as text. By attending to cues in the researchers’ descriptions and commentary, we can contrast, for instance, the edgy competitive play of Trackton’s impromptu theater to the literary uplift of Heller’s garden to the bite—tempered by sweetness—of Goldblatt’s community-organizing effort to the threatening hyperbole of Cintron’s shadow system. Approaching the tenor of local public discourse in this way may take some getting used to. But I would hope that you will find doing so to be worthwhile, for these registers offer handles (edgy competitive play vs. literary uplift vs. threatening hyperbole) that succinctly capture some of the most significant differences across alternative versions of local public life. Differences in register also emphasize that for an ordinary person to go public, never is it enough simply to decode or encode text; one must also perform specific literacies in the tenor of a given local public.
Literacies
This part of the framework attends to the literacies that ordinary people use to go public. These are the “technical” repertoires affiliated with discursive activity described in a given account (Street, Cross-cultural 9). Literacies are purposeful—as in Scribner and Cole’s definition of literate practices (236). Literacies help organize public life—as in Heath’s notion of a literate event (386). Literacies employ conventions that people may transform to meet the demands of their own rhetorical goals—as in Flower’s definition of a literate act (Construction 36–37). In sum, literacies organize how people carry out their purposes for going public. As Street would advocate, the framework is also attentive to the ways that that oral and written literacies “mix” in different combinations in different contexts (Cross-cultural 10).
Rhetorical Invention
The last element in the local public framework is rhetorical invention: how a discourse permits people to respond to exigencies that arise within its discursive space.6 Rhetorical invention solves “the problem [. . .] all writers face,” that of “finding subjects to write about and of developing these subjects” (Lauer 1). Here, I pose not a single definition of rhetorical invention but rather a question: what’s the version of rhetorical invention embedded within a given account of local public life? The framework lets us identify both the data and the theoretical explanations driving accounts of rhetorical invention across accounts of local public life.
A key way to compare invention’s generative responses across local publics is to consider its implications—how rhetorical invention translates into choices, practices, and actions. To get at these implications, I conclude each five-point analysis in chapters 4 through 8 with a set of implications and some commentary. In these sections, I consider implications that a given viewpoint holds for some of the most perplexing issues that vex community-literacy studies—issues such as local democracy, program sustainability, the politics of identity, and institutional sponsorship. I draw connections to viewpoints treated in other chapters and to other relevant studies and theories. Foremost, these implication sections focus on “consequences [ . . . for] knowledge making, policymaking, and day to day operations” (Royster and Williams, “History” 564). In doing so, these sections attempt to model one way to “keep[. . .] our intellectual engagements with contentious and complex issues productive” (Royster and Williams, “Reading” 142).
In using the local public framework to review community-literacy studies, I have planned my project to be comprehensive although it obviously is not exhaustive. The measure of the framework’s success will be its ability to spur readers to make connections and comparisons of their own.
In part, the framework affords within-type comparisons, as table 3 demonstrates.
For instance, both Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies and Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools portray the local public as the discursive space where private and public spheres intersect. To depict this intersection, Barton and Hamilton invoke the image of a link and stress movement between the private-public binary; Cushman, invokes a gate and stresses the binary’s outright collapse. By implication, Cushman’s gatekeeping encounter makes salient political dynamics that the link does not. Because gatekeeping encounters are sites of intense political struggle, the institutional literacies required to navigate such spaces are inherently political tools.
The framework also supports readers’ connections to other studies. For instance, a reader could use Barton and Hamilton’s working theory of a link to frame Gail Weinstein-Shr’s portrait of Chou Chang, a “literacy and cultural broker” for other Hmong immigrants who like himself are trying to negotiate “urban bureaucracy” in downtown Philadelphia (283). Additionally, a reader may consider how other studies extend implications that follow from those reviewed here; for instance, how Lavadenz extends Cushman’s analysis of institutional literacies by describing the immigration raid (designed to expose illegal immigrants) as the extreme gatekeeping encounter.
Like many other artifacts from community-literacy studies, the meaning and function of the local public framework reside not only in the definitions of its terms but also in relation to the larger history of efforts in rhetoric and composition to span the distance between the situated and the public. The next chapter recounts this history as a response to two of the most pressing questions that the field of rhetoric and composition has faced over the past thirty years: How do ordinary people best exercise their language rights? And how does local democratic discourse actually work? To that history, we now turn.
3 Locating Community Literacy Studies
To what can we trace this interest in how ordinary people go public? How did it come to pass that community-literacy studies put a new unit of analysis—the local public—on the table in order to pursue this interest? Topics come and go all the time in academic fields, so what about this one let it take hold? What roles have sites such as Pittsburgh’s CLC played in the history of community literacy, particularly in relation to building the kinds of observation-based theories and practices that scholars have needed to get this line of inquiry off the ground? These are some of the questions that the previous chapters raise.
In response to these questions, this 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. What has attracted community-literacy scholars to local publics is the promise they hold of enacting (never perfectly, always provisionally, and sometimes never that) what Flower has called “a rhetoric of engagement” grounded in relationships and focused on rhetorical action (Community Literacy 1).
As you would expect, the ethical visions that inspire community-literacy scholars’ interest in local publics vary. Flower anchors her vision in Reinhold Niebuhr’s “‘ethic of love and justice’ [. . .] a “spirit of stubborn generosity [ . . . that] acknowledges the undeniable—the social and economic substructures of power, racism, of identity that will not be erased by goodwill” (“Negotiating” 51, 60). Coogan anchors his vision in West’s “‘love ethic’ that is neither sentimental nor culturally separatist” (“Counterpublics” 463). Affiliated with Karl Marx, Cushman’s vision upholds “reciprocal relations” as a standard for “ethical action in the research paradigm to facilitate social change” (Struggle 28). Rooted in Ernest Bloch’s utopian ideal, Paula Mathieu’s street-based literacy projects enact “hope”—a gesture that seeks to move out of abstractions about a better world toward actions devised to change the current world (Tactics 18). Inspired by Alinsky, Goldblatt’s vision is “the promise of true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off-campus partners” (“Alinsky’s Reveille” 294).
For all the differences in their language, politics, and theoretical orientations, these scholars are drawn to the potential of local publics to dismantle university/“white” privilege and to reconfigure writing instruction outside the academic classroom in terms of mutual learning, linguistic and cultural diversity, and rhetorical
