyes are directed slightly away and beyond the viewer.

A team from the University of Dayton, consisting of undergraduate students, a faculty facilitator, and practitioner partners, conducted an innovative oral history project documenting the experiences of ordinary people who lived through the unrest following Michael Brown’s death in 2014. The Moral Courage Project, as it was called, sought to investigate the spectrum of stories from Ferguson that failed to fit into the extreme and polarized narratives emerging from mainstream media coverage and were, therefore, overlooked. With the testimonies collected, the team produced a multimedia exhibit featuring portraits and audio materials. In the process of preparing, traveling, and working, we learned not only about the events surrounding Ferguson, but also profound lessons about building community and practicing courage. As the exhibit begins to travel and reach diverse audiences, the team bears responsibility for sharing these stories and positioning the content in a society where everyday resistance is a reality.

Drawing from a larger qualitative research project focused on Black women’s naming practices, I consider how Black women employ Black feminist consciousness practices of self-definition and self-valuation to name, define, and describe their identities. Given the complex history and popularity of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) image within public and private discourses, I focus on how five self-identified Black women claim, utilize, and theorize strong in relation to their identities and as part of their everyday lives. This research calls for more critical engagement of the individual and collective meanings behind words commonly associated with Black womanhood, but doing so by prioritizing the voices and lived experiences of Black women.

In this article, we examine how Latinitas, a non-profit organization aimed towards empowering Latina youth through multimedia and technology, is a site of resistance. Latinitas provides linguistic, cultural, and technological resources as means to promote empowerment in the Latinx community, thereby creating and nurturing a space for Latinx youth. This article is written by two members of Latinitas: Jasmine Villa, Coordinator for the Youth Editorial Advisory Board, and Taylor Figueroa, a high school senior and Contributing Writer for Latinitas Magazine. Using personal experiences and testimonios, this article highlights how Latinitas sustains social justice efforts by providing an interplay of multimodal spaces (physical and digital) for Latinx youth to use as a platform for self-expression.

Front matter for Reflections Special Winter Issue, 2017 to 2018.

This article offers a case study of the development and implementation of a free activist and leadership course for members of the community planning on running for elected office. The article describes how the course was developed, including an explanation of the partnership between the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) and the University of Central Florida’s United Faculty of Florida (UCF-UFF), which resulted in the creation of an Orlando LLI chapter. The Electoral Activism and Leadership Academy (EALA), as the course was called, was motivated by two disability methodologies: first, a “madness narrative methodology” (Fields), wherein “representations are fragmented and nonrational,” even “resisting objectivity, linearity, and rational progression,” and secondly, a “nothing about us without us” methodology (Fields), which advocates the need for open discussions about action with populations who would be affected by such action. These methodologies helped reduce anxiety around the subject, offering a space for instructors and participants to participate as and when they could, share their stories, and get advice. This paper demonstrates that when oppressive cultural and political climates fragment bodies and identities of marginalized people, that fragmentation becomes the catalyst for opportunities of resistance. These fragmentations ultimately are representative of the cracks in oppressive systems, giving rise to the urgent need for the inclusivity of underrepresented or neglected perspectives, voices, and bodies to achieve everyday rhetorical resistance.

This article explores the dynamic practice of inviting community members to grade college students on their work in community-engaged partnerships. The authors articulate theories of writing assessment with theories of reciprocity to argue that community-based student evaluations can be a valid and ethical form of assessment, and discuss a case study in which local youth graded college students to offer eight best practices for implementing community-based assessment. As reciprocity is often underemphasized in practice, community evaluations provide a strategy for shifting power toward community members, potentially reinvigorating applications of reciprocity to make them more substantial and meaningful.

Review of Genre and the Performance of Publics by editors Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi.

Review of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” —Iowa Representative Steve Kin

Review of South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies by Iswari P. Pandey.

Review of Collaborative Imagination by Paul Feigenbaum.

#Charlottesville. In the moment of transition between summer and fall, the events in Charlottesville called into question the United States’ commitment to equality, equal rights, and racial justice.

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware of various national cultures and rhetorical traditions across the world. Integrating non-Western public rhetorics into the U.S. writing classroom challenges students in this context to write outside of the classical conventions of rhetoric and affords students to mobilize a new discourse for civic action.

Co-authored by a professor and two undergraduates and drawing on interviews with community partners, this essay analyzes a community writing project to document the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city. In collaboration with a local African American history museum, students interviewed 22 African Americans ranging in age from 62-90 years old who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the 22 oral histories recorded, transcribed, and housed at the museum, students, community members, and the professor researched, wrote, preserved, and shared a history of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by African American members of the local community. Aligned with the “political turn” in community-writing partnerships advocated by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick (7), the coauthors argue that collaboratively producing and studying local civil rights history is a form of anti-racist writing pedagogy. The rhetorical, historical project under study illuminates the rhetorical and powerful nature of current narratives of race and racism. As we and all our collaborators documented Civil Rights era history together, we began to circulate layers of counternarratives that both expose and challenge racial realities in productive ways.

Well, this is it. My last introduction as editor. Soon it will be time to pass the editor’s baton to our incoming co-editors, Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick. I wish them well, and I look forward to working with them during this transition stage until Fall 2017.

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream1 and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of the journey toward their dreams. Sharing their narratives and photographs in public forums, the students challenged the individualist American Dream discourse, underscoring a collective approach instead. The outcomes foreground previously-silenced voices and provide an example of culturally relevant pedagogy within a structured literacy curriculum.

This article describes the value of cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning. We argue that community-based learning both provides unique opportunities for breaking academic silos and invites campus partnerships to make ambitious projects possible. To illustrate, we describe a course “Writing for Social Justice” that involved created videos for our local YWCA’s Racial Justice Program. We begin by discussing the shared value of collaboration across writing studies and librarianship (our disciplinary orientations). We identify four forms of cross-campus collaboration, which engaged us in working with each other, with our community partner, and with other partners across campus. From there, we visualize a timeline, turning from the why of cross-campus collaborations to the how. Finally, we underscore the need to name and claim—to value and cultivate—cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning.

Since I began teaching a course titled Writing in the Community, I have been fascinated with how narratives deepen students’ service-learning experiences. In their article “Narrative Learning in Adulthood,” M. Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter say that stories “draw us into an experience at more than a cognitive level; they engage our spirit, our imagination, our heart, and this engagement is complex and holistic.” Narratives give broader context to students’ service, foster critical consciousness, help students believe they can make a contribution in their own communities, and contribute to making service-learning a transformative experience, all outcomes that remind us of the importance of the humanities in forming active citizens.

The proportion of young women in the juvenile justice system has increased substantially since the nineties, yet the rhetoric surrounding them remains under-studied and under-critiqued. The oppressive nature of this rhetoric thwarts the achievement of gender equity in juvenile justice, undermining the reforms that have been recommended over years of research. The following analysis examines this rhetoric for the ways in which it silences women and furthers gendered oppression in system; it also offers critical cautions regarding existing approaches to gender-responsive programming. By acknowledging the subalternity of young justice-involved women, further studies and community collaborations can be taken up to close the distance between the actual experiences and knowledges of young women and the rhetorical constructions of them that have long informed policy, programming, and daily interaction.

Review of From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life by editors Clare Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel.

Review of Democracy’s Education: Public Work, Citizenship, & The Future of Colleges and Universities by editor Harry C. Boyte.

Review of Historias de Éxito within Mexican Communities: Silenced Voices by Octavio Pimentel.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 17, Issue 1, Spring 2017 issue.

This paper uses interviews with five publicly engaged, university-employed sociologists or folklorists in Houston to illuminate ways that rhetoric and composition scholars studying composition history can connect our research projects to nonacademic communities near our campuses. Drawing from covenantal ethics, it argues that we stand to re-see our work’s significance if, starting with general education classes like first-year composition, we share our research with members of nearby nonacademic communities and allow members of those communities to give our research new interpretations and uses.

Review of Civic Work Civic Lessons: Two Generations Reflect on Public Service by Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu.

Review of Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean by Kevin A. Browne.

“Walk out, dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence,” serves as a prompt for One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler’s Global V-Day: Stop Violence Against Women Movement. One Billion Rising asks women and those who love them to gather in dance, protest, and voice in a globally staged effort to demand an end to gender-based violence. This essay analyzes a One Billion Rising installation with particular focus on ways a campus community engages with and understands personal trauma as impacted by publicly staged trauma movements. Cvetkovich’s (2012) “public feelings” project and Berlant’s (2011) “cruel optimism” provide a theoretical framework to consider ways One Billion Rising constructs private bodies as representations of public opposition to violence and its aftermath. Closing thoughts consider how reproducers of civic engagement and resistance, and those most intimate with sexual violence and its trauma, interact with the One Billion Rising charge.

This article offers both a theoretical underpinning and a case study of practice as exhibits of a more democratic community engagement praxis for rhetoric and composition educators. The case study featured in the article suggests re-positioning the importance of collaborative and democratic engagement as the cornerstone of successful community engagement work. While the case is situated in technical and professional communication, it affords an interdisciplinary representation of community engagement.

Four examples of Iraq veterans’ self-sponsored writing and media compositions are reviewed in order to develop a rhetoric of “witnessing” (Oliver, “Witnessing and Testimony” 80) with which to engage veterans’ writing. Particular attention is paid to how this rhetoric can help reframe anxieties that accompany faculty work with veterans in composition classes and in higher education more generally.

Review of Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans editors Lovella Calica and Kevin Basl.

This essay supplements previous studies on effective strategies for instructing veterans in the first year writing classroom. Those studies typically focus on students who identify as veterans, but there are many veterans entering American universities who do not reveal their past military experiences. This essay explores one approach of developing a first year writing course that responds to the experiences of “stealth” veterans while simultaneously meeting the educational needs of all the students. I contend that a rhetorical education approach to writing instruction allows veterans to connect their writing with both citizenship and their former military service, and may reduce the divide between veteran and nonveteran students. I focus on how a citizenship pedagogy could allow veterans to see a stronger purpose for their academic work and to develop an understanding of how citizens can make decisions through inquiry.

Poem by Jenny Pacanowski.

Review essay of When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula Caplan and See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home by David Chrisinger.

The CCCC position statement on student veterans (2015) reminds writing program administrators (WPAs) of their responsibility to prepare faculty to understand not only the challenges these returning students may face but also the assets they bring with them. This essay argues that writing programs must develop faculty education programs that go beyond solo workshops to articulate what it means to be veteran friendly. Specifically, this essay identifies and describes a special-interest-group (or SIG) model for instructor education. This SIG relies on a micro-curriculum to promote a mode of “uncoverage” in learning about student veterans (Reid, 2004). Instructor reflections from a pilot program identify and define characteristics that help to articulate what veteran friendly means in local contexts including awareness of student-veteran issues, empathy toward student veterans, and confidence in working with student veterans.

During the post 9/11 period, veteran writing programs—led by grassroots movements such as Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project—have proliferated across the US. Clinical and anecdotal evidence shows writing is an effective means to address the trauma of warfare; focusing on the unnatural experience of combat, PTSD and moral injury. Most importantly, the writing groups provide an informal, supportive and communal environment in which veterans share stories with each other, and with the civilian population. This essay follows the story of Nathan Lewis, an Iraq War veteran and an influential (and beloved) member of the veteran writing community. It blends journalism, by a writer following the “Solutions Journalism model, with academic inquiry—from the perspective of the soldier/veteran and the journalist/witness. Nathan’s story of war trauma and writing (through multiple interviews) is threaded through seminal moments in post-war literature, trauma theory and the concept of witnessing

The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works—poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.

In this paper, the authors introduce the voluntary education center (VEC), which is a multi-school campus located on military bases in the United States and worldwide that offers accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees to service members and their families. The VEC combines military and higher education elements, offering a productive site of study for the complex interactions between writing instructors and student-veterans in this community of practice. Findings from interviews with five VEC writing instructors offer perspectives on teaching student-veterans in a non-traditional academic environment and illustrate the strategies faculty deploy as they engage with student-veterans, as well as the resources and support they seek. Implications for faculty in traditional higher education settings who work with increasing numbers of veterans are explored.

