At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy "in the community" are being eroded "at the university." Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and…

This paper develops a rhetorically centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics--those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors…