Introduction: Envisioning Engaged Infrastructures for Community Writing

We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on “Building Engaged Infrastructure.” Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015¹ and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations. This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.

The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring. This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action. According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was “to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures—an engaged infrastructure—to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded.”² In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.

We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing. For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely. The same is true for what counts as writing. An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex. However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call “community writing.” Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 “Imagining Community Literacy” meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 “Writing Democracy” conference in Commerce, Texas³, or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world. We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work. In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official “Position Statement on Community-Engaged Projects in Rhetoric and Composition,”⁴ whose ultimate goal is “to make visible and measurable the intellectual richness and value community-engaged work brings to academe.” Given the important role we believe this statement can play in helping us build engaged infrastructures for community writing on our own campuses, we are delighted to publish it in this special issue.⁵

Still, differences across community writing are no less common than they are in any other field. Local conditions, for example, regularly determine the shape of projects and outcomes. Thus, while all of the following essays address community writing specifically, they do so in ways that reject the notion that our commonality is a stable, and therefore exclusionary, subfield. The pieces that follow demonstrate that community writing struggles first with self-definition, even as that definition is continually and intentionally elided. We do not insist on a unified definition but rather embrace its necessary fluidity.

The conference theme and the theme for this special issue, “building engaged infrastructure,” was influenced by Jeff Grabill’s scholarship on infrastructures, which, he explains, “enact standards, they are activity systems, and they are also the people themselves” (40). As such, infrastructures are both constrained by external forces and (re)created by the people, places, and communities most directly involved. The infrastructures we work to create are, perhaps paradoxically, unstable: fluid and dynamic, adaptive and tactical, diverse and inclusive. Like Veronica House argued in her CCW Chair’s Address, the corporatization of our universities and the perpetual news cycles insisting on higher education’s...