While many colleges and universities have earned a “military friendly” designation, too few offer opportunities for faculty to learn about military culture and the specific issues facing student veterans as they transition from active duty to student status. This article chronicles the authors’ experiences with and approaches to a workshop series, “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer,” which we have facilitated over the last several years at Colorado State University. Stressing the importance of a strength-based (versus deficit) model for the workshops and the integral role of student-veterans’ participation in the workshops, the essay offers an overview of strategies, common themes, materials and outcomes for faculty development workshops about this important issue.

This article describes a community outreach project for veterans with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) that was particularly effective as a short-term veteran writing group. Sponsored by a grant from the Paralyzed Veterans of America, The University of Arizona hosted an outreach project for veterans with SCI/D in October 2013. When situated in a trusted community of veterans with spinal cord injury and disease, reflection afforded a space for reauthoring experiences wherein veterans were able to make meaning from military experiences. In this manuscript, we highlight reflective writing as a fundamental component of the community outreach because reflection was essential for identifying and sharing strengths to carry forward.

Review of Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and Post-9/11 University by editors Sue Doe and Lisa Lanstraat.

In the fall of 2014, Troy University partnered with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, working in conjunction with the Maine Humanities Council, to provide a veterans’ reading group to wounded warriors at the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Benning, GA. The program, Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience, consisted of five, ten-week sessions. During weekly meetings, veterans came together to share dinner and swap stories. While reading and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and art, the veterans learned much about each other and themselves. In this article, Paige Paquette, an assistant professor of English and the group facilitator, will discuss her involvement in the planning and implementation of the program. Six of the participating veterans will share their experiences in a literary program that allowed them to realize they all have a story worth telling.

Ecological engagement is about attending to the possibilities of dwelling in a place; skunkwork is a way of orienting this dwelling. Skunkwork refers to creative, self-coordinated, collective work in informal spaces of learning and reminds us that ecologically attuned work in the world can promote unexpected, yet collectively desired, change. In this essay, we describe how we used skunkwork to orient our ecological engagement in two workshops on ‘community resilience.’ In both workshops, Boulder Creek became our commonplace, with its history of flooding and abatements as well as one city’s planning and management of crisis and sustainability. We draw from our respective home ecologies and our collective experiences in these workshops to highlight how four attributes of skunkwork and ecological engagement, namely proximity, movement, ecological narration, and weak theory, contribute to community engagement scholarship and advocacy.

Engaged public science communication can support community resilience as policymakers, resource managers, and citizens come to terms with the effects of environmental disturbances, natural disasters, and climate change. Drawing upon field-based ethnographic research of public-facing outreach and education at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), the researcher considers how, in the wake of a catastrophic storm, the evolving ethical science communication and public engagement strategies of park rangers might contribute to and strengthen community resilience. A rhetorical analysis of science communication and interpretive practices at FIIS illuminates some affordances and constraints of rhetorical models of science communication and of pedagogies of play for community-based work.

Review of Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse by editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy.

In the process of creating portraits that document the lives and knowledge of community leaders who are engaged in food access work and urban farming in Chester, PA, students in a first year writing course at Widener University are introduced to a rhetoric of social change and the multivocality and creativity that characterizes food justice work in Chester. The Food Justice Portrait Project is community writing created collaboratively with the goal of reciprocity that provides an archive of biography and institutional history. The exhibition of the portraits challenges the problematic charity model of addressing need in a community and supports community agency.

Introduction to Reflections 2016 Fall issue by Editor Cristina Kirklighter.

Review of The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry by S. Scott Graham.

This article describes how I incorporated an AR-based community media project into a recent undergraduate course on environmental rhetoric, which featured a partnership with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS). With the support of DMNS staff in Creative Technology and Exhibits, students in the course researched and wrote curated materials designed for the museum’s extensive Wildlife Exhibits. Built with readily available mobile technologies, their projects augment the Wildlife Exhibits’ existing print-based text panels (which convey scientific information about the animals) with additional layers of digital texts and multimedia that speak to ways in which these animals have inhabited the human imagination in art, film, literature, and mythology.

This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.

In this study, I consider how public participants respond to institutionalized representations of environmental risk related to fracking. I am particularly interested in moments where participants, reporting marginalization when they attempt to understand or represent risk through environmental regulatory institutions, find or attempt to find agency to shift discussion points about environmental risk.

Environmentalist David Orr lamented some twenty years ago that universities “still educate the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency” (27). This emergency, as Reflections readers are well aware, refers to the shifting and collapse of massive ecosystems and agricultural systems because of human-caused pollution and climate change coupled with exponential population growth. The planetary shifts call on us to reconceive our positions as activists, scholars, and teachers in relation to our communities, to the earth, and to one another. These shifts provide an opportunity for us to rethink the stark and often arbitrary distinctions between our research, teaching, and service or between our colleges and universities and our communities. Students and fellow community members need to be prepared for, and feel agency in, our changing world. In many ways, higher education has heeded Orr’s call.

This article examines the metaphorical confluence between notions of ecology and economy to argue that there is a deep connection between taking care of our spheres of belonging (ecology) and organizing our resources for our spheres of belonging (economy). Invoking the principles of gift-giving economy, this article offers this story of Writing Across Communities as a representative anecdote toward reconsidering the cultural and economic arrangements by which we instantiate community writing programs.

The erosion of Indigenous food systems as part of European and Euroamerican colonization has resulted in a parallel erosion of Indigenous health, lands, and cultural knowledge. In rural southeastern North Carolina, residents of Robeson County are primarily Lumbee Indians who have been impacted by economic, ecological, and health concerns resulting from colonialism’s historical legacy, even as many have worked to safeguard select traditional ecological knowledge. To highlight sustaining community health as fundamental to Native sovereignty, I include service-learning in the Introduction to American Indian Studies (AIS Intro) course I team-teach at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Service-learning activities at Hawkeye Indian Cultural Center—the only organic farm in our region—strive to underscore to students, service-learning’s potential to foster university-community partnerships, to recuperate and sustain local ecological knowledge and Indigenous food traditions, and to enhance the health of our students and community members.

Review of The Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context by Mary Jo Reiff, Anis Bawarshi, Michelle Ballif, and Christian Weisser.

This essay theorizes a pedagogy of responsibility as an alternative to place-based and critical pedagogies that offers to ground students in deep ethical obligation. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I suggest that place may function as a trace of the Other that reminds the self of her responsibility. By analyzing a case study of a place-based college writing assignment, I demonstrate how a pedagogy of responsibility cultivates students’ responsibility for engaging others in ethical, rhetorical response.

Review of Participatory Critical Rhetoric by Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Enders, and Samantha Senda-Cook.

Recent research suggests that climate change is a “tribal” issue. That is, some audiences deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change because of their group identities, not because they misunderstand the science. In this essay, I offer a case study of two Christian climate science communicators and their efforts to persuade religious and conservative audiences who are skeptical of the need to respond to climate change. I analyze three of their rhetorical moves that may be of interest to those who teach and practice public rhetoric. As I analyze these moves, I consider both their persuasive potential and tradeoffs.

Review of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere by Robert Cox and Phaedra Pezzullo.

Review of composing(media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing by editors Arola, K. l., & Wysocki, A. F.

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning. The author uses autoethnography to trace her thinking throughout a yearlong fellows program, during which she developed and taught a new service-learning writing curriculum. She describes how the fellows program helped her to turn several challenges into threshold experiences that resulted in key shifts in thinking.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

I will begin this introduction with one of my favorite quotes written by Maya Angelou. I have shared this quote with many friends, family, and colleagues, and I’ll share it again. The quote is this one: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” In another quote she says we are not born with courage, but we develop it “by doing small, courageous things.” As I reflect on my years of editing this journal, I admit I’m drawn to courageous authors— those willing to take risks and put themselves out there—those who admit to their failures and courageously learn from these failures to better themselves and those around them— those who challenge what we might initially celebrate. Courageous authors help us in our quest for “doing small, courageous things.” Courageous authors consistently check their virtues. Courageous authors make up what you’ll read in this issue.

Review of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Frank Farmer.

Review of Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance by editors Vershawn Ashanti and Aja Martinez.

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities.

Review of Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency by Cruz Medina.

“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed and funded through a Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship at Michigan State University and presented as a digital poster at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2015.

In this complicated world of drones and melting ice caps, copper mines and waste heaps, pipelines, sawmills, and sweatshops it’s hard to know if you can do any good at all.

Near the end of the 19th century, literacy manuals were marketed to African Americans who sought to improve their reading and writing skills outside of a traditional classroom setting. I argue these texts had a worthwhile goal of providing literacy instruction for learners, but they were problematic in that they also served as a source for assimilation into the dominant white culture. Via archival research methods, I examine three of these manuals to discuss how they taught literacy in addition to assimilating students regarding family, politics, and religion—a marked difference from more traditional literacy instruction in the classroom. The lessons represented the idea that discrimination was not necessarily a problem caused by whites but the result of a moral deficit on the part of African Americans. One selection, “Politics,” published in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule (1905), edited by Josie Hall, an African American teacher, instructs, “I think it would have been better far/If the Negro had let politics alone/For the first thing he needed was a home/An education and clothes” (173). Another text Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge (1897), written and published solely by James T. Haley, an African American publisher, seems to be the exception, emphasizing a sense of community through point-counterpoints on language used to reference African Americans. These texts raise questions of how writing instruction past and present may assimilate students through the complicated idea of bettering oneself through education. I conclude that the texts represent a still-present paradox in education; the social advantages students seek are often unattainable without some adoption of dominant social mores, even though it may unknowingly imply a student’s own cultural identity is somehow deficient.

As the Editor of this journal, I am delighted to have interviewed Dr. Cassandra Simon, founding editor of the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship. Some of you who were at the Conference of Community Writing may have heard me enthusiastically talk about this journal as I showed you a copy of an issue. Some of you know our journal is about “Getting on the Bus” as we pay homage to the young civil rights student activists did many years ago. We strive to walk the talk as a social justice and racial justice activist journal. The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship also walks the talk through a founding editor who had this vision guided through her life experiences and made it into a reality with one of the most successful journals in our area. We know our journals are different from the mainstream. We encourage our authors to take risks with their research and writing, work against an ivory tower mentality, and strive for inclusivity by embracing the voices of academics, students, community partners, and others. I am pleased to interview a sister editor and share her inspiring insights on what it means to be a journal editor who celebrates community engagement and scholarship.

Review of Women, Writing and Prison: Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out by editors Tobi Jacobi and Ann Folwell Stanford.

Hurricane Katrina had a tremendous impact not only on the Gulf Coast but on individuals who lived and worked in her disastrous aftermath. I was an assistant professor of social work at LSU when Katrina disrupted my life and career. I recall vividly the first hours, days, and weeks after the storm. I was asked to volunteer in a local hospital emergency room with highly traumatized evacuees, and I, not unlike many other relief workers, developed Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) symptoms. To cope and heal, I turned to scholarship and research. This is a reflection on how Katrina has defined my professional life for the past 10 years.

Introduction to Reflections Fall 2015 issue, by Editor Cristina Kirklighter.

While service learning can be compatible with feminist objectives, if the service does not contribute to structural change or help students understand their role in facilitating change, it can replicate patriarchal goals and run counter to feminism (Ludlow). In this article, we show the way we utilized a feminist lens when designing and implementing a service learning project designed to tackle the problem of dating violence on our campus community. We argue that the feminist lens enhanced student learning and ensured the students make a more lasting and meaningful contribution to a community.

Review of I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon.

After reviewing some of the manuscripts for this issue, we, as editors, thought it would be appropriate to interview Steve Parks’ regarding his perspectives on graduate students and community projects. Steve has worked with graduate students for many years, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He was also the past editor of this journal for a number of years, and we have benefitted through his guidance. As he says at the end of the interview, the interview format cannot capture the spirit of “collaborative discussion” that comes from this work. However, given our close relationship with Steve over the years, the questions we did develop come out of our conversations with him and thus is a product of previous listening and dialoguing. An interview with a friend, mentor, and colleague is a different type of interview—one grounded in the familiar.

Welcome to another issue of Reflections. We are particularly pleased to begin the issue interviewing Steve Parks, someone who the editors have worked with for a number of years. Given we have a couple of articles focused on graduate student experiences with community projects and service-learning, we thought asking Steve Parks to reflect on this particular area would add continuity to this issue. For many years, Steve has mentored many graduate students, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He is also the previous Editor of Reflections and someone I’ve known for years.

