Kelenyi, Gabrielle Isabel

Seader, Chad

Turner, Alison

Vilageliu-Diaz, Ada

English

DigitalCommons@Florida International University

Community Literacy Journal Volume 18 Issue 1 Article 2 Fall 3-21-2024 Guest Editors' Introduction Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi Chad Seader Alison Turner Ada Vilageliu-Diaz Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy Recommended Citation Kelenyi, Gabrielle Isabel; Seader, Chad; Turner, Alison; and Vilageliu-Diaz, Ada (2024) "Guest Editors' Introduction," Community Literacy Journal: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy/vol18/iss1/2 This work is brought to you for free and open access by FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Community Literacy Journal by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact dcc@fiu.edu. fall 20231Guest Editors’ IntroductionGuest Editors’ IntroductionGabrielle Isabel Kelenyi, Chad Seader, Alison Turner, Ada Vilageliu-DiazFor this special issue of Community Literacy Journal, we invited submissions from practitioners who are applying methods and practices as a means for “imagining a world that doesn’t exist” (Ozy Aloziem). The call for papers de-veloped from a discussion initially shaped by Coalition for Community Writing Emerging Scholars, who were inspired by the 2023 Conference on Community Writ-ing’s theme: radical imagination. Conversations over several months highlighted this special issue as an opportunity to intentionally feature new voices and BIPOC per-spectives. As guest editors for this special issue, we are proud to publish research that reflects ideas, values, and possibilities that deepen these foundational discussions. As emerging editors navigating the business of academic publishing, we’re fa-miliar with the rhetorical and systematic frictions shaping our work in community writing. It often seems as if the values and practices needed to support truly transfor-mative antiracist, decolonial, anticapitalist community potentials are at odds with the conditions of our employment and the necessities to simply get by in the US. For us, this tension between the possibilities we strive to manifest and currents of the neo-liberal university is a source of both frustration and creative resilience. While work-ing with the authors featured in this issue, we felt a sense of comradery seeing them wrestle with the same questions and challenges that we face in our own practices. As drafts circulated back and forth between editors and authors, we offered each other fresh perspectives that inspired new ideas and strategies to strengthen our respective communities. The issue reflects the knowledge-sharing and mutual support that lies at the heart of our work to continuously reimagine what community writing and lit-eracy can do despite institutional and structural limitations. First, in two peer-reviewed articles, authors focus on how culturally specific rhet-orics operate to heal and (dis)empower communities, respectively. In “African Amer-icans in Ghana: Enacting Literate Acts of Healing from Epistemic and Ontological Harm,” Mohammed Sakip Iddrisu explores the ritual of African Americans visiting the Ancestral Slave River Park in the Central Region of Ghana. Iddrisu frames this site as a “space where African Americans and other Africans in the diaspora symbol-ically inscribe their names as evidence of their return to their ancestral homeland,” a “gesture” that he argues is “in defiance of colonial structures.” Traveling to this site, Iddrisu asserts, is a “radical literate social act” that heals ontological harm, manifest-ing in literacy practices ranging from embodied rituals of bathing, writing on the Me-morial Wall of Return, dress, and naming.While Iddrisu’s piece highlights the textual and non-textual literacies of Afri-can Americans in Ghana, Guadalupe Remigio Ortega radically reimagines literacy and non-literacy in “Saliendo del Pueblo: Literacy and Non-Literacy Practices in community literacy journal2 KELENYI, SEADER, TURNER, AND VILAGELIU-DIAZa Mixtec Farmworking Community.” By highlighting her parents’ deliberate choices to prioritize orality, human connection, stories, spirituality, and connection to land to communicate both within and without their Mixtec farmworking communities, Re-migio Ortega aims to transform “non-literacy into a positive, intentional, and proud choice, an act of self-preservation and resistance” for Latinx Indigenous folx. Her par-ents’ stories demonstrate how literacy and non-literacy interact, bringing questions about who and how literacy empowers and disempowers to the fore.Then, rooted in her own experience as a first-year professor at a private, pre-dominantly-white university, Teigha VanHester’s piece “Finding the Lorde in Me” draws upon Audre Lorde’s work on eros and anger to expand Aja Martinez’s concept of counterstory and develop strategies BIPOC scholars might use to navigate insti-tutional violence. VanHester’s concept of Lordean counterstory deviates from Marti-nez’s model via its focus on embodiment. By honing in on our emotions and under-standing how those emotions relate to the systems we’re positioned within, VanHester claims that Lordean counterstory has potential to build community and fight against the forces of neoliberalism by opening new possibilities.Finally, Erin Green’s “Radically Imagining Community Programs: Reflection, Collaboration, and Organizer Toolkits” addresses the challenges of developing community writing projects through a discussion of their own public-facing syllabus project and organizer toolkits for social justice. Green’s piece argues for the impor-tance of flexibility and adaptability when designing and implementing community writing projects despite scholars’ “ambitious” goals because “community literacy work is challenging and often comes with unforeseen disruptions.” This Issues piece serves as a useful reminder for community writing practitioners that we should move be-yond the idea of reciprocity and focus instead on “more emergent strategies for enact-ing radical change.”Taken together, these pieces show that imagining a better future isn’t enough; rather, radical imagination requires that we engage one another, experiment, and play outside predetermined structures as a means of guiding structural change and em-bodying new ways of being in the world. In the words of Michael Lone Wolf Orrell, the creator of this issue’s cover art, these new ways of being require “sharp edges” to arrive at “colorful beauty.”We are pleased to also include two book reviews, edited by Jessica Shumake, and the fourth publication of “Coda: Community Writing and Creative Work,” edited by Kefaya Diab, Chad Seader, Alison Turner, and Stephanie Wade.

Guest Editors\u27 Introduction

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Guest Editors\u27 Introduction

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