Situated-public literacies are also collaborative. This feature means that situated-public literacies need to be nurtured in supportive environments like the women’s writing workshop in Heller’s Until We Are Strong Together or the workshop for Mexican immigrant mothers in Janise Hurtig’s “Resisting Assimilation.” These and other ethnographic studies of literacy workshops highlight the importance of facilitators who support the nascent ideas of inexperienced writers. Just as importantly, they identify the invaluable role that these same writers play for one another as readers and members of a local public, taking one another’s ideas seriously and responding to them with respectful candor. To the extent that community-literacy scholars share a common crie de coeur, I would think it’s their shared commitment to collaboration (in any number of configurations) as a joint response to socio-political mechanisms that otherwise exclude ordinary people from the processes of public dialogue and decision making. Collaboration is a means by which ordinary people make their voices heard. Collaborative also refers to the complex ways that multiple readers and writers, speakers and listeners may move among interchangeable roles within complex networks to co-create literate texts (Moss Community Text; Comstock 59).
Situated-public literacies often strike a problem-posing stance. It was Freire who most eloquently articulated the humanizing consequences that follow from theorizing local public discourse in praxis. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire advocated problem-posing teams (or culture circles) where participants learned to read the world as a site of colonialism and class struggle. Freire’s method motivated “members of the community to exchange ideas, to understand a specific problem, to find one or more solutions to it, and to determine a programme with a timetable, using specific materials” (Gerbault 153). Freire’s pedagogy has informed ethnographic efforts to document situated-public literacies (Sleeter and Bernal 240–58). Its problem-posing feature is prominent in the adaptations that re-invent for American classrooms Freire’s pedagogy designed for resilient peasants (Finn; Shor and Pari). The problem-posing feature of situated-public literacies has also compelled scholars to augment Freirian pedagogy with additional problem-solving rhetorics, including John Dewey’s civic ideals (Coogan, “Community Literacy” 106); Alinsky’s community-organizing principles (Coogan, “Service Learning”; Faber; Goldblatt “Alinsky’s Reveille”) and Flower’s social-cognitive rhetoric (Peck, Flower, and Higgins; Flower “Talking Across Difference”).
Situated-public literacies also tend to be sponsored—that is, affiliated with institutional sponsors that circulate not only texts but practices for interpreting and composing texts (Brandt American; Brandt Involvement). Brandt calls this circulatory process sponsorship—the process by which large-scale economic forces [. . .] set the routes and determine the worldly worth of [ . . . a given] literacy (American 20). Sponsorship helps account for how knowledge is distributed within organizations (Hull “Hearing Other Voices”) and households (Moll and González), how people navigate social networks (Farr “En Los Dos Idiomas”), and how institutional design can promote social change (Grabill Community Literacy).
Finally, situated-public literacies often comprise alternative discourses affiliated with no single homeplace or public institution. Alternative discourses may be an inventive hybrid (Barton and Hamilton 122) that laces together discourses of the street and school, policy talk and political activism (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 210). In other situations, the alternative discourse may be a “hidden transcript” in direct tension with the standards and assumptions of a public institution’s bureaucracy (Cushman, Struggle 139) or a city newspaper’s petty bourgeois bias (Cintron, Angels’ Town 193). Alternative discourses support transcultural repositioning, the “self-conscious[. . .]” process by which members of minority culture move among “different languages and dialects, different social classes, different culture and artistic forms” (Guerra 8). As such, alternative discourses support strategic border crossing, at once linguistic, symbolic, literal, and political (Lavadenz 109).
Situating the Study of Participatory Democracy
As literacy scholars took issue with the dominant autonomous model of literacy, in a similar fashion, public-spheres scholars have critiqued the dominant, abstract, and idealized (though skewed) version of how democratic discourse works. Most notably, in 1990, Fraser sounded the call for the study of “actually existing democracy” (109).12
Fraser sought to complicate the abstract democratic theory that Jürgen Habermas issued in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, published in German in 1962 and circulated in English by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas described the method (deliberating claims and adjudicating evidence) by which private citizens (propertied men) set aside (bracketed) their individual interests and differences in order to discuss the most pressing issues of their day (the common good). Habermas identified a method by which public talk supersedes force or coercion in efforts to determine matters of public concern. He also designated a discursive space (the public sphere) separate from that of commerce or the state where people participate in democratic public life through talk. What Fraser objected to were the exclusionary aspects of the Enlightenment-era, bourgeois public sphere that informed Habermas’s theory. In “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” published in 1990, Fraser argued that this sphere restricted the access of “women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians” (123). She argued that a better model would configure the public sphere not as singular but multiple, and would recognize that in democratic deliberation differences are not bracketed but rather inform the very terms of discussion. She called scholars to attend to the conditions that thwart or make possible intercultural communication (121).
In 1999, Gerard Hauser added that it’s not enough to situate studies of actually existing democracy in contemporary, large-scale media-driven conceptions of the public—what this volume refers to as formal publics. These conceptions tend to limit the participation of ordinary people to the voting booth, opinion poll, and jury box (Vernacular 190–91). When scholars assume public life pertains only to large-scale politics of the state, it’s easy not only to view the populace as apathetic (Eliasoph 1), but also to sever the study of democracy from “the dynamic context in which democracy is experienced and lived” (Hauser, “Rhetorical Democracy” 3). Instead, Hauser called for scholars to take an “empirical attitude” toward the “untidy communicative practices” that shape local vernacular public life (Vernacular 275).
Ideas about Actually Existing Democracy
In heeding the call to situate the study of participatory democracy in actual practice, public-spheres scholars have contributed to our field’s understanding of local public discourse. Instead of theorizing about “the public sphere” where citizens bracket their differences and follow the rules and style of rational-critical argument in order to deliberate over common concerns, Fraser identified a multiplicity of alternative publics “formed under conditions of dominance and subordination” (127). Because late-capitalist societies like the United States fall short of their democratic ideals, alternative or counter publics are immensely important. Not only do they offer safe havens to minority groups who within these spaces can develop and articulate their shared interests and identities, but they also persuade the dominant culture to think and behave differently about issues that affect the counterpublic’s members. Fraser credited feminist alternative subalterns, for example, with making domestic abuse a public, rather than solely familial, issue.
In Vernacular Voices, Hauser clarified that it is vernacular voices—the “street-level give-and-take of contrary viewpoints”—that promote discussion and provide insights that matter most to public discourse, not the opinions of “institutional actors” nor some abstract standards of logic, disinterest, or rationality (89). These vernacular voices make pubic discourse more interesting, lively—and, yes, untidy—than Habermas’s