Review of Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. HarperCollins, 2014.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

Review of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

Review of Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age by Jennifer Rowsell. Routledge, 2013.

This paper draws on our time working together in a community literacy organization in New York, NY. In it, we describe the strengths of the program while also detailing our questions about how our “mentor/mentee” relationship was represented in the organization’s mission statement and fundraising rhetoric: specifically, the term “at-risk,” which was applied to the “mentees.” We describe the difficulties we faced when we proposed a writing workshop that challenged the organization’s mission statement and raise questions about the rhetorical tension inherent in education nonprofits’ reliance on funding. We ask community literacy nonprofits to consider whether their mission statement and fundraising language inadvertently individualize and/or racialize systemic inequities in public education and argue in favor of community-defined mission statements.

For five years of graduate school, I avoided studying disability because I thought it would require confronting the idea that I have a disability. I was first introduced to disability studies during my master’s coursework. I mustered the courage to take the course on disability because deep down, I knew that this thing I was calling a “vision problem” or what the doctors told me is a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa, might actually be a “disability.” I left the course feeling stimulated but no less intimidated by the idea of looking at myself in the mirror and thinking “disabled.” I resolved that my interest in disability studies was purely personal—it would allow me to learn about my own experiences, but I would do it privately, and I would publicly study something more obviously related to my profession as a writing instructor.

“All visualizations of disability are mediations that shape the world in which people who have or do not have disabilities inhabit and negotiate together. The point is that all representations have social and political consequences. Understanding how images create or dispel disability as a system of exclusions and prejudices is a move toward the process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography (75)

On Christmas Eve, 2012, I participated in a service event with Occupy Sandy on Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York City. Several local charities gathered together to provide Christmas gifts and food for Rockaway residents who had lost everything in the storm and the flood two months before, at the end of October. My spouse and I had worked in a church kitchen in Brooklyn, the day before Christmas Eve, in collaboration with others, cutting apples, arranging dough in massive baking pans, to prepare apple crumbles for this holiday event.

Review of Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2014.

Review of Signs And Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language by Tracy Ann Morse. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2014.

As the field of disability studies expands, a question that is cropping up in theoretical discussions more and more often is whether or not Fatness falls into the category of disability. Theorist April Herndon gives a compelling argument for the inclusion of Fat within disability studies, making an especially interesting connection between the idea of “elective disability” in the Deaf community (associated with a refusal to undergo procedures for cochlear implants or similar surgeries) and the idea that Fat people actively “choose” to be Fat by foregoing medical treatment. Herndon states, “[B]oth Fat and Deaf people are often considered morally blameworthy when they choose not to adopt recommended treatment. Similarly, both fatness and deafness are routinely recognized as medical conditions but seldom as the counter-hegemonic identities of Fat and Deaf, especially within the contexts of law and medicine” (128). The connection Herndon is making is that, rather than recognizing Fat and Deaf as identities that many people embrace, both are seen as defects that could and should be fixed. Thus, Herndon is making a clear connection between Fat studies and disability studies—that of medicalization, perceived choice, and normalization.

An accessible society,” crip theorist Robert McRuer argues, “is not one simply with ramps and Braille signs on ‘public’ buildings, but one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other have been reconfigured” (94). Using McRuer’s definition as a starting point, in this article I seek to work toward creating a more accessible society of teacher-scholars by exploring interdependency as an ethic for intellectual work. Toward this end, I will first argue that creating such a public requires a reconceptualization of the term “pedagogy,” one that moves beyond the boundaries of the classroom such that learning emerges as a dynamic process of recognition and interrelation. I will then review the concepts of independence, dependence, and interdependence as they have been taken up in disability studies and conclude by using these meanings to map out how interrelations on multiple levels make our intellectual work possible.

As Editor of Reflections, I am pleased to introduce this special issue focused on Disability Studies. I have had the pleasure of working with Allison Hitt and Bre Garrett, the Special Editors to this issue, these past few months. Their commitment to this special issue shows through in the dedication and hard work they’ve exhibited throughout this process. Although my area is not disability studies, as a personal essay scholar and teacher, I was particularly impressed with the narrative styles of many of the contributors and the courage they had in speaking openly. As I’ve said many times about my editorship with this journal, we must not just talk about our areas of interest, but walk it as well. These special editors and contributors do just that.

"[W]e might say that disability refers to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of bodily, mental, or behavioral functioning aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically." — Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability "Rhetoric needs disability studies as a reminder to pay critical and careful attention to the body. Disability studies needs rhetoric to better understand and negotiate the ways that discourse represents and impacts the experience of disability." —Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric

Article featuring interviews with Melanie Yergeau, Beth Ferri, and Nirmala Erevelles.

Review of Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Review of Scalawag: A White Southerners Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism by Edward H. Peeples. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

In this article I examine the nature of reciprocity and representation when mental illness is associated with the researcher and/or participant. Reciprocity has been a central concept of activist research methodology, which explores how academic knowledge can be used in the public sphere. Ellen Cushman defines reciprocity as “an open and conscious negotiation of the power structures reproduced during the give-and-take interactions of the people involved on both sides of the relationship” (16). Reciprocity can take the form of sharing the final write-up with participants, inviting participants into the composing of the write-up itself, and writing for and with participants on community-rather than academically-focused projects. These facets of reciprocity are particularly attuned to the civic turn of rhetoric and composition, such as that seen in John Ackerman’s and David Coogan’s edited collection, The Public Work of Rhetoric. For example, in Sophists for Social Change, Coogan describes his experience partnering with teens to organize a booklet describing a city community in order to promote a teen center. The civically-oriented, activist nature of reciprocity links it to the public sphere through its concern for research participants.

Dr. Edward H. Peeples’ career as an activist and academic spans some forty years and reads like a how-to on combining scholarship and activism. Just as amazing as his career was the journey to it. Growing up in the south entrenched in Jim Crow, one might assume that Peeples would have continued down the path of the status quo; however, his memoir, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey thorough Segregation to Human Rights Activism (University of Virginia Press, 2014) recounts his story of learning whiteness and then standing firm against them.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 13, Number 2, Spring 2014 issue.

Many community stakeholders are experiencing increased pressure to enter the digital arena in order to be heard by new audiences, but many such stakeholders lack the technical expertise to do so. To meet this demand, some service-learning teachers are turning to digital media production as a new method of service. This approach to a service-learning pedagogy brings with it inherent complications, however. We believe these complications call for a re-orientation of service-learning projects around a model of distributed knowledge work. This model asks students to view themselves as budding professionals entering into community networks that preexist them. It also requires students to deeply share their knowledge-making practices with community stakeholders.

Review of Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, by Stephen Parks. Syracuse University Press, 2010.

"A white double consciousness would not involve the move between white and black subjectivities or black and American perspectives, as DuBois and Fanon developed the notion. Instead, for whites, double consciousness requires an ever present acknowledgment of the historical legacy of white identity constructions in the persistent structures of inequality and exploitation, as well as a newly awakened memory of the many white traitors to white privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human community." —Linda Martín Alcoff, The Whiteness Question

How might current public-spheres theory underestimate the rhetorical potential of an enclave public—portraying, as such theory does, an enclave as an acutely limited resource for rhetorical empowerment (Squires 458)? This is the question this study takes up. To do so, this study analyzes the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex in Chicago, Illinois, as the complex fell siege to policy decisions to demolish it. My analysis shows that these residents’ rhetoric defied limited conceptions of an enclave. Specifically, I argue that by building a network of interconnected coalitions and by using its enclave position as a point of publicity, this group’s rhetorical work complicates scholarship on how groups with little citizenship status might vie for public accountability to them as agents recognized for their rhetorical leverage.

Review of PHD to Ph.D: How Education Saved My Life by Elaine Richardson. Parlor Press, 2013.

This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.

Review of Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance, by Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008. 142 pp.

Cristina and Isabel’s invitation to be interviewed for this edition of the journal is an honor. I apologize to all readers in advance for a contribution that could have been much better with more time, but I’m grateful to have the chance to comment on a topic that has been the motivating factor in my personal life and my life as an educator and linguist. I will respond to a few questions that have been posed to me by Cristina and Isabel, frame the ethnic studies problem in a larger context, highlight NCTE and CCCC’s work in this area, recounting the work of the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the important work of assisting teachers to recognize and implement a curriculum that authentically represents historic work, and comment briefly on Cruz Medina’s insightful essay on the ethnic studies issue in Arizona.

En un mundo dividido Por un río Lleno de lagrimas Y risas...

Today tutored two fourth graders in tandem, Lili and Maria, our trio reading poems.

Review of Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago. Vintage, 2011.

Review of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González and Angela P. Harris. Utah State UP, 2012.

“You should know that the education of the heart is very important. This will distinguish you from others. Educating oneself is easy, but educating ourselves to help other human beings to help the community is much more difficult.” —Cesar Chávez

This article draws on an archival case study of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Building on my experience as an activist and working in communities and institutions, I argue that it is valuable to examine and translate the histories and practices of organizations like the CFMN to learn the rhetorical abilities we need to operate and make collective change as both part of and outside of publics and institutions. To make this argument, I analyze how Chicanas of the CFMN incited change by writing, theorizing, and making an identity through what might be considered mundane and programmatic writing.

She used to say… Never forget the acento It is part of your identity Y como todos los Mexicanos You need to keep your dignity...

When I draw, I focus on how people interact with one another in some small yet meaningful way. I emphasize the negative or white/empty space around the characters I draw and their environment. I do this not only to make the characters “stick out,” but also to help create a separate personality for the environment, such as the sky, trees, the sun, clouds, houses, and buildings. I use geometric shapes to emphasize how the characters in their environments are “perfect” in their own way. For instance, I use the circle to portray the idea of a generational connection and bond between the individuals within a family and circles of friends. I show not only spatial depth in my drawings but also emotional depth, such as by portraying the characters’ feelings for one another, the rituals they engage in and their attitudes. The shading techniques that I use help to compliment, add texture, and “color” the characters and their environment.

“(Chican@ Studies) will help in creating and giving impetus to that historical consciousness which Chicanos must possess in order successfully to struggle as a people toward a new vision of Aztlan.” —El Plan de Santa Barbara (1969) “When your education is under attack, what do you do?! Fight Back!!...” —UNIDOS chant at April 26, 2011 Tucson School Board Take-Over

Francisco and Miguel’s research agenda is centered in educational leadership and community development. Their work is interdisciplinary and is situated within the intersectionalities of identity formation, race, class, gender, plática and story. In operationalizing this work, Guajardo and Guajardo employ an epistemological construct congruent with their research partners that challenges higher education to engage in research that privileges the lives of youth, elders, and the organic leaders from the community.

This case study describes the Nuestra Casa (Our House) Initiative, an advocacy, communication, and social mobilization strategy to increase tuberculosis (TB) awareness through a public art exhibition hosted at the University of Texas at El Paso. This work describes this multi-disciplinary initiative that cut across academic boundaries to engage faculty, students, and community members in service-learning and community engagement efforts. Nuestra Casa reached diverse audiences, including school children, farm workers, promotoras (health promoters), university students, educators, persons affected by TB, and public health officials in Mexico and in the United States through education, critical reflection, and a call to action.

Colonial narratives often characterize Latin@ culture and students as deficient with regard to education. These narratives persist through legislation like Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which outlawed the culturally relevant curriculum of Tucson High School’s Mexican American Studies program. This article argues that culturally relevant student writing that responds to a prompt about dichos or proverbial sayings in Spanish, illustrate rhetorical strategies of subversive complicity when analyzed through a decolonial framework. Written by students at multiple Tucson High schools during the controversy surrounding HB 2281, the student publication, Nuestros Refranes, serves as the site of analysis that demonstrates how students navigate institutions governed by subjugating policy.

This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secures their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and the public schools. However, because the police and schools help to subordinate community residents, the teens’ new identity sets them against their neighbors. The study describes how Mike and his fellow teacher instruct the teens in how to negotiate this irresolvable structural contradiction through double-consciousness. Drawing on interviews and observations, the author presents the perspectives of Mike and the teens he teaches regarding race, empowerment and justice in literacy education.

Review of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe Lambert. 4th edition, Routledge, 2012.

It is well known that in the United States White European American (WEA) cultural practices are the norm. These ideologies appear ubiquitously, but are especially prevalent in spaces like universities, where WEA cultural practices have a long history of normalcy. For example, although not often stated, university classes are heavily guided by WEA ideologies. This manuscript examines how these practices appear within writing classrooms, and how the curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher biases (re)produce these racist practices that often marginalize people of color.

Introduction to Reflections Spring 2013 issue.

This essay explores the pedagogical lessons of student-inmate peer reviews conducted during a prison outreach project in a first-year composition class. Collaborative writing between inmates and students reveals the positive outcomes that can result from strong mutuality in community-based learning relationships. Through a qualitative analysis of student reflection papers and prisoner oral reflections, this essay shows how an emphasis on the personal during this project did not preclude systemic considerations, but rather produced productive, political outcomes. This essay concludes with a response from my community partner—a prisoner in a medium security facility and participant in the peer reviews. We hope to demonstrate how a reciprocal, relationship-based orientation can facilitate not only productive community-based learning outcomes for students and communities, but also a new type of scholarship—one more thoroughly enriched by community voices.

Drawing upon concepts from service-learning theorists Sarah Ash and Patti Clayton’s DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (2009), this article suggests an innovative approach to critical reflection. Rather than create separate reflection assignments, which can be problematic for a number of reasons described in this article, the author offers composition teachers strategies for embedding critical reflection concepts into composition assignments to create a “reflective course.” The author provides models of types of reflective assignments from a first-year service-learning writing course, including a research paper, a proposal letter to a member of the community, and an oral presentation. These models are adaptable to many levels of rhetoric and composition courses, to many genres, and to students working with a wide range of community partners.

Review of Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. Lexington Books, 2011.

This article includes excerpts and information about Mother Tongue/Idioma materno, a published anthology created in collaboration with authors and Program Gemini Ink, a San Antonio-based literary arts organization and independent literary center in South Texas.

Service-learning courses have typically encouraged students to write for or about communities. Such courses rarely involve students writing with the communities they serve, despite the growing number of opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media. Scholarship on collaborative writing with communities in service-learning courses is scarce; research on collaboration using digital, multimodal texts is more so. Arguing that digital technologies have the potential to make service-learning more reciprocal and effective for all participants, this article 1) suggests that digital spaces are an underutilized technology in community-university partnerships; 2) discusses common barriers to using digital mediums collaboratively; and 3) recommends a set of best practices for introducing collaborative digital writing into service-learning courses.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 2013 issue.

Review of Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by Banksy. Paranoid Pictures 2010.

During a December 2011 interview with the Jewish Channel, then Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said, “I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are, in fact, Arabs and historically part of the Arab community, and they had the chance to go many places.” Gingrich then defended this statement during the December 10 Republican debate, arguing, “Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists.” While Gingrich’s comments were met with audience applause during the debate and later praised by some in right-wing circles, they also drew plenty of negative criticism—and not just from Palestinians. The outcry came from both conservative and liberal Americans, while many in the international community, including Jews and Arabs, also took umbrage at Gingrich’s statements.

Documentary film has the power to carry the stories and ideas of an individual or group of people to others who are separated by space, economics, national boundaries, cultural differences, life circumstances and/or time. Such a power—to speak and be heard by others—is often exactly what is missing for people living in poverty, with little or no access to the technologies or networks necessary to circulate stories beyond their local communities. But bound up in that power is also a terrible responsibility and danger: how does the documentarian avoid becoming the story (or determining the story) instead of acting as the vehicle to share the story? How does she avoid becoming a self-appointed spokesperson for the poor or marginalized? Or how does he not leverage the story of others’ suffering for one’s own gain or acknowledgment? These questions become even thornier when intersected with issues of race, cultural capital, and national identity.

Review of Stick ‘Em Up, written by Tony Reyes, directed by Alex Luster. Shoot, Edit, Sleep and Stone Kanyon Productions, 2011. http://stickemupmovie.com

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

Our mission is to provide opportunities for local communities to represent themselves by telling their stories in their own words. We document stories of local communities because we believe their voices matter in addressing issues of national and global significance. We value these stories as a way for communities to reflect upon and analyze their own experience through literacy and oral performance. We are committed to working with communities, writers, editors and translators to develop strategies that assure these stories will be heard in the larger world. —New City Community Press, circa 2000

In 2009, Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a $600 Canon camera to find and capture the voices of Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence advocates and activists. Their objective was to challenge the dominant narratives of violence, terrorism, and oppression perpetuated by the mainstream U.S. media, and Dreams Deferred: The Struggle for Peace and Justice in Israel and Palestine documents voices of nonviolence activism as an alternative to such narratives. In the following article, Jennifer takes us behind the camera to explain what compelled her and Vernon to make their documentary, why they made the choices they did, and how they went about making their first feature-length documentary. Theirs is a story that illustrates the rhetorical power of do-it-yourself activism in response to a deeply felt call to action. —Kathleen Kerr, Virginia Tech

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

Public writing is a constant battle to make one view seem inevitable in hopes that the audience will set aside the other possibilities. —Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics Attention is being directed toward reality-driven representations from an ever-wider array of sources: journalistic, literary, anthropological. —Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary Watch the movie. Show it to others. Inform yourself. Get active on the issue. —from the “Dreams Deferred” DVD sleeve

The authors have provided, here, a brief introduction to their digital article.

On a cold night in December 2010, the experimental documentary Rothstein’s First Assignment was screened at Virginia Tech. After the film, the audience asked questions of the panelists, who included Dr. Scott Whiddon, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Transylvania University and composer of the original music in the film; the film’s director, Richard Knox Robinson, an award winning photojournalist; and me, the film’s assistant producer.1 That night was the culmination of years of archival research, interviews, long phone conversations, planning missteps, rewrites, emotion, and gratification. The film has since been accepted to the Seattle International Film Festival, the Appalachian Film Festival, the Virginia Film Festival, and several other smaller screenings.

Though born in Ohio, Eli Goldblatt would soon be able to call several more cities home as his father moved the family to Army posts in the United States and Germany. It was this transience that pushed Eli to develop significant relationships quickly and to cherish them long after the family had moved again. This focus on relationships and a sense of movement through the world is something that continues to inform Eli’s career as a professor of writing and a community partner in literacy education. Just as a hitchhiker and a driver build their brief relationship through narratives, we also harness the power of narratives to build our relationships with others, with our communities, and with our world.

Enlightened Self-Interest is a game about non-profit boards. When you play the game with people involved in university/community partnerships, at least one member of the board should be a university representative, but the game can certainly be played with any mix of member characters.

Contemporary nonprofit and governmental organizations actively mediate relationships through and compose representations of literacy initiatives and their participants’ literate abilities for multiple national and transnational audiences. Connecting Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship and New Literacy Studies scholars’ conceptions of literacy mediation to Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural intermediary, this article identifies critical processes of literacy intermediation during a 2008 “Voices of Women” national quilt project collaboration between nonprofit organization Create Africa South, the South African Parliamentary Millennium Programme, and women project participants. Intermediating relationships and processes intensify at postcolonial and multilingual sites of literacy initiatives, in particular through acts of framing and translating that literacy intermediaries engage. Identifying literacy intermediaries affords literacy studies scholars a critical tool to connect local sites of literacy to transnational organizational processes and policies.

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.

This article nods to a writing project in a Detroit Metro area writing class where students were challenged to take a metaphorical walk inside the walls of inner-city Detroit. Modeling the intersection of theory and practice embedded in this method of seeing the city, it introduces terms from compositionists and other scholars who write about place theory. It suggests that the development of vocabulary for seeing and re-seeing a place can help writers, who are also citizens, interpret the material world around them better and, in the best case, invest or reinvest in their communities. Readers are also asked to consider what Detroit “streetwork” can teach them about consuming and producing text twenty-first century style.

In recent years, numerous scholars have become disillusioned with first-wave critical pedagogy, particularly the idea that transformative intellectuals can emancipate students and advance progressive politics despite working for reactionary educational institutions. Portraying social justice-oriented teachers as dogmatic, naïve, and self-contradictory, these post-first-wave scholars hope instead to cultivate students’ critical literacies within the default and privatized ethos of the American Dream. A handful of other scholars look to literacy education’s progressive extracurriculum for ideological refuge from institutional hegemony. This essay, while agreeing that significant obstacles constrain progressive teaching in ways that first-wave critical pedagogues have not sufficiently acknowledged, nevertheless rejects the idea that progressive teachers are trapped by unavoidable paradox. It argues further that, rather than accentuating a dichotomy between institutional and extracurricular, socially conscientious teachers can more productively negotiate the challenges of progressive education by breaking down walls between these locations.

In “A Narrative of Teaching, Community, and Activism,” youth minister, Tim Lee, narrates his journey towards establishing a literacy program dedicated to the personal and spiritual development of young black men. In addition to spiritual advisement and critical dialogue, his program exposes young men to prominent black thinkers such as Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, Malcolm X, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. This community-based initiative is dedicated to the development of a community literacy specific and, as Lee sees it, necessary, for the successful development of the black male youth in Chicago and beyond.

Mrs. Wilma Stephenson has taught in the Philadelphia public school system for over forty years. She currently serves as a culinary arts teacher, a cheerleading coach, and the director of the yearbook committee at Philadelphia’s Frankford High School. Despite the fact that very few conversations about education incorporate a broad understanding of literacy and education that includes practical arts such as cooking, we believe such practices model spaces where institutional knowledge can meet community knowledge in valuable ways. Wilma Stephenson and her students are the subject of Pressure Cooker, a documentary about a group of Philadelphia high school students learning the ins and outs of the culinary arts.

Using the work of Keith Gilyard (Voices of The Self) and Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps) as models for interrogating his own development as a writer of color, Cagnolatti explores the way Hip Hop influenced his rhetorical education in the urban and militant environment of a Los Angeles magnet high school. Through his detailed analysis of the E.M.E.R.G.E. (Elevated Minds Embracing Righteousness and Gaining Equality) collective he joined in high school, he provides an in-depth and passionate model for how teachers should use Hip Hop forms such as battling, freestyling, and ciphering to shape their approach to college composition instruction and community engagement.

In this article, Williams-Christopher calls for greater awareness of the educational import of non-traditional texts, specifically black women’s memoir, for college composition and rhetoric courses. Williams-Christopher contends that including texts that illustrate the various ways black women have transcended forms of oppression, abuse, and disenfranchisement helps to validate the experiences of black women inside and outside of academe. In doing so, the university becomes a space where the transaction of knowledge is multi-directional rather than merely from teacher to student. The goal of holding both community literacy and academic literary in equal regard is to create a space where students can start to break down sharp divides between academic spaces and local communities.

Review of Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age by Adam J. Banks. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.

As a follow-up to his own article in this collection Damon Cagnolatti decided to interview Thomas Lee about his experiences with EMERGE, a student group designed to build critical thinking through discussions on hip-hop, the local community, and youth culture. Thomas Lee is currently the director for the Pasadena, CA based transitional housing organization known as “Hillsides Youth Moving On.” At Hillsides Thomas assists emancipated foster youth (ages 17-21) in achieving financial and social independence.

African American community literacy (AACL) originates with the belief that collective social interactions frequently provide the best chance for individuals to develop—through dialogue, personal interactions, and storytelling—into critical citizens. Community, although often taken for granted, figures into the learning of all students as a primary influence on their language and reading habits, as a space for deliberating with others. In response to this understanding, the editors and authors of this collection ask how we might use the long tradition of African American community literacy to teach students to write and respond to traditional academic concerns and the broader social world. Our interests in AACL extends from an understanding that “if writing instructors are to open their typically controlled, teacher-centered classrooms to the press of local community life, they should be aware of how literacy is figured differently across various contexts" (Deans, Roswell, and Burr 5). In this case, we focus on the way black Americans have used specific social practices to organize and educate one another.

This article considers the value of young adult literature in the literacy development of adolescents. Her account of an out-of-school reading group for adolescent African American girls illustrates the capacity such spaces have to provide young African American women with opportunities for self-reflection, critical inquiry, and personal development, opportunities that may not exist within the traditional classroom setting. Melvin-Davis contends that reading groups, such as these, function as “homeplaces,” spaces where diverse, relevant, and realistic African American experiences are shared, validated, and explored for the insights they might reveal for negotiating the world.

