The problem-solving dimension of democratic discourse carries real consequences, for example, for designing treatment programs for pregnant addicts or writing (or obstructing) laws to recognize the plurality of family forms. This was Iris Young’s point in Inclusion and Democracy, published in 2002. She argued that public discourse affects the very quality of our lives, the terms by which we know our existence and exercise our citizenship.
In Publics and Counterpublics, first published in 2002, Warner distinguished counterpublics from publics according to the discourses each circulates. Warner claimed counterpublics circulate politically charged alternatives to rational-critical discourse that call attention to the exclusionary politics of the dominant culture. In order to maximize their oppositional identity-building capacity, these counterpublics circulate countervalent, performative discourses that the public mainstream may consider hostile and indecorous.
In Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, published in 2005, West cautioned that given the force with which imperialism and materialism threaten American democracy, going public requires of ordinary people nothing short of a tragicomic commitment to hope (16). West commended a deeply critical and intensely energetic “vision of everyday people renouncing self-interest and creating a web of caring under harsh American circumstances” (95).
Rhetorical Interventions to Support Democratic Engagement
Rhetorical interventions serve as sites for situated theory-building that test, refine, and extend ideas from public-spheres studies. These interventions also scaffold public engagement—often by drawing on vernacular discourses as a resource for deliberation. Rhetorical interventions tend to fall into three groups: activist educational initiatives in the community, pedagogical practices in college courses, and techne for designing local publics—particularly as partnerships between community organizations and universities. In practice, these interventions are often integrally connected. Take Pittsburgh’s CLC, for example. As a collaborative, it was intentionally designed to serve both community and university interests. Likewise, its design supported activist educational initiatives like Inform and other literacy projects; furthermore, specific classroom pedagogies prepared college students to work as writing mentors with urban teens in these literacy projects (Peck, Flower, and Higgins). For the sake of clarity, however, in the analysis that follows, I separate interventions into these three categories.
Activist Educational Initiatives. Activist educational initiatives are community-based literacy projects that support mutual learning among participants and writing that “makes a difference” (Stock and Swenson 157). These projects are part of a long history of university-outreach programs that attempt to respond to the social and economic conditions of neighborhoods beyond the borders of (especially urban) universities (Hull and Zacher). Community-literacy initiatives, however, have introduced a distinctive focus on transactional writing that draws upon learners’ local knowledge and supports the rhetorical action of participants. Exemplars include the following:
ArtShow (1989–1999). Youth-based arts programs in New York, Boston, rural California, and Kentucky engaged young people through the arts in social entrepreneurship and community-building. For example, in a project called TeenTalk, youth worked with subject area experts to develop knowledge-rich scripts which the youth performed to draw audiences into focused discussions on such topics as illegal drug use, parental neglect, and sexual abuse (Heath and Smyth; McLaughlin, Irby, and Langman).13
CLC Projects and Derivatives (1989- ). Affiliated with Pittsburgh’s CLC, the Community House Learning and Technology Center, and CMU’s Center for Community Outreach, these projects build intercultural working relationships and use writing to support personal and public inquiry and deliberation (Flower “Intercultural Knowledge”; Flower “Negotiating”; Flower “Talking Across Difference”; Long “Community Literacy”; Long, Peck, and Baskins; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Such projects include the following:
Argue: an inquiry-driven project using problem-solving strategies to address controversial open questions around such issues as landlord-tenant relations, drugs, and school suspension.
Digital Storytelling: a group of computer-supported initiatives (e.g., Struggle and Voices from the GLBT Community) helping youth, adults, and faith-based organizations to use digital tools to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Hands-On Productions: a literacy project using video and multimedia tools to dramatize teens’ perspectives on a broad range of issues, including school reform, teen stress, and risk and respect.
Inform: a literacy project bringing urban teens and college students together to take action on urban issues. Over the course of each 10-week project, teen-mentor pairs draft articles for a newsletter and host a problem-solving dialogue with other stakeholders, including city officials and other members of the community.
Carnegie Mellon’s Community-University Think Tank: a culturally diverse body of problem solvers committed to bringing wider perspectives and collaborative action to urban issues. The think tank creates a structured dialogue in which people from Pittsburgh’s urban community—representing community residents, business, regional development, social service, and education—meet to construct and to evaluate workable solutions to workplace and worklife problems.
Write for Your Life (1994- ). Housed in Michigan State University’s Writing Center, the Write For Your Life (WFYL) project supports a consortium of teachers in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania as they develop curriculum that students use to examine local issues that influence student health, literacy, and learning. Though the program started several years earlier, WFYL began to flourish in 1994 when its curriculum started asking students not only to research local issues that mattered to them, but to write and to implement proposals for social action that addressed these issues. Over more than a decade and around the country, students have implemented numerous proposals to improve the quality of life in their communities—for instance, by testing regional water quality, instituting cross-generational mentoring programs, and implementing recycling campaigns. Like DUSTY (below), WFYL has roots in the National Writing Project (NWP), a nationwide professional development program for teachers.14 Within the history of the NWP, WFYL represents the effort—under Dixie Goswami’s leadership with the Bread Loaf Teacher Network—to move classroom instruction from expressivist objectives to transactional ones through which “students’ writing can accomplish beneficial social work” (Stock and Swenson 155; see also Benson and Christian).
New City Writing Institute (1998- ). New City Writing supports a collaborative network among Philadelphia schools and community organizations. With support from Temple University, the institute “focus[es . . . ] on community-based writing and reading programs that lead to publications as well as educational ventures whereby schoolteachers, neighborhood people, and university-related people can learn together” (Goldblatt, “Alinsky’s Reveille” 283). The institute supports New City Press which publishes documents, including a magazine called Open City, that feature local writers and the perspectives and interests of specific communities in the area, ranging from disabilities activists to rural farm workers who work just west of the city. The institute also supports arts initiatives throughout the city, particularly with African American and Asian communities (Parks and Goldblatt).
Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth, or DUSTY, (2001- ). DUSTY is University of California at Berkeley’s computer-based outreach project. It began in the basement of a community center in West Oakland and now operates in several public schools. With partners worldwide—from Norway to India—DUSTY connects youth through their digital work across racial, linguistic, cultural, geographic, and political borders. Using digital technologies, youth produce stories in which they position “themselves as agents in and authors of their lives locally and globally” (Hull, “Transforming Literacy” 40). The program takes as its central question, “how [should educators] transform schooling and its principle activity and means—literacy—so as to engage young people and sustain their participation?” (Hull and Zacher par. 16). DUSTY responds to this question by offering youth the