Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric

Building on Nancy Fraser’s (1990) theorization of transnational public spheres, this study examines protest rhetoric of Ghanaian environmental activists who use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter to protest illegal mining (galamsey). I argue that these activists, locally in Ghana and across the diaspora, construct what I call a Transnational Environmental Counterpublic (TEC) to mobilize, raise awareness and influence policy decisions in Ghana. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, I examine protest rhetoric across hashtags, viral posts alphabetic and visuals, and non-human materialities (colors, paper, cloth) to understand how networks of activists contest environmental injustices. This analysis shows that protest rhetoric is not only shaped by embodied and material actants, but they also contest the dominant narrative of land exploitation, extractive capitalism, and ecological responsibility in Ghana. I call on the field to recognize the value of transnational rhetorical practices and their role in shaping global conversations on environmental justice, digital activism, and transnational coalition building.

This essay examines three iconic photographs of “The 15 White Coats” who are a group of fifteen African American medical school students and emerging physicians who posed in solidarity in front of a former slave cabin in Louisiana. Although the photographs generated wide acclaim regarding underrepresentation in medicine, I argue that the performative goal of The 15 White Coats was to subvert any standard images of physicians as white and to underscore past and ongoing exploitation of Black bodies in medicine. More specifically, I demonstrate through these images a methodology of “visual counterstory,” which serves as a form of resistance to anti-Black sentiment while reinforcing positive images of Black physicians. Ultimately, I show how “visual counterstory” makes an important intervention in the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine scholarship, thereby, raising consciousness of the disparities occurring in the contemporary discourse of health and medicine.

Becoming an AARP-designated “age-friendly'' state is a five-year project, and states who choose to do so, often create a website devoted to policy efforts and initiative updates. On these websites, visual rhetoric and writing play a central role in communicating with the public. These websites have implications for how aging is represented and who is included in this online space, both in photographs and in a website’s alternative text (alt text). To conduct my analysis, I selected three “age-friendly” state homepages and used a framework of text and image integration (Shriver, 1997) and accessibility (Horton & Quesenbery, 2013). My analysis revealed that “age-friendly” state pages must provide greater representation of what aging can look like and should include informative and useful alternative text. I also analyzed the Age-Friendly Minnesota site for the network of digital tools (Spinuzzi, 2015). Through this analysis, I found evidence of an ethos of transparency being developed through a large amount of content being made available online, including meeting videos, which captured both efforts to be accountable to the public and moments of adapting to technology. In giving users access to the unedited meetings, they gain access to the mundane and necessary coordination of technology as well as a greater understanding of the process for developing policy.

Following Gogan (2014), this article outlines how shifting emphasis from persuasion to participation as the desired “end” of public writing can help scholars, teachers, and students better conceptualize public rhetorical work. To better understand the range of “participation,” I argue that scholars and teachers might consider three separate-but-overlapping formulations of public writing participation: 1) participation as confronting—accessing and inhabiting places of institutionally-sanctioned rhetoric through agonistic presence, 2) participation as conditioning and coordinating rhetorical action and engagement within broader ecologies, and 3) participation as constructing and creating through future-building and the assembling of publics. To describe these formulations, I outline the rhetorical work of “copwatching,” the organized effort to monitor policing through video documentation and other routinized tactics. Functioning within the contemporary ecology surrounding police reform, copwatching’s diverse activities help illustrate the realities of public rhetorical work as forms of strategic participation across times and spaces.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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/.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.