This article examines an African American urban debate league in order to understand the types of literacy training youth in these leagues undergo. As the author notes, debate leagues are important sites of community literacy that are often overshadowed by the popular views of these leagues as highly competitive, predominantly white, and for the socially affluent. However, Cridland-Hughes shows that facilitators and organizers in urban debate settings often shape these leagues as sites of communal and cultural education and support. Her discussion of City Debate, one such organization enacting community literacy, illustrates the relationships built through these sites of rhetorical training and their connection to the development of black youth as critical thinkers, speakers, and citizens of tomorrow.

This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading and discussing the works of African American writers can provide a critical lens for understanding one’s own subjugation, and participates in a long tradition of African American community literacy by helping to transform the lives and minds of a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.

Roosevelt Wilson is the former owner and editor of Capital Outlook newspaper and a former Professor of Journalism at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). This interview with Van Wilson investigates Roosevelt Wilson’s commitment to FAMU and the African American Community. The Capital Outlook newspaper bridges FAMU and the black community as a service-learning site, and links the black community to the university as an African American Community literacy partner. As such, Mr. Wilson is an “agent of social change” in the African American community.

This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the ways of knowing in language of his community, suggests a relationship between language and the truth, and points toward a community pedagogy rooted in language. Allen also figures as a rhetor whose own higher literacy is sponsored by his community, and who returns his rhetorical power to the community for its own betterment. These same dimensions can be witnessed in the pedagogies of later nineteenth-century African American educators, particularly that of Fanny Jackson Coppin of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Daniel A. Payne of Wilberforce University. Moreover, Allen’s very lack of formalized schooling affords us a way of reframing contemporary efforts in university and community partnerships, and offers compelling precedent for Linda Flower’s model of inquiry. For African American higher learning, community literacy partnerships are not merely an additive element of a traditional curriculum; instead, they are the lifeblood of the school itself.

Review of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six by Jordan Flaherty. Haymarket Books, 2010.

This article discusses Shaw University’s mission and service to African American Communities. The author asserts a definition of community literacy that exemplifies the “communal” relationships of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and African American community literacy partnerships. By analyzing historical and contemporary literacy partnerships and agents of change at Shaw University, the author highlights an insider view of community literacy, as lived experiences that reflect the university’s mission. This insider view draws attention to the shared experience of a people as well as the uplift and education of African Americans. The author believes that this focus speaks to Shaw University’s motto of service to Christ and humanity.

“Upholding the Tradition” explores the national program The Big Read and Claflin University’s attempt to form community partnerships in order to increase literacy in the primarily black, rural, and poor city of Orangeburg, SC, where the university is located. The essay includes interviews with the program director and with a key community member, Reverend Larry McCutheon, who was instrumental in recruiting more than 40 people to take part in the reading project. The interviews demonstrate how multiple levels of planning and engagement were implemented and also how many HBCUs, like Claflin, approach service-learning. More importantly, this essay attempts to theorize ways in which HBCUs can do a better job of servicing the neighborhoods that house them. Ultimately, The Big Read project, featuring Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, was successful in reaching lapsed readers because it highlighted programs that brought the reader to the book and allowed him or her to become engaged with issues raised therein.

This article investigates service-learning practices and pedagogy at Jackson State University (JSU), a Historically Black University, founded in 1877 to educate underserved and underrepresented African Americans in Mississippi. As a reflection of the university’s motto, “Challenging Minds and Changing Lives,” this research highlights JSU’s concerted efforts to foster students’ participation in school-community literacy partnerships. Since 2009, the university has facilitated academic instruction in first-year English Composition and Literature courses and in second-year Humanities courses. Not only have these efforts enabled JSU students to partner with Elementary schools and African American women’s help initiatives in the Metro-Jackson area, but JSU students have also completed service-learning projects in Limon, Costa Rica. To further illustrate JSU’s commitment to African American literacy partnerships, the authors present a selection of course materials to demonstrate course designs dedicated to service-learning and African American community literacy partnerships.

For one hundred years, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a Historically Black College and University, has promoted the concept of service as a means of building a stronger academic and social community. At NCCU, service manifests in many forms; however, during the fall 2009 semester, a group of college students collaborated with high school students on a handwritten letter-writing project. The cross-aged teaching initiative employed different theoretical practices that helped NCCU students become rhetors who immersed themselves in rhetorical situations that promoted change. This article focuses on the impact of this literacy-based service-learning experience on NCCU students’ perception of themselves as change agents and problem solvers and on their rhetorical and analytical thinking skills. It also focuses on high school students’ readiness to form a partnership with NCCU students and reveal the problems that negatively affect their lives. Since university students engaged in a rhetoric of change, this partnership is an example of how NCCU continues its founder’s legacy.

Review of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom by Kristie S. Fleckenstein. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

For several decades now, the scholarship of rhetoric and composition studies has shown an increased interest in community literacy and community-based pedagogy. Many point to the emergence of the Ethnography of Literacy (see studies by Heath, Barton, Cushman) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, among others) as an origin for this initial focus on community literacy practices. These areas of scholarship turn our gazes to community literacy practices as rich sites of inquiry that emphasize the social nature of literacy and writing. Linda Flower explains that this turn is, due in part, because “rhetoric and composition studies has long held itself accountable to the public and social significance of writing,” while recognizing its “potentially contradictory goal of developing personally empowered writers” (Community Literacy 76).

This article discusses found literacy partnerships—collaborations around literacy practices that emerge unexpectedly when Spelman College students enact the spirit of service and activism that has defined the historically black liberal arts college for women since its inception. Through an examination of institutional rhetoric, a required general education course and three student cases, the article considers the relationship between doing and becoming as students’ literacies align with the interests of community agencies. Literacy partnerships are not always planned; they can emerge from a spirit of service and commitment to activism that encourages students not just to do service, but to become, through their doing, civic-minded women who use their literacies to promote positive social change.

Despite the significant role digital technology has played in social movements, including the political protests in Iran last year, many still doubt the ability of these technologies to foster civic engagement and social change. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell claims the enthusiasm for social media is “outsized,” and that 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement we’ve (“we” meaning Americans writ large) “seem to have forgotten what activism is.” Gladwell’s analysis highlights many short comings of social networking technologies, and moreover, makes (very) clear his distinction between social networks performing one-off acts of kindness and hierarchical organizations making “real” social change.

As more nonprofit organizations take advantage of the ease of creating an online presence, they need to understand the fundamental nature of Web 2.0: its interactivity between writers and readers. The “(un)civil discourse” that often comes from such interactivity results in an inherent lack of control for writers and their organizations. However, the nonprofits that most successfully use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their missions are those that accept and even embrace this lack of control, finding ways to use it productively to improve their advocacy and empower their supporters and clients.

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

Review of Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement with editors Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser. Utah State Press, 2010.

Review of Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action by Jeffrey T. Grabill. Hampton Press, 2007.

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new opportunities to organize, communicate, and campaign utilizing these new rhetorical networks. I argue for a notion of “viral advocacy” for organizing in new digital spaces. Based on an on-going project using social media in my faculty union’s advocacy work, I demonstrate some possibilities for using social media for rhetorical advocacy.

This article investigates the parameters of civic engagement through digital writing. Specifically, it examines the differences between slacktivism and activism against changing citizenship styles and definitions of civic action. With the goal of rethinking the relationship between civics, digital technology, and slacktivism, it outlines a digital writing project that uses social networking technologies to enact social change by increasing students’ awareness in terms of what counts as civic action in digital spaces. In particular, it draws upon student reflections from a digital writing class to illustrate how engaging Stuart Selber’s three components of computer literacy—the functional, critical, and rhetorical—can afford young citizens an aware and ultimately agentive role in terms of their online civic participation, as well as an opportunity to increase their social capital as digital citizens.

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on deliberation by looking at the social networking practices of a local non-profit. Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves meals to homeless individuals in Washington DC, actively engages many followers and fans through their Twitter and Facebook feeds, but their social networking does not set out to encourage deliberation among homeless and housed people. Nevertheless, the essay argues, their on-line rhetorical work should be understood as the work of public-formation. The essay analyzes the local contexts and participants—including, in this case, the constantly public lives of chronically homeless individuals—and considers how social networking offers people a new tool in public formation: the power of circulation.

As promoters of social justice movements adopt digital technologies in order to communicate with their members, it is necessary to interrogate the rhetorical and ethical effects of these new technologies. If connection to a justice movement is as easy as typing and reading a few key phrases, can that connection be expected to prompt the kind of action required for social change to occur? Using student produced writing and responses to websites promoting social justice causes, this essay discusses emerging digital and cultural literacies that demand a re-imagining of rhetorical appeals for both membership in and action by social justice organizations. Although at first glance the electronic environment seems antagonistic to the goals of uniting people toward a cause, once one begins to closely examine what the new platforms for electronic communications are and how they are being used to form interpersonal connections, one finds that they are ideal for the kind of community building past voices of social justice deemed necessary for successful social transformation. Despite any perceived fragility of virtual awareness, digital technology is an extremely beneficial tool for civic engagement, capable of fostering conversation and writing about justice issues in a meaningful and rhetorically sophisticated manner, and individuals can learn to use their voices to shape the kind of inclusive communities they desire socially into those that also seek justice.

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.

This article deals primarily with the issue(s) of student engagement and technology by examining two YouTube videos, both posted by professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch. A critical examination of such texts is both academically revealing and pedagogically useful. By foregrounding the complex interplay of cultural attitudes towards technology, progress, and the purpose(s) of education, scholars and teachers may fruitfully engage students in both the critical study and composition of multi-modal texts. As a gesture in that direction, I view the larger issue of public discourse through the lens of Patricia Roberts-Miller’s taxonomy of models of the public sphere, and Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible.

This is the story of my first attempt to write myself into labor activism in higher education. As an untenured teacher protesting retrenchment and increases in class sizes at a public university, I explore the risks inherent not only in directly addressing critique to management, but also in publicly posting that critique via blog and Facebook. I note the potential protections of public writing at a unionized school, and discuss the surprising benefits of even small actions for a culture of labor consciousness.

Service learning presents students and teachers alike with emotionally fraught moments. Before these moments shape ideologies and worldviews, they give us sensations. Understanding these sensations is part of what theorists label the affective domain. Affect is a notion garnering much critical attention from compositionists writ large but little attention in the service learning literature. The field has much to gain from acknowledging that students and teachers both experience civic engagement rationally as well as affectively. One of the potential benefits is a more sensitive understanding of how various modes of civic engagement (e.g., volunteerism and activism) are socially, ideologically, and emotionally constructed.

This paper describes how a book group setting fostered the construction of meaning by 12 urban adolescent Latina girls as they responded to literature. Differing from the interactions seen in more traditional educational settings, this study examines the ways that this book group context encouraged the participants to discuss and write about issues related to their lives in order contemplate social and personal complexities, celebrate triumphs, and cope with tragedies. Furthermore, this paper explores the development of the literate meaning-making behaviors that helped the girls interpret textual messages and connect with each other as members of a literate community.

This essay argues that by expanding our conception of a “literacy act” to include the denial of literacy, it is possible to gain a greater understanding into how the politics of literacy are enacted both historically and in the current moment.

In the midst of Tea Party protests, party politics, and political programming which marked the recent mid-term elections, one question kept returning to me: What would it look like if dialogue, a sense of mutual listening and response, was the norm and not the exception? What would it mean to engage in political issues, but to do with a sense of collaboration, cooperation?

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 presents The Kamp Katrina Project, a community literacy partnership with Kamp Katrina residents in New Orleans. Kamp Katrina is a colony for displaced artists, musicians, and low-wage earners. In this article, Kamp Katrina residents relate their stories about life in post-Katrina New Orleans after the levee failures devastated the city (now exacerbated by the recent BP oil disaster). As part of this article, we enclose the documentary short Kamp Katrina: A Love Letter to New Orleans, one of several community texts including a book of photography and a website (http://public.csusm.edu/kampkatrina/) where visitors can access video biographies and performances and learn how to support Kamp Katrina.

In 2009, Reflections sponsored a panel titled “De-centering Dewey,” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The following statements reflect the comments of the program participants, Ellen Cushman, Juan Guerra, and Steve Parks. A question and answer period followed these remarks, which is also reproduced below. Speaker comments have been edited for clarity.

The following email conversation, much of it done in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts across a table from each other, contains two strands that quickly merge into one. We’ve reproduced the beginning of each strand. We each sent an initial email (before either of us had read the other’s posting) and responded to them. Strand one starts with Lauren’s first posting and Kirk’s response to it, strand two with Kirk’s first posting and Lauren’s response. Following that, somewhat chaotically, we’ve included postings, which take up various themes. Readers will see where they merge, and where threads get picked up (or dropped).

