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216 9 Affirming a Contested Agency I want to propose a paradox. People who stand within circles of privilege (like myself and many readers of this book) may also be standing in need of empowerment. What we need in this case is not a space to express our identity or the power to resist pressures upon it but the capacity to speak publicly for something of value in a committed but critical way. By critical, I mean taking an experimental stance to our own knowing (including our beliefs and values), engaging in an inquiry about what they mean in practice, and remaining open to transformation. And yet, many of us are nervous about speaking for rather than against something and suspicious of those who do. With good reason. Commitment can slide from the hilltop of inquiry down into the pits of certainty and rigidity; it can signal a willed blindness to the disturbingly tangled reality of problems for which there are “no right answers.” Or affirmation may sound like a naïve optimism that would make us look foolish in the withering and invulnerable gaze of cynicism. Moreover , we tell ourselves, isn’t a public rhetoric of affirmation and commitment best left to the likes of a Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Paulo Freire, or Cornel West, whose sweeping, elegant, or profound analyses of the world give them the sense of personal agency, authority, or political power one seems to need? If it is true that the privileged (as scholars, teachers, students, citizens) do sometimes stand in the need of the empowerment to affirm, here is a more welcome paradox. In community literacy, the privileged become empowered to speak by becoming able to speak for the hidden agency of marginalized, silenced, or disempowered others. We need to be precise here; this “speaking for” does not mean “speaking in place of” others; it is not a matter of theorizing about or asserting bold claims. It is the caring, patiently precise, and writerly work of drawing out, documenting, and giving visibility and presence to the agency of someone else (in their own eyes and the eyes of others) when Affirming a Contested Agency 217 that person is presumed to lack such capacity, insight, or expertise. In this rhetoric of engagement, students and educators become rhetorical agents by seeing, supporting, and giving a public presence to the agency, capacity, ability, and insight of community partners. Such engagement takes different forms, from supporting to documenting to public fashioning. This chapter documents a form that emerged from the Community Literacy Center experiment, but it stands in the company of work by writers with different theoretical groundings but a similarly motivated sense of the urgency of public talk. Some of the most significant images of possibility for me have been found in Shirley Brice Heath’s community-development documentaries, Glynda Hull’s multimodal digital storytelling, Ellen Cushman’s praxis of new media, Jeffrey Grabill’s technological and organizational intervention, Ira Shor’s academic activism, Eli Goldblatt’s New City Community Press, and David Coogan’s materialist portraits of civic dialogue. They are part of a growing number of teachers and scholars turning to the public and civic possibilities of rhetoric and composition. Nurturing Rhetorical Agency in Everyday Life Learning to take rhetorical action needs sponsors, especially if your schooling envisions more passive roles for you. Raymond was called by his mentors to take a new kind of rhetorical agency in the supportive publics of the Community House. But sometimes one must initiate dialogue and invent a new path in more socially charged situations. When Amanda Young brought her interest in medical communication to a community literacy project, she discovered “a disturbing tendency among [these] adolescent girls to attribute responsibility for their reproductive health to someone else: their mothers, their boyfriends, or, in a distressing number of cases, a relative or family friend who had molested them” (2000, p. 39). She developed an interactive computer program called What’s Your Plan? that used the strategies of community literacy to support girls in making decisions about sexual relationships, health, abstinence, and contraception (1999). When girls open the program’s multimedia magazine (Teen Scene: Dice or Dialogue?), they find themselves in a heart-to-heart talk between Brandy and Tyrone about their relationship and choices around abstinence and sexual activity. It’s a touchy topic that raises the question of who is in control. Posing a...

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