Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long

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      2 Definitions and Distinctions

      The question How is it that ordinary people go public? is predicated on a prior distinction—that of ordinary people. Iris Marion Young included herself among the ordinary residents of Pittsburgh who together agitated for a citizens’ review board to monitor police conduct. She opened Inclusion and Democracy with a “story of ordinary democracy in action” to illustrate that “more-marginalized citizens with fewer resources and official status can sometimes make up for such inequality with organization and time” (3).1 Welch, too, is interested in how “ordinary people [. . .] go public” (470, 476). For her, it’s the legacy of class struggle that puts most academics and students, their parents and other workers in the same ordinary boat (478–79). Magaly Lavadenz takes ordinary further still in her study of transcultural repositioning within immigration raids. Ordinary refers not to the status of citizen or authorized worker as defined by the state, but rather to the fact that all of us (our students, ourselves, the community residents with whom we work) are neither political figures, nor celebrities, and yet—and here’s the important part—we, in our humanity, are full and representative people in the local publics in which we participate.2 “The public sphere,” as David Coogan points out, “does not exist in any meaningful way apart from our own rhetorical investments in it” (“Counterpublics” 462).

      Furthermore, the term ordinary signals a difference between how ordinary people show up in politicians’ and celebrities’ public discourse and how we ourselves actually go public. In politicians’ public address, the “ordinary person” (Wells 329) is typically “a prop” (330), “the mouthpiece of monologic public policy” (330). Similarly, the ordinary person is cast as the mere recipient of the celebrity’s public appeal, as demonstrated in the photo op that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie staged for their newborn to turn America’s attention to poverty and disease in Namibia (Smith 61). Interested in how ordinary people piece together “scraps of discursive space” to go public, Susan Wells is among those who have oriented rhetorical study toward the public discursive practices of ordinary people (326). She and her students go public, for instance, to appoint a minister, to improve the safety of a neighborhood, to expose incidents of police brutality.

      Community literacy has made the enterprise of going public central to our own and our students’ rhetorical education. Studies in community literacy ask, what does it take for ordinary people to go public? What constitutes situated-public literacies? How might we, as activist rhetoricians, best work to improve the quality of contemporary public life? By forging mutually respectful institutional partnerships? By structuring intercultural inquiry? Or, by designing forums for deliberation to inform wise action? How can a better understanding of ordinary people going public help us, as educators, to figure out “what [. . .] we want from public writing” and to design educational experiences that college students use to develop their own rhetorical acumen (Wells 325)?

      This volume suggests that the community of community literacy might be best understood in terms of these discursive sites where ordinary people go public. From a rhetorical perspective, then, community refers not to existing geographic locales as the idea of a neighborhood would suggest (Barton and Hamilton 15) but to symbolic constructs enacted in time and space around shared exigencies—in other words, local publics. People construct these communities—at once discursive and physical entities—around distinct rhetorical agendas that range from socializing children into appropriate language use (e.g., Trackton’s street theater) to eliciting stakeholders’ perspectives on a shared problem (e.g., Pittsburgh’s community think tank) to demanding respect under conditions that yield little of it (e.g., Angelstown’s shadow system). And people draw upon a whole family of situated-public literacies, in order to do so.

      To study sites such as these, below I suggest a parsimonious framework, not so much an overriding set of terms, but just enough structure to put alternative accounts of people going public in relation to one another. I use this framework to emphasize public features of community literacy not always salient in other standard accounts of literacy, such as “Family and Community Literacies” (Cushman, Barbier, Mazak, and Petrone; Qualls). Nor are these public features necessarily addressed in discussions of everyday literacy (Knobel; cf. Nystrand and Duffy) or, as Barton and Hamilton observe, when community literacy is framed in terms of minority-group practices (15).3

The Local Public Framework

      This chapter introduces the five-point local public framework as a heuristic for comparing alternative accounts of people going public and for considering the implications that follow from them. The point of the framework is not to dissect individual studies as much as to set different kinds of accounts of local public life in relation to one another. We all know better than to compare apples and oranges. In literacy studies, the fruit basket is even more varied, with literacy scholars employing a wide range of research methods—from discourse analysis and cultural critique to action research, including progressive pedagogies and innovative organizational practices. Without deracinating their literate activities from the contexts in which they derive their significance, the framework is my attempt to attend to the rhetorical dynamics at play when ordinary people go public.

      Table 2. The local public framework.

Guiding Metaphor

      Metaphors figure prominently in literacy research describing the discursive sites where the ordinary people go public. As rhetorical devices, these metaphors serve a dramatic function due to their “magical quality, one difficult to describe in discursive academic language” (J. Murphy 6). Metaphors wield the evocative capacity to conjure up discursive space, to call that space into being. Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca called this quality “presence” (116–17); Michael Warner calls it the “world-making” capacity of style (128). Thick descriptions of local public life are stylistic accomplishments in their own right. Through these descriptions, literacy scholars not only conjure up in readers’ minds local publics such as Trackton’s public stage and Angelstown’s shadow system, but in doing so they have also successfully created another type of discursive space for the study of local public rhetoric: a formal public that you and I as readers and writers also help to maintain.

      I have identified the guiding metaphors in these researchers’ accounts of local public life by reading one of two ways. In some cases, the metaphor is designated by the author as a key conceptual home. This is the case, for instance, for the theater in Heath’s Way with Words, the link in Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies, and the shadow system in Cintron’s Angels’ Town. In other cases, identifying the core metaphor required a more constructive effort on my part. For instance, Cushman refers the institutional site she studied as a gatekeeping encounter. I looked to her analysis to see how a gate operates within such an encounter—to swing shut or to creak open, for instance—and how the image of the gate signals both space beneath and above it, as in the expressions “hitting bottom” and “getting over.”

      In identifying each guiding metaphor, I sought evidence of each researcher’s rhetorical understanding of the local public life he or she observed. As heuristics, the СКАЧАТЬ