The Local Public Framework
This chapter introduces the five-point local public framework as a heuristic for comparing alternative accounts of people going public and for considering the implications that follow from them. The point of the framework is not to dissect individual studies as much as to set different kinds of accounts of local public life in relation to one another. We all know better than to compare apples and oranges. In literacy studies, the fruit basket is even more varied, with literacy scholars employing a wide range of research methods—from discourse analysis and cultural critique to action research, including progressive pedagogies and innovative organizational practices. Without deracinating their literate activities from the contexts in which they derive their significance, the framework is my attempt to attend to the rhetorical dynamics at play when ordinary people go public.
Table 2. The local public framework.
| Point of Comparison | Brief Definition |
| 1. Guiding Metaphor | the image that describes the discursive space where ordinary people go public, including distinctive features |
| 2. Context | location, as well as other context-specific factors that give public literacies their meaning |
| 3. Tenor of the Discourse | register—the affective quality of the discourse |
| 4. Literacy | key practices that comprise the discourse; how people use writing and words to organize and carry out their purposes for going public |
| 5. Rhetorical Invention | the generative process by which people respond to the exigencies that call the local public into being |
Guiding Metaphor
Metaphors figure prominently in literacy research describing the discursive sites where the ordinary people go public. As rhetorical devices, these metaphors serve a dramatic function due to their “magical quality, one difficult to describe in discursive academic language” (J. Murphy 6). Metaphors wield the evocative capacity to conjure up discursive space, to call that space into being. Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca called this quality “presence” (116–17); Michael Warner calls it the “world-making” capacity of style (128). Thick descriptions of local public life are stylistic accomplishments in their own right. Through these descriptions, literacy scholars not only conjure up in readers’ minds local publics such as Trackton’s public stage and Angelstown’s shadow system, but in doing so they have also successfully created another type of discursive space for the study of local public rhetoric: a formal public that you and I as readers and writers also help to maintain.
I have identified the guiding metaphors in these researchers’ accounts of local public life by reading one of two ways. In some cases, the metaphor is designated by the author as a key conceptual home. This is the case, for instance, for the theater in Heath’s Way with Words, the link in Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies, and the shadow system in Cintron’s Angels’ Town. In other cases, identifying the core metaphor required a more constructive effort on my part. For instance, Cushman refers the institutional site she studied as a gatekeeping encounter. I looked to her analysis to see how a gate operates within such an encounter—to swing shut or to creak open, for instance—and how the image of the gate signals both space beneath and above it, as in the expressions “hitting bottom” and “getting over.”
In identifying each guiding metaphor, I sought evidence of each researcher’s rhetorical understanding of the local public life he or she observed. As heuristics, the researchers’ metaphors work like other such images: to structure and to define “the human conceptual system” (Lakoff and Johnson 6), indicating the “working theories,” or internal representations, people build to interpret and to carry out complex discursive phenomena such as teaching, composing, deliberating, and theory building (Flower, Construction 260–62).4 For instance, Cintron uses the metaphor of the shadow system to account for the tension between the political theories he brings to his critical ethnography and what he observes on the streets of Angelstown. Cintron calls this metaphor his interpretative scheme. It functions “heuristically” which, he says, “is how all metaphors work” (Angels’ Town 176). Because a metaphor suggests similarities between two otherwise dissimilar objects, metaphors reveal “unsuspected connectives” (Burke 90). To identify these connectives, the framework’s analysis of metaphor includes both the dominant image—the metaphor itself (such as Cintron’s shadow system)—and the metaphor’s distinctive features; for instance, that the shadow system mimics the system world and shelters difference. Likewise, Heath’s impromptu theater is dramatic and spontaneous; Brandt’s cultural womb nurtures and prepares. In connecting their guiding metaphors to such features, the researchers articulate their theories of how local public rhetoric works. For instance, Barton and Hamilton’s link between private lives and public institutions carries out its rhetorical work by connecting domains to networks for the purpose of social action.
Metaphors preview differences in scholars’ descriptions of local public life. Four additional elements help to identify and to elaborate key distinctions: the context that frames the discourse that people use to go public in a given study, the tenor of that discourse, the literacies that constitute the discourse, and the process of rhetorical invention that generates new local public discourse. To define the first three of these elements, I draw from Brian Street’s ideological model of literacy (Cross-cultural). In the discussion below, please keep in mind that I am not devising a tool to unearth objective facts but an interpretive framework for making useful distinctions across multiple accounts of ordinary people going public.
Context
Under “context,” the framework attends to two factors: first, the issue of location; second, the “broader features of social and cultural life” that give public discursive activity its meaning (Street, Cross-cultural 15). To replace the autonomous model that characterized literacy as a discrete entity that could be transported across contexts for similar effect, Street emphasizes that context-specific factors shape specific literacies and make them meaningful. Positioning their work in relation to the ideological model, for instance, Barton and Hamilton entitle their study of literacy in a British working-class neighborhood Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. For Street, new literacy studies should do more than amass numerous case studies of local literacies. His aim? “[U]seful generalizations” (Cross-cultural 10).
In fact, one of the most significant generalizations to be gleaned from the study of local literacies is that community literacy’s decidedly public orientation gears its practices toward what Kirk Branch refers to as “‘the ought to be’”—not only the world as it currently is, but also some future-oriented version of the social world as it could be (18).5 I believe a rhetorically-centered framework that supports comparisons across accounts of local literacies can enhance our understanding of how different literate practices may “transform local actions into meanings bound for or relevant to other places” (Brandt and Clinton 349, emphasis added). Attention to location offers a useful vantage point for “bringing [such significant] differences to light” (Atwill 212).
Location. The term local has captured the collective imagination of rhetorical scholars for some time (Killingsworth 111). In community-literacy studies local is something of a Burkean godterm. Yet depending on whether local modifies knowledge, literacy or attitudes, its connotation can change dramatically. Modifying knowledge, local often carries a positive connotation. For instance, Clifford Geertz’s depiction of indigenous people’s local knowledge carries over to the CLC’s strategies for eliciting the local knowledge of community residents (Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 258; Higgins and Brush). Modifying literacy, local suggests a rather technical distinction; local literacies are situated in domains other than work, school, or government; for instance, the home and the neighborhood (Barton and