At the first Community and Writing conference in Boulder last October, as she considered community and writing as a scholarly field, Paula Mathieu framed three audiences of concern: community members, students, and scholars. Mathieu sequenced them in the order she did to provoke the consideration that scholarship should never be a primary motive—if, that is, we are truly committed to the critical project of social justice or transformation. For these reasons, I found Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook’s Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ provocative by focusing on the scholarly motive. This co-authored book illustrates, but does not prescribe, what rhetorical scholarship looks like from the perspective of a rhetorical critic who is also a participant.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric