Editors' Introduction

The Promising and Challenging Present of Community Literacy

On the Community Literacy Journal (CLJ) website, we have expanded the definition of community literacy from the already forward-thinking and expansive definition offered by the journal's founding editors, Michael Moore and John Warnock. We've done this to accommodate and include the vast representations of literacy we see across multiple domains beyond mainstream educational and work institutions. Under this wide umbrella, according to the journal website's revised definition, community literacy

can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns. For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used. Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well. Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

With more practitioners at faculty and graduate levels, the praxis of community literacy no longer occupies such a marginalized space within the broader field of rhetoric and composition. In fact, the successes of the 2015 and 2017 Conferences on Community Writing, which had respectively 350 and 436 attendees, raised broad interest in funneling that excitement, energy, and drive into an official organization for community literacy. As this organization, the Coalition for Community Writing, takes shape, the Community Literacy Journal will become an affiliated journal.

But with this growth come even more of the challenges that practitioners have been thinking through and discussing for years, often in the pages of the CLJ. These challenges include the costs and benefits of institutionalization, or what it means—to paraphrase from Paula Mathieu's now canonical book, Tactics of Hope—when previously tactical approaches evolve into strategic infrastructures. There are also the psychosocial implications of investing both our minds and our hearts into supporting social change while being continually reminded that the institutions we represent may reinforce the status quo. It has become increasingly clear to us that the experiences of failure and even burnout—that state where we must step back from community literacy journal the work—might be inevitable components of this praxis, which are points echoed in various chapters of Jessica Restaino and Laurie Cella's collection Unsustainable. In fact, the frequency of burnout has contributed to a new emphasis on contemplative pedagogy, mindfulness, and self-care in community literacy scholarship and practice (Briggs and Mathieu; Godbee).

These material, political, ethical, cognitive, and affective growing pains reflect the experiences of engaged scholars throughout higher education, which has led some to call for dialing back, or even ceasing, the pursuit of community-university partnerships (Stoecker). Within community literacy, the development of best practices and principles such as egalitarianism and reciprocity have emerged alongside the understanding that no matter how thoughtful we are about how we engage community partners, unintended negative consequences can – and at times will – occur. Positioning our practices within the rhetorical ecology of community literacy, interrogating how power imbalances and implicit biases manifest in relationships, and facing the implications of austerity capitalism are all critically important components of this work. At the same time, this self-analytical work, and the misgivings and skepticism about engagement it can engender, can be debilitating for university practitioners and condescending to community partners, whose experiences we sometimes wrongly anticipate. We suspect that, in many cases, community representatives are savvier about the ethical complexities academics face than we give them credit for. We must be self-aware, and we must regularly revisit both our positionality and the dynamic ethical complications of our partnerships. But when we decide on behalf of a community whether or not we are exploiting it, we re-inscribe the same power dynamics we seek to level. In spite of these persistent structural...