Review of Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements, edited by Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia Malesh. SUNY Press, 2009. 250 pages.

This project investigates how a group of adult learners who are acquiring new literacies articulate their relationships to dominant ideologies of literacy. My goal is to look beyond typically expressed motivations for becoming more literate to understand how people see the roles of writing and reading in their lives. I argue that adult learners can teach scholars and teachers something about dominant ideologies from their unique point of critique. Another goal is to examine how learners use alternative literacy narratives to define a place of agency. By examining interview transcripts and written texts, I investigate the ways that one adult learner uses alternative narratives as a means to alter his subject position and disrupt dominant literacy narratives.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

For many people, the word "NHI" means nothing more than an acronym. It does not illustrate or symbolize victimization, injustice, marginalization, or a complete disregard of humanity in life and death. "NHI" or No Humans Involved is a designation that was used by police, politicians, and judges when dealing with prostitutes and other marginalized communities. This paper will mainly look at the effects of NHI in regards to women sex workers. NHI is an example of the institutional oppression that Tracey E. Ore's Maintaining Inequalities: Systems of Oppression and Privilege addresses. By designating crimes against sex workers as "NHI," police, politicians, and judges are accepting the continued violence against sex workers, and the belief that sex workers are unworthy of human rights. The main problem of society is the clashing of ideologies, defined as a system of beliefs. It is important that for oppression and thus, the oppression of sex workers, to end, ideologies of individuals must be dynamic to ideologies of other individuals. In other words, we need to be able to have our ideology, but still be willing to learn, change, or adapt to those ideologies of others.

At the start of my junior year this semester, Professor McCracken asked our class whether or not we identified as feminists. I hesitated before raising my hand. I knew that I wanted to be a feminist but I was afraid that if I was questioned further about what it means to be a feminist, I would not have a worthy answer. Having minimal background in the history and contemporary struggle for women's rights, I quickly glanced around the classroom to gather a reason why my hand should remain raised. I noticed some hands raised confidently and others at half-mast. Then I noticed the white board displaying the title of our class: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Marginalized Communities. I really care about these issues, I asserted in my mind, and my classmates must too, if they chose to take this course.

Here are the major writing assignments, sequenced from English 101103, that Jonathan developed for his service-learning course on HIV and AIDS.

This paper recounts the experiences of co-teaching a community engaged seminar focused on study of sexuality and space in the city of Syracuse. This geographical focus grounded engagement and provides here a platform from which to address the difficulties of identifying communities organized around diverse, socially constructed identities. The study of sexuality and space prompts a rethinking of how and whether sexuality operates in the city as a situated series of locations or, rather, a series of identities shaping all spaces. The paper explores a semester-long, student-driven discussion concerning queer as a category in relation to the study of sexuality and community. Through discussion of this scholarship, we engaged students in the ongoing process of figuring out what it meant to locate queer communities and to queer the broader community.

What is the origin of oppression? Why do we hear so much about it from some circles, and yet can rarely identify it when it confronts us in our everyday lives? Charlie Manter and I, April Maltz, set out to answer this question within the context of our Honors Seminar, Gender, Sex, Race, and Marginalized Communities. We focused on rhetorically analyzing oppression as it occurs in American society using Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, which states that our reality is represented through the use of symbols and that it is created by the terministic screens through which we view these symbols and by drawing on Tracy Ore and Marilyn Frye's theories of oppression. Tracy Ore claims that oppression is institutionalized, and that there are five types of institutional oppression: family, media, education, state and public policy, and economy.

Since its founding, the Hetrick-Martin Institute has grown from a small, volunteer-led grass-roots advocacy organization into a leading professional provider of social support and programming for at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Hetrick-Martin youth members, ranging in age from 12 to 21, come from 174 zip codes throughout all of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area. They are of all colors and sizes, come from all kinds of backgrounds, and their enthusiasm and creativity is boundless.

An (Em)bodied Workshop: When Service Learning Gets Bawdy explores the ways a student's perception about which bodies are and are not sexualized creates problems for that student when she attempts to run a writing group for senior citizens with Alzheimer's disease. This essay suggests that students engaging in service learning may import constructions of a mind/body split common in school settings to service learning sites as a way to authorize their presence in these sites. Students engaged in service learning need to be pushed to examine the ways their constructions of their work may erase the body.

Review of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

This article discusses the practices of sexual literacy by two members of Legato (the collegiate Lesbian and Gay Association) in Istanbul, Turkey, through the perspectives of gateways, sponsors, and the accumulation of literacies. The discussion reveals that sexual literacy is community-based. Therefore, the complex and conflicting notions of community, as inflected by the politics of place and use, are essential for theorizing present and future configurations of sexual literacy in different ways. The conclusion provides suggestions for further research and some thoughts about ways of incorporating pedagogical understandings of how literacies are (self) initiated and acquired, in community-based literacy education.

This essay shares stories and valorizes concepts related to sexualized identities, highlighting details and reflections about exotic dancing, and Bernadette Barton's Stripped. Further, the essay contends that potentially powerful and profound pedagogy exists in exploring these, identities, and that explorations leading to developed awareness of sexually stigmatized individuals and groups may encourage student writers to become more engaged in supporting community engagement.

It is difficult to imagine one's place within oppression, and even more difficult to picture one's participation in it. Yet the fact remains that we live in a hierarchical society that creates a steep slope for marginalized communities to climb. Marginalization occurs when an individual or group is considered "outside" the bounds of mainstream society based on differential association from the "norm", i.e. white, male, rich, and heterosexual.

Review of Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach by Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson.

In Queer Rhetorics, an upper-division service-learning writing course taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, students used queer theory to frame their engagement with local LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Boulder. In their journals, students moved from responding personally to the course material and their volunteer work to generating their own critical inquiries into queer discourse, as well as community-based service projects. This essay argues that self-reflecting on their own sexual citizenship in the context of community engagement fosters students' critical understanding of the public rhetoric of sexuality and gender and the social norms that delimit our sexual worlds.

We know the drill: service learning is good. It's good for you, it's good for your students, and it's good for the community partners and the communities they serve. We know the drill but we still want to hear it, and we want to hear why.

This article presents an interdisciplinary advanced honors course: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Marginalized Communities. Through this ' course and its service-learning applications, students discovered that discourses of gender, sexuality, and race are not simply theoretical—ultimately, they impact people's lives. I include an explanation of the curriculum and the service-learning applications in my design and facilitation of the course, as well as samples of student work and a partial "showcase" of the student's final community event. In addition to describing one course in particular, this article aims to explore service-learning in activist, educative, and research formats and the implications for our students, our own research and knowledge, and our communities.

This article addresses the "problem of speaking for others" in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners' and students' voices with her own, Grobman suggests that the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another. She argues that this productive, but highly complex collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty reminds us that theoretical understandings of such concepts as hybridity, border-crossing, and blurring of group-based differences and identities do not necessarily occur in practice; rather, the Black-white binary, sometimes for very good reasons, is not dissolved. Grobman recommends strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 9, No. 1, Fall 2009.

In a 2002 article, Patricia Roberts-Miller asked if rhetorical theory has a place for what she then called "principled dissent and sincere outrage." This article addresses that challenge, as the author follows a year of living in and writing for a community in Atlanta that works with the homeless in that city. In it, she argues that, if there is a place for dissenting rhetoric, it is taking place in marginalized movements and publications like the one published by Atlanta's Open Door Community. Hers is a follow-up of two previous discussions (both written with Paula Mathieu of Boston College) on what these authors are calling "a rhetoric of dissent."

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native (NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain from service-learning. The results were mixed, with the initial study indicating NNS students often experience more difficulty finding and successfully completing work in the community while the main study found a similar group of NNS students to expect and gain more from service-learning activities than a comparative group of NS students. Implications for introducing diverse student populations to service-learning activities are discussed in light of these findings.

Review of Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy by Keith Gilyard. So. Illinois Press. 2008.

This essay examines Katrina's impact on service-learning pedagogy, in particular how the instability of the storm's aftermath has generated alternate approaches to service project planning and implementation. Tulane's mandatory service-learning requirement following Katrina led the authors to develop a joint project at New Orleans City Park, which combined five sections of writing students who worked clearing storm debris. The weekly movement from an idealized campus space through devastated areas of the city and park served as the basis for two complementary pedagogical approaches, one treating Katrina's disruption of space; the other treating the storm's disruption of time.

Review of Eyes on the Ought to Be: What we Teach About When we Teach About Literacy by Kirk Branch. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 216 pages

This article describes how to set up a course in which students create publications for social justice organizations and non-profits. Careful planning is required, but the news articles, media releases, flyers and newsletters are often crucial to the success of these organizations, and therefore, student rewards are great.

Should we teach our student's how to form street protests, wave placards, and be confrontational? In our quest to teach students how to reshape civic spaces, that is, must our student learn to go beyond civility?

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.

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth in the areas of public rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, ethnography, research, and professional and technical communication. Central to all these areas is the fundamental understanding that writing matters; it can make a difference for peoples, organizations, and institutions. Depending on the purposes and exigencies for writing in these contexts, community-based writing can mobilize people, inform policy, seed new initiatives, draw audiences to events and forums, allow for greater participation in decision making, and make decision making transparent. For the last decade and half, scholars in rhetoric and composition have worked hard to define our roles in facilitating writing in the public interest, though we have not often done so in ways that create a synergy around shared research interests or theoretical projects.

Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication by Melody Bowdon and J. Blare Scott. New York: Longman, 2003.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower. Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

Most discussions of service-learning focus on the potential pitfalls of working with students who inhabit relatively privileged positions. While this crucial concern deserves attention, it has limited our focus by encouraging students to cross borders, to encounter people different from themselves rather than to encounter something different within themselves or within their own communities. This approach may be particularly problematic for students of color whose education for social justice, citizenship, and historical consciousness might best be furthered by a writing, or might I say a “re-writing,” pedagogy that emphasizes recursive spatial movement through place over time—a “writing as the community” service-learning paradigm.

This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I offer some thoughts about how instructors might improve the pedagogical pairing of ethnographic writing with service-learning experiences.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect of academic work: course redesign. Through the lens of standpoint theory, we see that students and community partners hold unique standpoints, yet all too often their voices are marginalized. I assert that their standpoints offer essential contributions to the course re-design process.

The goal of this article is to disrupt and challenge the negative discourses often associated with Mexican immigrants by introducing Mexicano concepts of success, including buena gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado. These concepts emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community in California that I have been a part of for more than ten years. In collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative study, using ethnographic methods, over a two-year period. This article focuses on two individuals: Luis and Armando.

Beneath the hysteria being generated around immigration, intertwined in the neighborhoods creating draconian anti-immigration laws, reside millions of individuals of Mexican descent who are working hard, supporting families, and supporting community growth. The stories of these individuals, however, are seldom represented. Rather, images of conservative talk show host Sean Hannity on horseback, chasing "wetbacks," seem to dominate the airways.

Moving Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Immigrant Experience is a service-learning course created and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with community partner, lnquilinos Boricuas en Acción, focusing on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in IBA's Cacique after-school program.

This article examines what it means when a university makes a multifaceted commitment to migration, taking note of both what can be accomplished through such a commitment and what tensions remain. At Fairfield University, engagement with migration is expressed in the curriculum, service-learning projects, faculty research, and in efforts to influence the national debate on immigration through the University's Center for Faith and Public Life. The philosophical context for this work on migration reflects, in part, the Jesuit Catholic tradition of the University. Service-learning courses across the curriculum involve work with immigrants. In a course on literacy, students assist children of immigrants at an adult literacy center.

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE's David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE's Richard Meade Award for Research in English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the problems with literacy education in America based on his own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York. Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about immigration, his work illuminates the connection between rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress those not of the dominant culture.

It is time for Latino immigrants in the United States to take back their stories-stories that have been rewritten by people in a campaign to drive them out of the United States. The revised stories read in the press and heard on the streets, promulgated by mayors and legislators and citizens who have a vision of America the Way It Used to Be, go something like this: our towns are being taken over by brown-skinned immigrants who drive our crime rate up and overwhelm the criminal justice system; these immigrants drain our economy, sucking our resources for schools, healthcare and welfare programs; they take away jobs from Americans and drive our wages down; they don't really want to be American-they stick to themselves, won't learn English, and are only here to take advantage of our way of life while refusing to contribute to it; and now, post 9/11, they are a terrorist threat. Citizens, we are being invaded; take back your communities before it's too late.

