Drawing on interview data regarding literacy practices done in tandem with housework, this article presents an array of recipe uses among retirement-age women. Given their backgrounds as professionals who come of age during second-wave feminism, the women see little value in "domestic" practices such as cooking literacies (Barton & Hamilton).…

A general overview of the Writing Democracy project, including its origin story and key objectives. Draws parallels between the historical context that gave rise to the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project and today, examining the potential for a reprise of FWP in community literacy and public rhetoric and introducing articles collected in this…

Little known about the now celebrated 1912 Bread and Roses strike is that prominent Progressive-era reformers condemned the strikers as "uncivil" and "violent." An examination of Bread and Roses' controversies reveals how a ruling class enlists middle-class sentiments to oppose social-justice arguments and defend a civil order--not for the good of…

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing "aid-to-Africa" rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals,…

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic…

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…

The article explores the rhetorical dimensions of witnessing. We concentrate, in particular, on two groups: 1) university students at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, whose murals are dramatic reminders of the massacres that resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 indigenous people in the 1980s and early 90s and of the corrupt…

This paper develops a rhetorically centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics--those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors…