At the time of this interview Dr. Grabill had just returned from West Virginia where he was working with junior high and high school students. Grabill’s work in West Virginia was as a member of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center (WIDE), which came out of a grant designed to develop young leaders in the Mountain State. The project was concerned not only with youth leadership development, but also asked the members of WIDE to use Photovoice and digital media as ways to identify community problems and—more importantly—methods so as to fruitfully intervene and solve those problems (this was a collaborative effort; Grabill and the other members of WIDE worked in conjunction with a national drug prevention organization and members of MSU’s community psychology program). Dr. Grabill was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule and have a conversation with Dr. Mathieu, and during this conversation Grabill and Mathieu discussed Grabill’s book, Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. In the space of this interview they cover what Writing Community Change means within the current context of comp-rhet scholarship; the dangers of hyper-specialization as comp-rhet matures; the place of service-learning in the ever solidifying discipline of comp-rhet; the history of civic engagement in comp-rhet; and the role of comp-rhet in training people to be socially conscious, critically literate, and
rhetorically savvy writers of traditional and digital texts.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric