By way of bringing the eleven articles highlighted here into conversation with each other, we followed Mueller’s lead and created our own word cloud based on the articles. Some of the major terms across these articles are expected: students, writing, work, rhetoric, Burke. Others, however, are surprising, for example “time,” which may support Rose’s claim that time is becoming an increasingly important consideration for the field. Some of the small-sized “trace”-words—such as Facebook, users, sciences, personal—that come up are illuminating as well in their seeming marginalization, indications of future concerns for the field. As you peruse the collection, consider, as Mueller suggests, what these different snapshot methods say about the current state of the field.
A Note on Selection Criteria and Methods:
These eleven articles advance knowledge in composition and rhetoric because they question, challenge, innovate, and re-imagine the field. It is those qualities that reviewers used as criteria for ranking the nominated articles. The major criteria for ranking and selecting the articles are threefold:
1.Article must demonstrate a broad sense of the discipline, demonstrating the ability to explain how its specific intervention in a sub-disciplinary area intersects and addresses broad concerns of the field.
2.Article must make an original contribution to the sub-disciplinary field, expanding or rearticulating central premises of that area.
3.Article must be written in a style which, while disciplinary-based, attempts to engage with a wider audience.
The editor of each participating journal was invited to submit two articles for consideration. Both articles were reviewed by reading groups at several colleges and universities across the United States. These groups consisted of full-time and part-time faculty, lecturers, and graduate students who read the articles and, according to the criteria listed above, ranked the articles on a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being an article that meets the highest criteria). The editors used these scores to select the final articles that appear here.
We owe a great debt to our reading groups, whose work made this project possible. We thank them for their careful reading and rankings of the articles. Specifically, we thank all of the associate editors who participated in the reading groups: Sarah Antinora, UC Riverside; Francesca Astiazaran, CSU San Bernadino; Paige V. Banaji, Ohio State University; Jessica Best, UC Riverside; Lindsey Banister, Syracuse University; Chase Bollig; Ohio State University; Matthew Bond, UC Riverside; Bridgette Callahan, CSU San Bernadino; Joanna Collins, University of Pittsburgh; Clare Connors, University of Pittsburgh; Katherine M. DeLuca; Ohio State University; Chloe de los Reyes, CSU San Bernadino; Jennie Friedrich, UC Riverside; Brenda Glascott, CSU San Bernadino; Rochelle Gold, UC Riverside; Ashley Hamilton, CSU San Bernadino; Joel Harris, CSU San Bernadino; Jennifer Herman; Ohio State University; Deborah Kuzawa; Ohio State University; Annie S. Mendenhall; Ohio State University; Peter Moe, University of Pittsburgh; Kristin Noone, UC Riverside; Tamara Isaak, Syracuse University; Emily Maloney, University of Pittsburgh; Lauren Obermark; Ohio State University; Jess Pauszek, Syracuse University; Anne Schnarr, UC Riverside; Karrieann Soto, Syracuse University; Frances Suderman, CSU San Bernadino’ Noel Tague, University of Pittsburgh; Jaclyn Vasquez, CSU San Bernadino.
Community Literacy Journal
Community Litearcy Journal is on the Web at http://www.communityliteracy.org/
The Community Literacy Journal publishes both scholarly work that contributes to the field’s emerging methodologies and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members.
We understand “community literacy” as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions. It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace literacy, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects.
For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used. Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal and technological representations as well.
Rhetorical Recipes: Women’s Literacies In and Out of the Kitchen
We think that Professor White-Farnham’s article presents an excellent and compelling interview methodology for inquiring into “women’s lived experience and the significance of everyday life” and reveals how social and everyday literacies function in several overlapping social and personal spheres and contexts.
1 Rhetorical Recipes: Women’s Literacies In and Out of the Kitchen
Jamie White-Farnham
Drawing on interview data regarding literacy practices done in tandem with housework, this article presents an array of recipe uses among retirement-age women. Given their backgrounds as professionals who came of age during second-wave feminism, the women see little value in “domestic” practices such as cooking literacies (Barton & Hamilton). However, the women’s uses of recipes for a variety of rhetorical purposes, in and out of the kitchen, are valuable material and social reflections of the women’s success in acquiring traditional literacies in school and at work.
“Resources? For cleaning?! That’s the last thing I think of!” When my research participant Sandra scoffed at the possibility that literacy and housework could intersect, she exemplified the general response of each of my six research participants to my questions about the literacy practices they use in housework: a somewhat protective attitude towards literacy, as if its use to facilitate mundane chores might debase it. Sandra’s reaction is but a single example of the decisive and dichotomous opinions shared in my recent interview study of women of retirement age regarding the relationship between housework and literacy: “I’m a terrible housekeeper. If you had asked me about career, I could have helped you.”
Sandra, like Emme, Edna, Donna, Anna, and Dee1, is a member of the Red Hat Society (RHS), a national social club for women over age fifty, which describes itself as a way for women to “let go of burdensome responsibilities for a little while” (Red Hat Society). The growth of the group since its inception in 1997 is impressive; reportedly, its membership has exceeded one million women worldwide. According to Sue Ellen Cooper, the California woman who founded Red Hat Society, the group’s primary appeal “is our determination to find the joy in life, to grasp the fun there is to be had at this age—fifty and beyond” (8). Cooper describes the recruitment base of RHS as former “wives, mothers, and, often, career women [who] have survived the busiest, most hectic years,” and the official website promotes the social activity of the group as “an opportunity for those who have shouldered various responsibilities at home and in the community their whole lives, to say goodbye to burdensome responsibilities and obligations for a little while” (Cooper 8; Red Hat Society).
There have been an untold number of press accounts of the group as it has attracted attention in each new community where chapters have formed. The archives of the The Providence Journal have chronicled RHS’s growth in Rhode Island since chapters began cropping up in the state between 2002 and 2003. A profile of a South County chapter emphasizes its new members’ enthusiasm to become part of the national trend, “in search of a silly state of mind” (Fleming C3). Among the reasons they participate in the group, the Rhody Red Hatters count making new friends, taking trips, participating in cultural events, and generally breaking up the monotony of daily routines and feelings of isolation a person can experience at and after retirement age.
In addition to this notoriety, the group has also drawn critique. A 2008 editorial comment by Paula Span in The New York Times denigrates