this book, these spaces are called local publics. As a rhetorical construct, the phrase local publics fills the gap between descriptive accounts of situated literacy (Barton; Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič; Street Literacy) and more abstract theories of public discourse. In comparison to both dominant formal (Barton and Hamilton; Warner) and adversarial (Roberts-Miller) publics, the local publics of community literacy extend Nancy Fraser’s notion of alternative publics. Local publics are located in time and place. Their potential (as well as limitations) as hosts for “actually existing democracy” makes them important sites for rhetorical inquiry (Fraser 109). More than any other entity, local publics constitute the community of community literacy.
The question also immediately raises the issue of institutional affiliation. Some of the earliest controversy in community-literacy studies focused on the power of institutions to define literacy. In this vein, Jeffery Grabill criticized Wayne Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins, founders of Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center (CLC), a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a settlement house called the Community House on the city’s North Side.3 Although Peck, Flower, and Higgins “manag[ed] to define” community literacy for the discipline, Grabill charged them with failing to define community (with all its institutional affiliations) “in any meaningful way” (Community 89). Likewise, Eli Goldblatt made institutional sponsorship the focus of “Van Rides in the Dark.” “Literacy, like all human activities,” wrote Goldblatt, “is practiced within a context of institutions, both institutions whose sponsorship of written language is quite explicit [. . .] or institutions for which written language functions subtly to maintain its solidity in the culture [. . .]” (78). In a hallway conversation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) the year prior to the publication of “Van Rides,” Goldblatt gently pointed out to me that the analysis I had just presented insufficiently theorized the issue of institutional sponsorship. At the time, I was coordinating college students serving as writing mentors at the CLC. For me, the revealing relationship was the connection college mentors made between literacy and social justice. In their work supporting urban teen writers at the CLC, they struggled with how best to forge this connection. How to juggle competing priorities (e.g., grammatical correctness, emancipation, free expression, action-oriented problem solving) was a pressing concern for students and an open question in the discipline at large (Long “Intercultural Images”).
Since that time, both Grabill (Community Literacy) and Goldblatt (“Alinsky’s Reveille”; “Van Rides”) have stressed the role that institutions play as literacy sponsors, and Deborah Brandt’s study of literacy sponsorship has provided theoretical underpinnings for understanding this relationship more fully (American). As much light as this work has brought to the issue of sponsorship, it also represents the momentum community-literacy studies has gained while investigating a whole range of problems that arise when literacy is publicly situated. The relationship between local publics and formal institutions is a case in point.
As the following analysis will show, when we ask how do ordinary people go public?, the responses we get in return expose a whole range of possible relationships between local public and formal institutions, sponsorship being one among many. So while the studies reviewed under current views (chapters 4 through 8) have each contributed significantly to community-literacy studies, together they also dramatize a complex (and no doubt incomplete) set of relationships between local publics and formal institutions that shape and constrain how ordinary people go public.4 As table 1 suggests, a local public may turn its back on formal public institutions, or it may rely on one or more such institution to sponsor it. A local public may intersect with a public institution, or be forged in partnership with one. Or a local public may outright defy formal, public institutions.5
Table 1. Prominent relationships between local publics and formal institutions.
| Literacy Scholar/s | Metaphor for the Local Public | Relation to Formal Institutions |
| Shirley Brice Heath | an impromptu street theater | the local public turns its back on public institutions |
| Deborah Brandt; Caroline Heller | organic imagery: a cultural womb and a garden | the local public relies on one or more institution to sponsor it |
| David Barton and Mary Hamilton;Ellen Cushman | a link anda gate along a fenceline | the local public intersects with a public institution |
| Eli Goldblatt;Linda Flower | a community-organizing effort and the community think tank | the local public is forged in partnership with a formal institution |
| Ralph Cintron | a shadow system | the local public defies formal public institutions |
Together, the studies reviewed in these chapters portray places where ordinary people develop public voices. But to draw implications from the distinctive features of these discursive spaces, the discourses they circulate, and the literate practices that sustain them, we need some sort of heuristic. The local public framework was designed for the job. It is introduced in chapter 2.
Following the format for the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition, chapter 2 provides key definitions and distinctions. It begins by distinguishing ordinary people from those typically depicted going public, namely political leaders and celebrities. Then it provides a rhetorical definition of community for the study of community literacy—a definition rooted in the local publics reviewed in this volume. The chapter then defines key elements of the local public framework: the metaphor that frames the account of people going public and its distinctive features; the context (including location) that frames the site; the tenor of the discourse; the literacies that people in the account use to go public; and the process of rhetorical invention they use to figure out what to say, to do, and to write. The chapter concludes by previewing images of community literacy. The chapter suggests that learning to read local publics is an engaging intellectual enterprise and a prerequisite to forging mutually respectful community-university partnerships.
Chapter 3 asks the question: to what disciplinary priorities can this interest in how ordinary people go public be traced? The chapter argues that the history of community literacy is tied up in efforts to define the local public as an object of inquiry and a site for rhetorical intervention. The chapter suggests that what has attracted community-literacy scholars to local publics is the promise they hold of enacting what Flower has called “a rhetoric of engagement” grounded in relationships and focused on rhetorical action (Community Literacy 1). Scholars’ interests in local publics have coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life—a connection that contends with the inherent ambiguity of language rights discourse and all the complexity of public-spheres studies. The chapter looks at how the ideals of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) movement pervade research in community literacy and how community-literacy projects test these ideals by situating them in public domains where vernacular literacies have a place at the table.
The book’s next section, current views, uses the local public framework as a lens for interpreting a range of positions, arguments, and lines of research related to community literacy and for examining possible opportunities for new research, programs, and applications. To do so, current views features, in turn, a series of images of local public life prominent in the literature.
Chapter 4 features the impromptu street theater in Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnography of Trackton, the rural African-American community she studied in the 1970s in the Piedmont Carolinas and described in Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Theatrical imagery is especially attuned to the performative quality of local public discourse. Thus, chapter 4 draws a parallel between the poetic world-making power of style in written text (e.g., the metaphors researchers use to describe local publics) and the “poetic worldmaking” power of performance (Warner 114), such as those Heath observed on Trackton’s public stage. The chapter also compares Trackton’s public performances to the Native American New Ghost Dance which insinuates local issues into more formal public forums (Lyons).
Chapter 5 features two organic images for local public life: the cultural womb— characterizing the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (Metro AME) parish to eight of the African Americans
