In 2008, I attended a symposium that highlighted our university’s outreach and community engagement initiatives. Sessions and exhibits ranged from promoting pesticide safety programs in Africa to local community design assistance projects. The symposium was very satisfying, but my conversations with participants often began the same way, with questions arising from my “Rhetoric and Writing” nametag. What was I doing there, and how could rhetoric help one understand and promote local and global social change? In Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements, editors Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia Malesh answer “why rhetoric?” through their cohesive yet diverse collection. They emphasize the possible interplay between rhetoric and social movements and remind us of rhetoric’s specific potential for promoting social change.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric