Offering a comparative analysis of “community-literacy studies," Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.” Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a “local” public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

The Public Work of Rhetoric presents the art of rhetorical techné as a contemporary praxis for civic engagement and social change, which is necessarily inclusive of people inside and outside the academy. In this provocative call to action, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, along with seventeen other accomplished contributors, offer case studies and criticism on the rhetorical practices of citizen-scholars pursuing democratic ideals in diverse civic communities—with partnerships across a range of media, institutions, exigencies, and discourses. Challenging conventional research methodologies and the traditional insularity of higher education, these essays argue that civic engagement as a rhetorical act requires critical attention to our notoriously veiled identity in public life, to our uneasy affiliation with democracy as a public virtue, and to the transcendent powers of discourse and ideology. This can be accomplished, the contributors argue, by building on the compatible traditions of materialist rhetoric and community literacy, two vestiges of rhetoric's dual citizenship in the fields of communication and English. This approach expresses a collective desire in rhetoric for more politically responsive scholarship, more visible impact in public life, and more access to the critical spaces between universities and their communities. The compelling case studies in The Public Work of Rhetoric are located in inner-urban and postindustrial communities where poverty is the overriding concern, in afterschool and extracurricular alternatives that offer new routes to literate achievement, in new media and digital representations of ethnic cultures designed to promote chosen identities, in neighborhoods and scientific laboratories where race is the dominant value, and in the policy borderlands between universities and the communities they serve. Through these studies and accounts, the contributors champion the notion that the public work of rhetoric is the tough labor of gaining access and trust, learning the codes and histories of communities, locating the situations in which rhetorical expertise is most effective, and in many cases jointly defining the terms for gauging social change.

In this volume, rhetoricians, literacy scholars, and humanists have come together to examine the complex discursive constructions of sustainability. Touching on topics including conservation efforts in specific locales; social and political constructions of rhetorical place and space; community literacy; historical and archival analysis of institutional politics, policies, and practices concerning the environment and economic growth and development; town planning and zoning issues; and rhetorics of environmental remediation and sustainability, this collection of essays provides rhetoricians and environmentalists a window into the complex and often contradictory arena of discourse on sustainability.

In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics—“citizen bricoleurs”—deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy. Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it. Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time.

Features the best articles published in rhetoric and composition journals in the previous year.

In the spirit of models of argument starting with inquiry, this book starts with a question: What might it mean to teach argument in ways that open up spaces for change—changes of mind, changes of practice and policy, changes in ways of talking and relating? The author explores teaching argument in ways that take into account the complexities and pluralities young people face as they attempt to enact local and global citizenship with others who may reasonably disagree. The focus is foremost on social action—the hard, hopeful work of finding productive ways forward in contexts where people need to work together across difference to get something worthwhile done.

A Responsive Rhetorical Art explores the risk-ridden realm of wise if always also fallible rhetorical action—the productive knowledge building required to compose and to leverage texts, broadly construed, for the purposes of public life marked by shrinking public resources, cultural conflict, and deferred hope. Here, composition and literacy learning hold an important and distinctive cultural promise: the capacity to invent with other people new ways forward in light of their own interests and values and in the face of obstacles that could not have otherwise been predicted. Distributed across publicly situated strangers, including citizen-educators, this work engages a persistent challenge of early rhetorical uptake in public life: that what might become public and shared is often tacit and contested. The book’s approach combines attention to local cases (with a transnational student organization, the Nipmuck Chaubunagungamaug, and the South Sudanese diaspora in Phoenix) with a revisable guide for taking up wise action and methods for uncovering elusive institutional logics.

Addresses how digital forms of personal writing can be most effectively used by teachers, students, and other community members. At a time when Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Instagram, and other social media dominate our interactions with one another and with our world, the teaching of writing also necessarily involves the employment of multimodal approaches, visual literacies, and online learning. Given this new digital landscape, how do we most effectively teach and create various forms of “personal writing” within our rhetoric and composition classes, our creative writing classes, and our community groups? Contributors to Getting Personal offer their thoughts about some of the positives and negatives of teaching and using personal writing within digital contexts. They also reveal intriguing teaching activities that they have designed to engage their students and other writers. In addition, they share some of the innovative responses they have received to these assignments. Getting Personal is about finding ways to teach and use personal writing in the digital age that can truly empower writing teachers, writing students, as well as other community members. “Getting Personal offers an engaging, comprehensive view of how and why instructors, in both creative and academic writing, can integrate contemporary writing and communication practices into their classrooms, assignments, and curricula.” — Jill Talbot, editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction “I am right now rethinking some of my assumptions about what it means to do and to teach personal writing—especially in digital environments. I’m also taken with the fact that while the chapters are clearly academic, they are also personal, and while several of them explicitly call the ‘false binary between the personal and the academic’ into question, my sense is that they themselves do so implicitly as well.” — Barry M. Maid, coauthor of The McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life, Fourth Edition

Engagement is trendy. Although paired most often with community, diverse invocations of engagement have gained cache, capturing longstanding shifts toward new practices of knowledge making that both reflect and facilitate multiple ways of being an academic. Engagement functions as a gloss for these shifts—addressing more expansive understandings of where, how, and with whom we research, teach, and partner. This book examines these shifts, locating them within socio-economic trends within and beyond the higher educational landscape, with particular focus on how they have been enacted within the diverse subfields of writing studies. In so doing, this book provides concrete models for enacting these new responsive practices, thereby encouraging scholars to examine how they can facilitate writing for social action through taking positions, building relationships, and crossing boundaries.