Critical Community Literacy: Looking With Local Resistance

Abstract

This dissertation considers the relationship between literacy and activism in the public sphere. In the fall of 2016 I participated with a local racial justice organization where I took part in a series of public meetings. Focused on alternative means of public safety, the meetings were planned in response to local state violence—multiple incidents of police shooting and killing Black community members—as well as the broader interlocking systems of oppression which fail to protect people of color. This study exhibits how one decentralized organization helps establish critical literacy in a segregated urban area, better known for its progressive politics than its proclivity for lethal state violence. These meetings warrant a more complex, critical frame than community literacy scholarship currently provides. Drawing on both literacy and rhetorical studies, my analysis reveals the ways in which literacy events represent a type of intervention, and in this case, serve to disrupt mythic timelines. During the events, I contend, local Black organizers occupy and transgress the role of a literacy sponsor by calling on their (kn)own experiences with racial oppression. My analysis nuances the relationship between literacy events and practices, and in turn, I offer a series of dialectics for participant-observation in community literacy studies. I hope to establish precedent for speaking more plainly about racism and whiteness in community literacy scholarship, and to challenge the dominant notion that community literacy projects are categorically just. Looking With Local Resistance signals that if we participate as activists in communities outside the academy, we must do so as reflexively and sustainably as we do critically.