Academic scholarship can often seem an indulgence. Often focused on a particular aspect of a particular debate within an even more specialized sub-disciplinary area, such scholarship seems distant from the actual concerns of the day. While this perhaps has always been somewhat true, the COVID pandemic has led to significant public questioning of the value of writing for academic journals and producing academic monographs. During the most difficult periods of the pandemic, Twitter and Facebook featured endless posts of individuals who have “put scholarship on the back burner” to focus on other public work, mental health, or to simply get through each day with their own or their family’s needs during such difficult times. It is, then, an odd experience to be editing a special issue on pedagogies and partnerships focused on addressing the COVID pandemic. Certainly, there have been points where, even as we labored on this journal, we wondered if time could not be better spent elsewhere, off the page.
And yet, we have found immense value in this editorial work and in the work featured in this publication. While these articles were all written under the broad call to “document, analyze, and reflect on the impact of COVID 19 on existing community-engaged writing projects, partnerships, and communities” and each emerged from their unique contexts, we’ve seen some consistent themes emerging in this work. For instance, the essays in this issue reflect something fundamental to our beliefs in academic and community work: the refusal to give up on the idea of community and the rejection of a “return to normalcy.” In that sense, the essays in this collection mark a commitment to continuing the efforts to build equitable, just, ethical, empathetic, and flexible teaching and partnerships rooted in the humanity of those involved.
It is in this belief moving forward that we find value in this scholarship that emerged from and was shaped by the pandemic. And we want to suggest that one vital role scholarship must undertake is to continue to push disciplines, classrooms, programs, and colleges to finally make real the “justice” rhetoric that often marks their public rhetoric. To make apparent the conditions that enable and constrain the work we do and why. To be willing to change our methods and listen to others whose embodied experiences might not match our own. In this collection of writing, we see so many different experiences and entry points into these discussions. Indeed, while writing this, we recognize that many of the authors whose work appears here are in academic positions requiring production and publication to maintain or advance their jobs. That is a fact not lost on us. Yet, we also see in this issue just how many articles either involve multiple authors or highlight partnerships and collaborations that continued even when the world was “isolated.” These moments of deep collaboration – of listening to, learning from, and even adapting your ideas because of others – provide meaningful models for the work ahead of us.
Particularly within and beyond the pandemic, new ways of speaking to each other, speaking in collectives, and listening to those too often on the wrong side of privilege must be created. Or better put, we might begin to look toward alternative models of community to produce and circulate knowledge, to re-value the purposes to which that knowledge is applied. And it is, perhaps, in venues such as Reflections—which work to learn from the academic and the activist, the community member and the student, as well as how many authors identify themselves as bringing together these positions – that such dialogues might emerge. Indeed, within this issue, we see the possibilities of collaboration across embodied experiences as well as disciplinary, institutional, and geographic borders. This work shows us how writing moves with communities, and our articles take us from rural Wisconsin to inner-city Pittsburgh, from the digital spaces between Virginia to Nepal, from zines in New Jersey to online writing groups in the New England region of New South Wales Australia, and more. These articles show us the capaciousness of community writing and its ability to build solidarity even among differences.
And these articles push us to reflect on and reexamine our roles and be open to change. We believe this work extends from inside the classroom to the work of our journals and much further beyond the academy. Indeed, such political change will only be possible if academics take this moment to rebuild the culture into something that challenges the multiple supremacist frameworks existent in our institutions. We have it in our power to do better. We have it in our power to focus on the humanity of people’s experiences and to speak collectively to demand more of our profession and our institutions.
And, as these authors illustrate, we have models for impactful community work to build more just and equitable community work, grounded in care, empathy, and humanity.
- Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, and K. Hyoejin Yoon call on community-engaged teachers and scholars to “challeng[e] the discipline’s complicity in anti-Asian racism” and “to move differently within their own universities and communities.” They focus on “the concept of movement” and its multiple forms, in order to weave together a listing of counterstories. As they note, this work “serve[s] to disrupt stock interpretations of Asian/American people and push back against master narratives about Asian/Americans and the issues that affect us.”
- Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Tamara Dean, Rachel Alsbury, Julia Buskirk, Margot Higgins, Eloise Johnson, Sharon Koretskov, Brad Steinmetz, Emma Waldinger, Samuel Wood, and Carl Zuleger describe how they navigated a community-based writing course with local community members who had already experienced catastrophic flooding and trauma in Wisconsin before the pandemic began. Here, “cultivating empathy” became a priority in these moments of dialogue and reflection between students and flood survivors.
- Charles Lesh and Kevin Smith describe how cross-institutional courses needed to be “rerouted” during the pandemic and offer possibilities for what this rerouting might teach us about emplaced teaching, writing, and understandings of community.
- Sweta Baniya, Kylie Call, Ashley Brein, and Ravi Kumar highlight an international partnership between Virginia Tech students and the Nepal-based organization Code for Nepal arguing for the importance of equity-based engagements. Their work pushes us to think about the digital divides across communities and considers the possibilities of global partnerships.
- Jason Luther traces the circuitry of quaranzines during the pandemic to show how they are assembled across both physical and digital spaces. These quaranzine assemblages operate, Luther argues, as “a transmediated archive of how community artists, writers, and publishers made sense of a global pandemic.”
- Paul Feigenbaum, Ben Lauren, and Dànielle Nicole Devoss focus our attention on “justice entrepreneurship” as a way for community literacy practitioners to respond to austere and precarious conditions. They acknowledge that justice and entrepreneurship are “imperfect companions” but that their combination can enable us to “better resist, challenge, and subvert the most unjust consequences of precarity capitalism while also contributing to knowledge about how rhetors and writers critically and ethically pursue such work.”
- Jennifer Eidum reflects on the evolution of a community partnership and TESOL Course at Elon University throughout the pandemic, focused in particular on “the key role trauma-informed reflection” can provide our pedagogies.
In our two profile pieces, we see how writing became a way to reflect on and process the pandemic for multiple people, from Iowa to Australia.
- Lesley Erin Bartlett and Laura Michael Brown describe how they designed the Iowa State University Quarantine Journal Project as a means of documenting public memory during this time, collaborating with the ISU Special Collections and University Archives.
- Sophie Masson, Lynette Aspey, and Ariella Van Luyn tell us about a long-standing Australian writers centre’s pivot to online workshops and events. They remind us of the ability for community writing groups to share local knowledge and foster connections – connections that have become incredibly important as COVID intervenes.
Finally, we have two book reviews. Both of these reviews remind us that the work of community literacy is messy, fraught, imperfect, and needs room for failure. These are not deficits of the work being done but rather a space for reflection and responsiveness to make changes for a more just and equitable understanding of community literacy.
- Whitney Jordan Adams’ review of Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche.
- Megan McCool’s review of Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah.