“We Move Together”: Reckoning with Disability Justice in Community Literacy Studies

This article centers disability justice, an ongoing and unfolding project of LGBTQA disabled BIPOC, to help understand and challenge the work of community literacy studies. By putting community literacy studies in conversation with disability justice through three themes—"Nothing About Us Without Us,” “Access is Love,” and “Solidarity Not Charity”—this essay moves to unpack how community literacy can resist not only ableism but also the interlocking systems of oppression which support it

Pedagogy of and for the Public: Imagining the Intersection of Public Humanities and Community Literacy

As a graduate student in the humanities, I am often fearful that my labor is performed for the sake of performing labor. Exacerbated by academia’s increasingly precarious landscape, this fear requires a hopeful antidote: a new pedagogy of and for the public. Constructed through empathic conversations between universities and communities, this new approach to public scholarship and teaching relies on the aims and practices of community literacy (e.g. sustainable models of multimodal learning, social justice, and community listening) in order to refocus the humanist’s work – particularly the disjointed labors undertaken by graduate students – around the cultivation of publics and counterpublics. In turn, a pedagogy of and for the public also implements the digital frameworks and organizational tools of public humanities projects to enliven community literacy praxis. Graduate student conferences are one site where we could enact this jointly constructed approach. By rearticulating these conferences’ capacity for professionalization, by expanding their audience, and by reimagining their form beyond the university context, I argue that we can establish sustainable programs aimed at expanding community literacies

"What Is It That's Going on Here?": Community Partner Frames for Engagement

Frames—defined as mental structures built through language and symbols that categorize our thoughts and experiences—have a significant impact on partnerships, shaping how participants understand the nature of the collaboration. While scholars have explored how teachers might frame engagement partnerships for university students and administrators, the field has yet to deeply draw on framing theory to examine community partner frames. This article argues that framing theory can shed light on how intentional frames might foster healthier partnerships for community members, offering a robust tour of framing theory and illustrating its impact through an analysis of how one community leader frames a high school-college writing partnership for local youth—ultimately suggesting that community partners may have much to teach the field of community writing about how to use frames rhetorically in engagement contexts

Maria Varela's Flickering Light: Literacy, Filmstrips, and the Work of Adult Literacy Education in the Civil Rights Movement

In this article, I take up the underrecognized and almost unstudied literacy work of Maria Varela, a Latinx Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff member in charge of developing literacy materials for African Americans in the South during the 1960s. I analyze the use of community activism in the multimodal literacy materials that Varela and African American communities collaboratively produced. These filmstrips played a critical role in those communities developing a new ethos of place: an imagined and embodied relationship between local and national communities that offers a new identity, sense of participatory agency, and place from which to speak

Allies in Progress: The Public-School Institutions We’ve Ignored

This article highlights some of the successes the Humanities Out There (HOT) program at the University of California, Irvine had when partnering with progressive institutions, namely with the Chicano/Latino Studies program at the university and with the arts program in a local high school. The first program engaged students in exploring the history underlying their communities, and the second helped students to dramatize their life experiences before a local public using their home languages. Analyzing what enabled HOT’s successes, I urge others sponsoring youth literacy to seek out, and make alliance with, progressive institutions within public education