Introduction : Taking stock of our past and assessing the future of community writing work / Laurie JC Cella -- After tactics, what comes next? / Paula Mathieu -- Tales from the crawl space : asserting youth agency within an unsustainable education system / Paul Feigenbaum, Sharayna Douglas, and Maria Lovett -- Strategic speculations on the question of value : the role of community publishing in English studies / Steve Parks -- Everyone loved it and still it closed : when a writing program isn't a core mandate / Emily Isaacs and Ellen Kolba -- Sustainability deferred : the conflicting logics of career advancement and community engagement / Thomas Deans -- Hope and despair, risk and struggle : (j)WPA work, service-learning, and the case for baby steps / Michael Donnelly -- Mobile sustainability : an adjunct's development of a permanent practice / Karen Johnson -- Assessing sustainability : the class that went terribly wrong / Lorelei Blackburn and Ellen Cushman -- The idea of a literacy dula / Hannah Ashley -- No more than fire belongs to Prometheus : techne, institutions, and intervention in local public life / Elenore Long -- Mastery, failure, and community outreach as a stochastic art : lessons learned with the Sudanese diaspora in Phoenix / Jennifer Clifton -- Conclusion : Rejecting binaries and rethinking relationships / Jessica Restaino.
Summary:
Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, edited by Jessica Restaino and Laurie JC Cella, explores short-lived university/community writing projects in an effort to rethink and re-examine the long-term sustainability in community writing work. Contributors examine their own efforts in order to provide alternate models for understanding, assessing, and enacting university/community writing projects that, for a range of reasons, fall outside of traditional practice. This collection considers what has become an increasingly unified call for praxis, where scholar-practitioners explore a specific project that fell short of theorized "best practice" sustainability in order to determine not only the nature of what remains-how and why we might find value in a community-based writing project that lacks long-term sustainability, for example-but also how or why we might rethink, redefine, and reevaluate best practice ideals in the first place. In so doing, the contributors are at once responding to what has been an increasing acknowledgment in the field that, for a variety of reasons, many community-based writing projects do not go as initially planned, and also applying-in praxis-a framework for thinking about and studying such projects. Unsustainable represents the kind of scholarly work that some of the most recognizable names in the field have been calling for over the past five years. This book affirms that unpredictability is an indispensable factor in the field and argues that such unpredictability presents-in fact, demands-a theoretical approach that takes these practical experiences as its base. Book jacket.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.