"Koladeras" are women who use call and response in impromptu songs that may contain proverbs, stories about the community, their life experiences, and who and what they see in their world from their own perspective. Via qualitative methods of (auto)ethnography, personal and life story narratives, and interviews, I look at how "koladeras'" as…

The work highlighted in this essay focuses on an ethnographic study of a group of African American women, members of Phenomenal Women, Incorporated, who come together not necessarily to read and write, but who, in their "sista space"--their club--often read and write when they come together. In this space, they promote self-help through reading…

This ethnographic study argues that reciprocity--the attempt to equalize the power dynamics that occur in working relationships--is a way to counteract the widely-used but rarely-critiqued deficit models that dominate the nonprofit landscape. If community work is not done with a near constant attention to power dynamics, programming that is…

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local Youth Media Organization. The study takes a detailed look at how the youth want to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggle with the confines of conventions of film as is represented by the…

Newspaper media create interpretations of marginalized groups that require rhetorical analysis so that we can better understand these representations. This article focuses on how newspaper articles create interpretations of sex work that affect both the marginalized and mainstream communities. My ethnographic case study argues that the material…

A recent nine-month field study considered the relationships among school-sponsored and community forms of literacy practices in a migrant-sending area of rural Mexico. While many teachers in rural Mexico argue that students should remain in school rather than migrate to the U.S., this study demonstrates the ways in which schools in rural Mexico…

This article explores the literacy lives of students enrolled in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia and the complex role of immediate and extended family members as sponsors of literacy in these students' lives. Some relatives emerged as both sponsors and inhibitors-or perhaps more accurately,…

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in Appalachia inform…