Since 2006, Open Borders Project/ Proyecto Sin Fronteras has used digital storytelling in our work with teens and adult learners in summer workshops, computer courses and ESL classes. Participants write stories or interview others about their immigrant experience, record, edit and mix their stories on an open-source program, and create short audio stories. Their stories are published on our website, used to stimulate discussions, shared in public forums, and played on the radio. The process of creating stories and sharing them has been profound. Listening to each other's stories and reflecting on our common experience is an act of honoring our lives and affirming our sacrifices and dreams. Through our stories, we build a collective identity as immigrants. Telling our stories allows us to take risks, to talk about missing our families, our isolation, our frustrations as we try to feel at home in our new world. Our stories create openings for conversations with our friends and family, to say things unsaid. Our biggest challenge: how to use our stories as instruments for change, to give us a voice, to be heard, to organize, to become actors responding to issues that affect our lives. This article is accompanied by a CD of several of the stories produced at Open Borders Project and referred to in the text.

This collaboratively written essay explores and advocates for the rich potential of community -university educational-activist partnerships for praxis-oriented learning that enrich the lives of all by unleashing the collective power of students, teachers, and community members. Offering four perspectives from such a collaboration in Minnesota, a place that has been a magnet for national and regional anti-immigrant activity, we reflect on the false notion of a town-gown divide, the emotional, political, and deeply personal investments we have in making these collaborations successful, and the critically important and imperative nature of community-based work for shaping a more humane and just future.

This paper reports the process and outcomes of a multidisciplinary service-learning project in a major metropolitan area in southwestern Indiana that focuses on determining, then meeting, the needs of our growing Latino/a population. We discuss three service-learning courses involved with this project - one completed, one in progress, and one being planned. Deploying a theoretical apparatus emerging from sociology and intercultural rhetorical theory, we discuss our students' interaction with this rhetorical borderland and the processes of becoming and hybrid thinking that occurred in the process.

Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers Latino/a immigration from the 1700s to the mid- 1900s. This paper will trace the early history of Latino/a immigration in New Orleans to help foster deep Southern Latino/a "roots" for this growing immigrant population. The paper will also focus on the largest New Orleans Latino/a community, Hondurans, tracing their early history and current immigrant experiences after Hurricane Katrina.

Playwright Glenn Hutchinson discusses his play Limbo, which is based on interviews with Marie Gonzalez, an undocumented college student. Like many other young people in limbo, Marie has made the United States her home; however, because she is undocumented, she is at risk of being deported back to a country she has not known since she was 5 years old. Marie has become an activist for the Dream Act, legislation that would help people in her situation. Following an introduction, Hutchinson has included some excerpts from his play that was performed in Charlotte, NC last year.

It all started with my doodling habit. Sitting at meetings - department meetings, committee meetings, doctoral defenses, meetings with the Chancellor, meetings with the insurance guy, you name it I doodle. Faces, mainly. Big long aquiline noses, thick as weeds eyebrows, creases galore, just for the fun of it. Sometimes muscled, Michelangelo arms and backs, rippling with little muscular bumps for which I have no anatomical backing.

Reader response between between Jessica Restaino and Elenore Long.

I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of transforming alienation into connection is a crucial step in fostering peace. Using this framework, I analyze ethnographic data on one highly successful writing instructor's classroom literate practices to illustrate a pedagogical approach that helped shift both students and teacher from alienation to connection.

Writing assignments carry political ramifications even when they attempt neutrality; students should learn that all writing occurs within larger contexts of power. To accomplish this goal, I advocate instruction derived from practices of critical rhetoric, critical revision, and critical discourse analysis. Rhetoric education, based on Donald Lazere's Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, trains students not only for academic writing, but for citizenry. Students write what David Bartholomae calls "practical criticism," critically revising their own texts. Also, students may practice the methodology of critical discourse analysis, as prescribed by Thomas Huckin, in a course that integrates civic literacy with introductory CDA assignments.

How do you teach peace during a war on terror? The short answer is constantly.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article focuses on America's Army Game, the first-person-shooter video game now being peddled by the U.S. Army for classroom use. In my community-based literacy class, where students partner with children and teens at a local youth center, this "game" helps us to grasp and problematize literacy sponsorship and recruitment-the idea that literacy education involves not just learning a new set of practices but also trying out a social identity. Through this class, I argue for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that's committed to counter-recruitment: to enlarging ideological space so that critical questions can be formed and alternatives entertained.

This article explores the collaborative experience of a university professor and the coordinator of a local hate crimes project as we developed and taught a service-learning course on public dialogue. We begin by describing dialogic communication and suggest that it can be integrated into other forms of public discourse, such as deliberation and advocacy, in order to enrich them. We then describe our course and analyze data we gathered during the semester to assess how the course affected our students. Our analysis suggests that although we missed some opportunities to optimize our students' learning, the course successfully prepared them to plan and facilitate public dialogues on diversity issues, and motivated most of them to become more engaged with their community as democratic citizens and promoters of social justice. We end with lessons learned and ideas for future research and practice.

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk about a real crime, our well-intentioned service component, the design of informational pamphlets for a rape crisis center, did not draw on students' personal resources, nor evoke a believable sense of "change agency." Greater engagement with avenues for action through writing, perhaps via the community partner's work in the local justice system, as well as deeper reflection on students' strengths and positioning, are central concerns as I revise my approach to the course. Faced with the prospect of one day implementing Writing Women Safe at my new institution, I argue that, as educators and scholars committed to community-based learning, we must develop partnerships that push all involved more deeply into honest assessment of needs, resources, and perspective.

Note: This article was originally published in Reflections Special Issue, Bridging the Gap: Emerging Scholars, Emerging Forms ofScholarship. "The Life of A Poem" is a poetic and critical reflection on the relationship between the University and institutionalized economic, physical and sexual violence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a PhD candidate at Duke University, and a founding member of UBUNTU, an artistic and organizing community that emerged in Durham, NC during the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. In this article, Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" becomes a text of healing and a means through which to critically reframe community building and engaged scholarship.

This paper profiles the creation of the Nyerere Centre for Peace Research in Arusha, Tanzania and the evolution of a unique approach to applied peace and conflict resolution in Arcadia University's Master's degree program in International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR). The focus is on a curriculum that bridges theory and practice in the conflict resolution field through the implementation of project-based learning initiatives, an approach particularly well-suited to the subject matter because it joins students, faculty and stakeholders together to solve problems and impact positive social change. The paper chronicles the development of this approach from within the IPCR program, including the partnership with the East African Community and the founding of the Nyerere Centre for Peace Research in Arusha, Tanzania.

In honor of the International Day of Peace (September 21, 2008), established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1981 to be "devoted to commemorating and  strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among , all nations and peoples," the United Nations organized a global peace messaging campaign inviting citizens from every country to urge world leaders to work harder for peace. With international conflicts and crises around the world in mind, the UN wished to provide ordinary people with the opportunity to have their voices heard by those who influence policy. In total, 150,000 text and online messages in many different languages were sent from 140 countries.

This conversation among five activists in Brooklyn, New York, explores the intersections between local anti-war organizing efforts and recent response to issues of gentrification, development, and displacement. Four of the five participants are university professors and members of a neighborhood peace group formed after 9/11; the other participant is an organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. All five live in the same diverse neighborhood. The central contradiction that emerges in the conversation is between the potential for building a more diverse movement around issues of gentrification and the equally great potential for gentrification to reproduce and deepen the very social divisions that have historically hampered organizing multi-racial movements across class lines.

Review of Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone by Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008.

This article examines Montana's effort to implement legislation "Indian Education for All," which is intended to help all Montanans learn about the historical and contemporary contributions and achievements of Montana's Native people, in light of peace-building. It describes three community projects developed by the Montana Writing Project to contribute to implementation efforts and peace activism in these matters. Examined are relevant theories of peace education: "Indian Education for All" legislation, the Montana Writing Project as a site of the National Writing : Project involved in Project Outreach efforts, and difficulties encountered in engaging this work. Participant writing : and photographs are included as illustrations of work accomplished.

Review of Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing by Louise Dunlap. Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2007.

Since the U.S. invaded Iraq, I see my life as usual-wanting to be on the "frontlines of non-violence," but not always knowing how to get there or what to do. In this narrative, I re-draw my local peace advocacy since 2003 to figure out the frontlines and my endeavors. Though refreshed by my core belief in the mutual dependence of non-violent means and ends, I also have identified close conflict with this idea. Especially where my county, campus, and classroom communities intersect, I live and work where non-violence is not everywhere a community value.

Review of The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-Kassner. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2008.

"Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable stuff, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff." —Joy Harjo, A Postcolonial Tale

Although conventional academic wisdom discourages young scholars from becoming involved in community-based work, the growing interest in service-learning and community literacy reflected in contemporary scholarship in composition and within the larger academy suggests that these are now viable paths to pursue throughout the trajectory of a scholarly career. Ellen Cushman maintains that by using service-learning and activist research methods to bridge the gap between university-based knowledge and community-based knowledge, “faculty members can have readily apparent accountability, and their intellectual work can have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335). The growing visibility of community-based scholarship and practice has allowed emerging scholars to set an agenda that our scholarly work must become legitimized and that the climate of resistance to conducting community-based work early in our professional careers must change. I suggest that we work toward mainstream acceptance of the scholarly value of community-based work to support young scholars’ careers while maintaining the edginess of this type of work by addressing key critiques.

We discuss how studying and creating zines in our composition classes allows our students to negotiate and explore the complexities of writing without the compulsions of many of the politically problematic commonplaces of composition pedagogy. We use zines to examine the unique ways in which their rhetorical devices address conflicts around questions of audience and diversity, as well as the particular questions that the zines raise about the politics of persuasion, our own writing practices, writing strategies that the zines suggest to us, and the construction of alternative communities.

While community literacy and service-learning are now established areas within the larger field of Composition and Rhetoric, I have been in the field long enough to remember when these were new areas – a not so long ago period where what counted as “scholarship” and “appropriate sources” was still very much in flux. During this period, our work wasn’t quite so comfortably situated within the mainstream and our very marginality pushed us to invent (and re-invent) the work our scholarship and, perhaps, ourselves as scholars.

Hurricane Katrina shut down nine colleges and universities in the New Orleans area right at the beginning of the fall 2005 semester, as students, faculty, and staff scattered across the country. Despite often severe damage from flooding, fires, and wind, all nine institutions reopened the following January, sometimes using FEMA trailers, hotels, and cruise ships to replace damaged buildings and lost housing. The stories of these campuses since Katrina are dominated by themes of loss, resilience, ingenuity, conflict, and renewed senses of mission and community.

This essay explores the ways in which narratives pieces (beginning with my own personal narrative, moving to the community outreach project that I have been working with, and finally through the narratives of my students) fit together to inform my work and I hope the work of other emerging scholars interested in community outreach. Ultimately, when read in conjunction with and respect to one another the narratives help to illustrate the ways in which community partnerships provide a wonderful merging of civic engagement and situated practice that makes the triad of teaching, outreach and scholarship dynamically interact and complimentary.

Becoming “publicly active” as a Ph.D. student in English and Education at the University of Michigan was a slow and at times bewildering process, with periods of frustration punctuated by moments of exhilaration. Consistently I encountered exciting opportunities for public scholarship and then saw these efforts dismissed or ignored. On one hand, I was fortunate to collaborate with scholars such as Buzz Alexander, whose Prison Creative Arts Project facilitates theater and writing workshops in prisons throughout Michigan and puts on a stunning exhibition of artwork by Michigan prisoners every spring. At the other extreme, multiple professors admonished me to pursue social justice in other forums—in other words, they believe the academy simply is not geared for such work. In short, graduate school gave me both the desire for public engagement and considerable anxiety about whether to pursue it within academia.

Community is a tricky word: although it often connotes an inclusive and harmonious collaborative space, too often it signifies a site of struggle and negotiation, an attempt to find a common framework for conflicting and seemingly contradictory impulses. One of the marks of those active in "community literacy studies," "service-learning" and '"engaged scholarship" is the desire to place themselves in the struggle to build a common framework for collaboration and, within that architecture, to move forward towards building a shared notion of educational, social, and/or political rights.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics by Elenore Long. Parlor Press, 2008.

