tend to be sponsored—that is, affiliated with institutional sponsors that circulate not only texts but practices for interpreting and composing texts (Brandt American; Brandt Involvement). Brandt calls this circulatory process sponsorship—the process by which large-scale economic forces [. . .] set the routes and determine the worldly worth of [ . . . a given] literacy (American 20). Sponsorship helps account for how knowledge is distributed within organizations (Hull “Hearing Other Voices”) and households (Moll and González), how people navigate social networks (Farr “En Los Dos Idiomas”), and how institutional design can promote social change (Grabill Community Literacy).
Finally, situated-public literacies often comprise alternative discourses affiliated with no single homeplace or public institution. Alternative discourses may be an inventive hybrid (Barton and Hamilton 122) that laces together discourses of the street and school, policy talk and political activism (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 210). In other situations, the alternative discourse may be a “hidden transcript” in direct tension with the standards and assumptions of a public institution’s bureaucracy (Cushman, Struggle 139) or a city newspaper’s petty bourgeois bias (Cintron, Angels’ Town 193). Alternative discourses support transcultural repositioning, the “self-conscious[. . .]” process by which members of minority culture move among “different languages and dialects, different social classes, different culture and artistic forms” (Guerra 8). As such, alternative discourses support strategic border crossing, at once linguistic, symbolic, literal, and political (Lavadenz 109).
Situating the Study of Participatory Democracy
As literacy scholars took issue with the dominant autonomous model of literacy, in a similar fashion, public-spheres scholars have critiqued the dominant, abstract, and idealized (though skewed) version of how democratic discourse works. Most notably, in 1990, Fraser sounded the call for the study of “actually existing democracy” (109).12
Fraser sought to complicate the abstract democratic theory that Jürgen Habermas issued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, published in German in 1962 and circulated in English by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas described the method (deliberating claims and adjudicating evidence) by which private citizens (propertied men) set aside (bracketed) their individual interests and differences in order to discuss the most pressing issues of their day (the common good). Habermas identified a method by which public talk supersedes force or coercion in efforts to determine matters of public concern. He also designated a discursive space (the public sphere) separate from that of commerce or the state where people participate in democratic public life through talk. What Fraser objected to were the exclusionary aspects of the Enlightenment-era, bourgeois public sphere that informed Habermas’s theory. In “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” published in 1990, Fraser argued that this sphere restricted the access of “women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians” (123). She argued that a better model would configure the public sphere not as singular but multiple, and would recognize that in democratic deliberation differences are not bracketed but rather inform the very terms of discussion. She called scholars to attend to the conditions that thwart or make possible intercultural communication (121).
In 1999, Gerard Hauser added that it’s not enough to situate studies of actually existing democracy in contemporary, large-scale media-driven conceptions of the public—what this volume refers to as formal publics. These conceptions tend to limit the participation of ordinary people to the voting booth, opinion poll, and jury box (Vernacular 190–91). When scholars assume public life pertains only to large-scale politics of the state, it’s easy not only to view the populace as apathetic (Eliasoph 1), but also to sever the study of democracy from “the dynamic context in which democracy is experienced and lived” (Hauser, “Rhetorical Democracy” 3). Instead, Hauser called for scholars to take an “empirical attitude” toward the “untidy communicative practices” that shape local vernacular public life (Vernacular 275).
Ideas about Actually Existing Democracy
In heeding the call to situate the study of participatory democracy in actual practice, public-spheres scholars have contributed to our field’s understanding of local public discourse. Instead of theorizing about “the public sphere” where citizens bracket their differences and follow the rules and style of rational-critical argument in order to deliberate over common concerns, Fraser identified a multiplicity of alternative publics “formed under conditions of dominance and subordination” (127). Because late-capitalist societies like the United States fall short of their democratic ideals, alternative or counter publics are immensely important. Not only do they offer safe havens to minority groups who within these spaces can develop and articulate their shared interests and identities, but they also persuade the dominant culture to think and behave differently about issues that affect the counterpublic’s members. Fraser credited feminist alternative subalterns, for example, with making domestic abuse a public, rather than solely familial, issue.
In Vernacular Voices, Hauser clarified that it is vernacular voices—the “street-level give-and-take of contrary viewpoints”—that promote discussion and provide insights that matter most to public discourse, not the opinions of “institutional actors” nor some abstract standards of logic, disinterest, or rationality (89). These vernacular voices make pubic discourse more interesting, lively—and, yes, untidy—than Habermas’s idealized versions. Scholars can’t make valid claims about public discourse without tapping into how everyday people—those “not privy to official sites or are marginalized”—engage in “society’s multilogue on issues that impact their lives” (276).
The problem-solving dimension of democratic discourse carries real consequences, for example, for designing treatment programs for pregnant addicts or writing (or obstructing) laws to recognize the plurality of family forms. This was Iris Young’s point in Inclusion and Democracy, published in 2002. She argued that public discourse affects the very quality of our lives, the terms by which we know our existence and exercise our citizenship.
In Publics and Counterpublics, first published in 2002, Warner distinguished counterpublics from publics according to the discourses each circulates. Warner claimed counterpublics circulate politically charged alternatives to rational-critical discourse that call attention to the exclusionary politics of the dominant culture. In order to maximize their oppositional identity-building capacity, these counterpublics circulate countervalent, performative discourses that the public mainstream may consider hostile and indecorous.
In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, published in 2005, West cautioned that given the force with which imperialism and materialism threaten American democracy, going public requires of ordinary people nothing short of a tragicomic commitment to hope (16). West commended a deeply critical and intensely energetic “vision of everyday people renouncing self-interest and creating a web of caring under harsh American circumstances” (95).
Rhetorical Interventions to Support Democratic Engagement
Rhetorical interventions serve as sites for situated theory-building that test, refine, and extend ideas from public-spheres studies. These interventions also scaffold public engagement—often by drawing on vernacular discourses as a resource for deliberation. Rhetorical interventions tend to fall into three groups: activist educational initiatives in the community, pedagogical practices in college courses, and techne for designing local publics—particularly as partnerships between community organizations and universities. In practice, these interventions are often integrally connected. Take Pittsburgh’s CLC, for example. As a collaborative, it was intentionally designed to serve both community and university interests. Likewise, its design supported activist educational initiatives like Inform and other literacy projects; furthermore, specific classroom pedagogies prepared college students to work as writing mentors with urban teens in these literacy projects (Peck, Flower, and Higgins). For the sake of clarity, however, in the analysis that follows, I separate interventions into these three categories.
Activist
