Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities
Edited by Jenn Fishman, Romeo García, and Lauren Rosenberg
Copy edited by Caitlin Kahihikolo. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. Contributors bring their lived experience as listeners in, to, and alongside the communities whose praxes they surface in chapters that enrich and complicate the deep interrelationship of listening and storytelling. Affirming that storytelling is the vessel through which community listening is made, unmade, and remade, the stories in this collection probe what it means to listen from community vantages and to bring such listening into academic conversations. Collectively, the contributors to this multidisciplinary collection advance scholarship that has community as the locus of iterative knowledge seeking and sharing.
Table of Contents
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Editors’ Introduction, Jenn Fishman, Romeo García, and Lauren Rosenberg
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.1.3
Part 1. Part 1. Hauntings and Possibilities
Chapter 1. Getting Closer to Mass Incarceration: Proximate Listening as Community Activism, Sally F. Benson
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.01
Chapter 2. Crafting Crip Space through Disabled Political Advocacy: #CripTheVote as Community Listening, Ada Hubrig
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.02
Chapter 3. Keeping Bad Company: “Listening” to Aryan Nations in the Archives, Patty Wilde, Mitzi Ceballos, and Wyn Andrews Richards
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.03
Part 2. Stories of Sustaining Community
Chapter 4. The Public Art of Listening: Relational Accountability and The Painted Desert Project, Kyle Boggs
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.04
Chapter 5. The DJ as Relational Listener and Creator of an Ethos of Community Listening, Karen R. Tellez-Trujillo
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.05
Chapter 6. Listening In: Letter Writing and Rhetorical Resilience Behind Bars, Alexandra J. Cavallaro, Wendy Hinshaw, and Tobi Jacobi
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.06
Part 3. Negotiating Self and Community
Chapter 7. Civic Community Listening: The Nexus of Storytelling and Listening within Civic Communities, Bailey M. Oliver-Blackburn, April Chatham-Carpenter, and Carol L. Thompson
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.07
Chapter 8. Community Listening In, With, and Against Whiteness at a PWI, Mary P. Sheridan, Cate Fosl, Kelly Kinahan, Carrie Mott, Angela Storey, and Shelley Thomas
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.08
Chapter 9. On Being In It, Katie W. Powell
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.09
Chapter 10. Daunting Community Listening: Designing and Implementing a Community Listening Framework and Accountability Group for Undergraduate Students, Keri Epps and Rowie Kirby-Straker with Casey Beiswenger, Zoe Chamberlin, Hannah Hill, Lauren Robertson, and Kaitlyn Taylor
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531.2.10
About the Editors
Jenn Fishman pursues teaching, research, and leadership opportunities across three areas of academic work: undergraduate research, longitudinal research, and community literacies. A recipient of the Braddock Award and PI of several grant-supported projects, her publications include The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (with Dominic DelliCarpini and Jane Greer, Parlor Press), Telling Stories: Perspectives on Longitudinal Research in Writing Studies (with Amy Kimme Hea, Utah State University Press) and special issues of CCC Online, Community Literacy Journal (with Lauren Rosenberg), and Peitho (with Jessica Enoch). Co-founder and Chief Capacitator of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), she is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University.
Romeo García (PhD, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University) is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. His interdisciplinary research appears in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture. García is co-editor (with Damián Baca) of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise (winner of the 2020 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award, Edited Collection), Unsettling Archival Research (with Gesa Kirsch, Caitlin Burns Allen, and Walker P. Smith, Southern Illinois University Press) and Pluriversal Literacies (with Ellen Cushman and Damián Baca, University of Pittsburgh Press).
Lauren Rosenberg is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the English department at the University of Texas at El Paso where she directs the first-year composition program, a recipient of the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2022-2023 Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. Much of her writing and research is in the subfield of community literacy. She is the author of The Desire for Literacy: Writing in the Lives of Adult Learners and numerous articles and book chapters that focus on the literate lives of adult learners. These include a co-authored essay with Stephanie L. Kerschbaum “Entanglements of Literacy Studies and Disability Studies,” which won the 2021 Richard C. Ohmann Outstand Article in College English Award. Together with Jenn Fishman, she guest edited a 2018 special issue of Community Literacy Journal where the idea of community listening was launched.
Publication Information: Fishman, Jenn, Romeo García, & Lauren Rosenberg (Eds.). (2025). Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531
Web Publication Date: January 16, 2025
Print Publication Date: Pending
ISBN: 978-1-64215-253-1 (PDF) 978-1-64215-254-8 (ePub) 978-1-64642-737-6 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2025.2531
Contact Information:
Jenn Fishman: jennfishman.phd@gmail.com
Romeo García: romeo.garcia@utah.edu
Lauren Rosenberg: lmrosenberg@utep.edu
Perspectives on Writing
Series Editors: Rich Rice, Texas Tech University, and J. Michael Rifenburg, University of North Georgia
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). It will also be available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado.
Copyright © 2025 Jenn Fishman, Romeo García, Lauren Rosenberg and the authors of individual parts of this book. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. 266 pages, with notes, figures, bibliographies, and index. This book will also be available in print from University Press of Colorado as well as from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Available in digital format for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may not reproduce this book on another website. For permission requests and other questions, such as creating a translation, please contact the copyright holder.