If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students and community organizations that begin very early in students' scholarly careers—perhaps even as undergraduates in the same locale. This organic relationship should be grounded in writing with the organization or for the organization. My decades of embedding service learning in an undergraduate course in technical communication and in many internships I have directed have shown me that writing with and/or for the organization is a key step in the ethnographic encounter that community-based education involves. Students come to know the local culture first as one of its discursive agents, the better to discern if they want to pursue this agency in further scholarship.

Review of From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community by Charlotte Hogg. University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

This article explores the disconnect between academic, interview-based research with adolescents and the actual lived experiences of teenagers. I advocate that through long-term relationships, community partnerships, creating safe and creative spaces and empowering youth to understand and make meaning of their own experiences, we can truly begin to investigate the issues relevant to their lives. Through personal reflection and analysis of the words and experiences of girls who participated in a performing arts program, I propose creative ways to invite silenced voices into the research process beyond interviews and surveys.

Rejecting the conventional academic wisdom that tells us to “put community-based programs and partnerships on hold or on the side until we achieve tenure,” I resolve this day to hold my multiple subjectivities together by remaining holistic, committed, concerned, connected, and compassionate, but most importantly, centered in the constellation of my community. I will not be (re)moved. I will not be situated in an Academic Siberia – cold, isolated, alone, without connection, without story, without experiential memory. Upon traversing the borderlands of the Academy, I cling to my bundle – the intricacies and nuances of my personal landscape, my contested identity, and the artifacts of that contestation, recognizing that validation and reward lies in the confluence of Civic Engagement and Holistic Academic Practice—the meta-language of significant contribution.

“What does public scholarship look like at the graduate level?” “What do publicly engaged graduate students want? What are their pressing concerns?” “How do graduate students get into publicly active work?” “What are publicly active graduate students doing?”

This article explores publicly active graduate work that engages with survivors of violence as they become testimonial narrators. Drawing on challenges I faced in transcribing and contextualizing the testimonio of Jorge Velásquez, who narrates his experience with injustice in post-war Guatemala, this analysis addresses some of the tensions that emerge during textual interactions with violence narratives. I explore second-hand trauma, notions of pornography of violence, and the role of accountability in scholarly and public representations. Paralleling Jorge’s testimonial performance, I offer narrative strategies I employed in the process of transcription and ethnographic contextualization into a larger narrative about the lived experience of violence within a culture of impunity.

This essay considers the implications of using David Russell's activity theory to re-conceptualize models of community service writing (CSW) that stem from discourse community theory. Here I argue that the notion of discourse community is of limited use to practitioners committed to CSW, because it leads students to adopt unrealistic expectations about their roles in CSW projects and it prevents them from accounting for a number of important factors while doing CSW. In its place, I offer activity theory as a guiding framework that students can use to learn about the multilayered activity systems they are seeking to work in as collaborators in CSW projects.

In the spring of 2007 I helped organize a research cluster with three other graduate students at the University of Washington that focused on the question of public scholarship for academics. We formed the group Students Writing in Public (SWIP), and, taking it as given that public scholarship is of value because it extends the readership of our work beyond the academy and therefore the impact that it might have, committed ourselves to pursuing (via weekly writing meetings/workshops and quarterly guest speakers) how to go about doing this thing called “public writing.” At the time, we conceived of public writing as a translation of our academic work into non-jargon-laden prose, largely as articles and editorials for popular magazines and newspapers. We saw SWIP as an opportunity to try out different kinds of writing so as to engage with an audience less familiar with the “conversations” in which we regularly take part.

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional writing and usability (what we would call “his things”), and writing program administration and adult basic education (“my things”).

A few years ago I served as a graduate assistant in an experimental course for freshmen at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia. New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE) united faculty and graduate students across disciplines to tackle instruction on pressing global issues such as climate change, health, sustainable development, and environmental resources. The issues were timely: Hurricane Katrina struck in the first few months of the course, and the content, including a five-hour community service component, had potential to spark social and civic responsibility among the 1800 students enrolled. There was just one problem: students hated it.

This essay examines the origins and initial objectives of the Comedy Club—an after school comic theatre program that develops an original sketch comedy show annually at Colonel E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, Maryland—along with the value of university-middle school collaborations. Throughout, I document administrative issues, some associated with university collaborations and others endemic to the public school system and the impact this collaboration had on my own research and teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park. Employing a feminist ethnography as my method, this discussion draws from interviews, participant-observation methods, and first-hand involvement to examine how this program is efficacious for students, the school district, the university and community at large.

The goals of community-centered courses in universities are often in tension with ensuring that a community acquires tools and knowledge useful to its own development and preservation. In Community Cultural Development, an undergraduate seminar taught at Tulane University, the attempt was made to harmonize these goals through creating profiles of elders and tradition bearers of the Treme Community in New Orleans. Included are responses of students to the class and their work in the community, along with examples of the community profiles they created. This work is framed by an overview of the course and its project that places it in the context of emerging tensions in Treme and the civic engagement movement in higher education.

The writing I received in my first-semester composition class at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, the semester immediately following Hurricane Katrina was stunning with respect to both student commitment and narrative sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative example of this writing entitled "life During Katrina" by a student I have called "K." The student's essay developed a thesis, documented a chronology, increasingly included detail, naturally included dialogue, and reached a sensitive and sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative sincerely reflective conclusion. Moreover, the student (like my other students in that class) was extraordinarily committed to revision, working diligently on issues of both grammar and clarity. My own conclusion to the remarkable post-Katrina student writing I experienced is that our teaching of Freshman Composition can be much more artificial than we really desire it to be. How to make first-year writing courses more meaningful to students is an imperative that I believe we must continue to explore.

Few of my students knew people from either the New Orleans area or those who had moved to Michigan following Hurricane Katrina. I learned of housing problems that arose from slow payment by government departments responsible for the beleaguered New Orleans residents. So like many teachers around the country, I thought that current events would lend themselves to "teaching moments." However, I noted that in order to raise my students' level of civic awareness, it would be important for them to look at their own state and city. Many times by studying the needs of our neighborhoods we can connect to the plight of people who live far from us.

This paper examines how first year students at a South Texas Gulf Coast university became engaged as researchers and writers in investigating the multi-dimensional issues that impact hurricane victims and their communities. Working with a number of faculty from their learning community and beyond who helped them see the cross-disciplinary implications of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, many of these students succeeded not only in creating a scholarly conversation on this topic in class, but demonstrated a compassion for others in their research. Through their research projects, many of them developed a research obsession that was manifested when they learned to care.

Beginning with the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the author, his students, fellow teachers, and Southeastern Louisiana, the article focuses on lessons learned about writing and teaching through the experience. The article tells the story of Katrina: In Their Own Words, an anthology of storm stories by local students and teachers that the author edited, and what he learned from this experience about the limits of academic writing and the value of voice. The final section focuses on a risky English 101 assignment on writing music that grew out of the storm, how this assignment led to a radio program and anthology, and what this assignment taught him about seizing the "teaching moment."

In 2006, a college professor found herself teaching freshmen composition students during the fall semester at Xavier University of Louisiana. This in itself was not unusual; what was different was that this "fall" semester was starting in January, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. Whether an out-of-towner who rode out the storm on campus or a New Orleans native who lost everything to the disaster, each student had been affected in some way, as had their still-shaken professor who was aware that, in time, not only would the shock wear off but the all-important memories and stories would fade. Throughout the semester Laborde shared her writing and her photographs (most taken in her recovery work as an Exterior Damage Assessor for the City of New Orleans) in order to encourage students to share their own observations and experiences in the form of journal entries and essays.

Mercy College professors in Toledo, Ohio responded to Hurricane Katrina through a disaster pedagogy. Students in composition classes created research wikis and participated in email dialogues and exchanges with University of New Orleans students. A new course, Service in Action: The Sociological Impact of Hurricane Katrina, was also created involving an alternative, volunteer-based spring break trip. This reflection explores how communal engagement is shaped, augmented, and challenged by the use of emergent technologies, and how, through the lens of service-learning, students may find their own voices, coming to recognize that they have the power and where-with-all to effect change.

I am writing from the position of what Stephen North categorizes in The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field as a practitioner. For practitioners, knowledge in composition is generated not only theoretically or through research-quantitative, qualitative or historical-but also (in fact, primarily) through reflective practice in the classroom. In this paper I would like to make my small contribution to the moldy, waterlogged, wind-whipped, recently erected Katrina Room in what North refers to as the Practitioner's House of Lore.

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the results of the first two years of collaborative practice and some critical reflection on the goals and realities of this model of collaborative community design in a post disaster context.

Departments of English are generally known for the storms within and their failure to calm the seas with minimal casualties. Even in times of fair weather, they often appear rudderless. What can be said about English can at times be said about other disciplines. What happens to a department, really a university, when external forces completely overwhelm internal ones? On August 29, 2005, the flood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina laid waste to university campuses in New Orleans. What this paper will do is to indicate how it affected a single department of English, what steps were taken toward recovery, and how using the strengths of the discipline could have carried faculty and students through the waters to higher, more secure ground.

on seeing the flooding after Hurricane Katrina.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, writing instructors at the University of New Orleans felt compelled to incorporate personal, social, and political aspects of the storm into their classrooms. In this article, individual instructors discuss a particular pedagogical approach assignment, class theme, or teaching strategy that we adopted, exploring its rationale and reflecting on our students' reactions and responses to place-based and civic-minded pedagogies during a time of crisis.

The article describes two service learning projects that engaged our Delgado Community College students in a sense of community that transcended their personal trials. A regional accrediting agency afforded local conference registrants the opportunity to participate in a Habitat for Humanity construction project; more than a hundred volunteered. What had been a diaspora of historical proportions effected a new community spirit, one borne of mutual loss and committed to restoration and rebuilding.

As I am a New Orleans native and doctoral candidate in the field of rhetoric and composition, Hurricane Katrina has forever impacted both my personal and academic lives. Relying upon the work of Sandra Gilbert and other trauma theorists, this essay presents a microcosm of my dissertation. It offers examples from New Orleans bloggers who chronicle their post-Katrina rebuilding efforts, and analyzes how writing in generative, on line spaces calls worldwide attention to a city still suffering. It also reflects upon my attempts to make Hurricane Katrina a teachable moment, and discusses the lessons I have learned when students react without empathy to assigned readings.

"And what a congress of stinks! . . . Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath." —Theodore Roethke, "Root Cellar"

Review of Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community by William DeGenaro, editor University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

Even though Lafayette, Louisiana is 150 miles to the west of New Orleans, the city was affected by Katrina, and its twin, Rita, in significant ways. While the eye of neither storm passed directly over Lafayette, we experienced a cosmology episode as the effects of back-to-back severe hurricanes made the world, if only for a short time, less rational and orderly. Based on personal experience as well as an analysis of student essays, this article is an attempt to articulate an essence of a liminal time. Exploring how we attempted to narrate this crisis can provide insight into the ways language works to make, and to simultaneously resist, the discursive event of trauma into a lived experience.

Review of Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum by Eli Goldblatt.Research in the Teaching of Rhetoric and Composition Series. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.

Review of Sine Cera: A Diverse City Writing Series Anthology: Two Old Guys From Brooklyn by the Salt Lake City, SLCC Community Writing Centre.

Delgado pond in early spring Still littered with Katrina-downed tree limbs...

In recent decades, higher education has increasingly relied on contingent faculty to teach multiple sections of composition courses with low pay and few benefits. Administrators have argued that institutions need these faculty to protect tenure-track faculty in times of financial difficulty and to manage fluctuating enrollments. When Hurricane Katrina forced universities and community colleges to declare financial exigency or force majeur, contingent faculty were the first to be terminated. However, their dismissal did not protect tenured and tenure-track faculty. Moreover, without contingent faculty, the Xavier University English Department successfully managed to staff composition classes in the first semesters following Katrina, a period of uncertainty and fluctuating enrollments. This success shows that the employment of large numbers of part-time faculty cannot be rationalized. Furthermore, faculty should strive to integrate part-time colleagues into the academy, and administrators should follow the example of departments which have successfully converted part time positions into tenure-track appointments.