Special Issue: Reconceptualizing Sustainability Literacies  

Action on behalf of life transforms…as we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us. 

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Sustainability, in the context of environmental concerns, has long been central to the work of community literacy practitioners (Mareck, CLJ Special Issue, 2009; House, Lasswell, and Dickson, Reflections Special Issue, 2016). Indeed, such work encompasses grassroots struggles with sustainability (Meyers, 2009), rural, placed-based, and eco-pedagogies (Cushman, 2018; Donehower, Hogg, and Schell, 2007; Davis, 2013), food security (Martinez, 2022), local public environmental discourse (Goggin and Long, 2009), and durable futures (McKibben, 2007). Yet, in recent decades, ecological crises have intensified, environmental protections have been rolled back, and “sustainable futures” have been co-opted by a politics of economic security that sacrifices the wellness of all life – human and more than human (Abram, 1997) - for political and monetary goals. Rhetorical work on/in sustainable communities now grapples with questions of trespass and belonging in multispecies contexts (Sackey, 2024), living in the Anthropocene (Propen, 2022), and the meaning and practice of ecological care (Clary-Lemon, 2023). Bridging biological and sociocultural realms in rhetorical inquiry, questions that center sustainability, community interests, and collective eco-consciousness in response to heightened environmental exigencies carry paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and a “sense of urgency” (Hawhee, 2023). Now, more than ever, scientists, community leaders, scholars, artists and activists must work across their various contexts and disciplines to cultivate and evolve concepts and practices of community literacy in climate justice work.

Our special issue asks community literacy practitioners to consider how we might reconceptualize sustainability collaboratively and across disciplines via frameworks committed to powerful intersections, reciprocity, reclamation, healing, and community connections. We invite essays and other genres from climate justice collaborators who re-imagine sustainability through community literacy. What might community literacy-oriented sustainability frameworks contribute to ongoing climate justice efforts? How are these new frameworks being described and implemented by collaborators on the front lines of climate justice activism? How might their re-conceptualizations of sustainability support communal action, reclamation, healing, and creating more socially just futures?  

Our vision for reconceptualizing sustainability literacies is informed by the intersectional, “emergent strategy” of social justice thought leaders like adrienne maree brown and the collaborative work of transdisciplinary eco-critics like Anna Tsing et al. in Feral Atlas. Indigenous climate activists like Dallas Goldtooth and Winona LaDuke, who blend “traditional” activism with intergenerational, community-centered, and arts-based knowledge-making, also inform our project. Open and attentive to a variety of collaborations, genres, and research projects exploring intersectional community-based sustainability frameworks, we will consider proposals that engage in, but are not limited to, the following:  

• projects in decolonizing conceptual or practice-based understandings of sustainability and literacy (see Whyte et al., 2017; Hayman et al., 2018; Clary-Lemon and Grant, 2022) and in rethinking our relationship to community and belonging in the context of environmental crisis, trespass, and new forms of relating to the more than human (see Jones, 2019; Osorio, 2021; Barnett, 2022; Hawhee, 2023; Sackey, 2024)
• community-facing essayistic or artistic explorations of sustainable futures (of what can flourish) in contexts of waste, environmental ruin, and decay or what it means to “wonder in the midst of dread” (see Banerjee, 2012; Peters, 2019; Tsing, 2015, 2017, 2021; Dambo); 
• community-based eco-criticism or climate justice activism worked through the lens of interdisciplinary cross-genre platforms, blended scholarship, critical storytelling methodologies, and co-authorship (see Lam et al., 2019; Goldtooth; LaDuke); 
• college reading and writing practices, place-based writing, eco-pedagogies, or “emergent strategies” centered on sustainability literacies attentive to power and difference and nonequivalent relationships to the more than human, including our relationship to land and the “land in our bones” (Davis, 2013; brown, 2017; Brownlee, 2020, Feghali, 2024);
• reconceptualization and critique of “durable futures” via sustainability frameworks informed by “materialist spiritualities,” interdependence, “nestwork,” and living “at home in the Anthropocene” (McKibben, 2007; brown, 2017; Propen, 2022; Clary-Lemon, 2023);
• dialogue and analysis of sustainability literacies related to healing modalities, including folk herbalism, ethnobotany, ancestral stewardship, and other earth-based pathways to belonging (Kimmerer, 2013; Feghali, 2024).    

We encourage proposals of 250-500 words, not including Works Cited, for various genres, from feature-length research articles to poetry, images, essays, and more, to be submitted to the editors by Oct. 23, 2024. Final article and essay drafts should be 2500-6000 words, due by February 22, 2025. Don’t hesitate to contact the guest editors with your ideas and questions regarding possible projects.  

Special issue editors Kaylie Fougerousse (kefouger@iu.edu), Joanna Gordon (jorgordo@iu.edu), Lydia Nixon (lydnixon@iu.edu), and Katie Silvester (klsilves@iu.edu)

Project Timeline

Proposals due: November 1, 2024 (extended deadline)

Invitations to Authors: November 22, 2024

Article drafts due: February 22, 2025

Final drafts due: July 1, 2025

Works Cited and Consulted

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Banerjee, Subhankar. Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2012.

Barnett, Joshua Trey. Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022.

Brownlee, Yavanna. “Relational Practices and Pedagogies in an Age of Climate Change: Engaging Students in Understanding Indigenous Ways of Knowing,” enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, no. 32, 2020, https://enculturation.net/relationalpracticesandpedagogies.

Boykoff, Maxwell. Creative (Climate) Communications: Productive Pathways for Science, Policy, and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

brown, adrienne maree, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. California: AK Press, 2017.          

Clary-Lemon, Jennifer. Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023.

Clary-Lemon, Jennifer, and David M. Grant, editors. Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022.

Cushman, Ellen. “2017 Conference on Community Writing Keynote Address: Place and Relationships in Community Writing.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 2018, pp. 17-26. doi:10.25148/clj.12.2.009098

Dambo, Thomas @thomasdambo, Instagram, 2024 https://www.instagram.com/thomasdambo

Davis, Rhonda D. “A Place for Eco-pedagogy in Community Literacy.” Community

Literacy Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 77–91. doi:10.25148/clj.7.2.009350

Donehower, Kim, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell. Rural Literacies. Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.

Feghali, Layla K. The Land in Our Bones: Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria To the Sinai-Earth-Based Pathways to Ancestral Stewardship and Belonging in Diaspora, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

Fujikane, Candace. Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Goggin, Peter, editor. Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability. Routledge, 2009.

Goggin, Peter, and Elenore Long. “The Co-Construction of a Local Public Environmental

Discourse: Letters to the Editor, Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, and the Southlands Hotel Development Controversy.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2009,   pp. 5–24. doi:10.25148/clj.4.1.009451

Goldtooth, Dallas @dallasgoldtooth. Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/Dallasgoldtooth/

Hayman, Eleanor, Colleen James, and Mark Wedge. “Future Rivers of the Anthropocene or Whose Anthropocene Is It? Decolonising the Anthropocene!” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 6, no. 2, 2018, pp. 77–92.

Hawhee, Debra. A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

House, Veronica, Catherine Lasswell, and Rebecca Dickson. “Editor’s Introduction: Sustainable Communities and Environmental Communication in Higher Education.” Reflections, vol. 16, no. 1, Fall 2016, pp. 3-13.

Jones, Madison. “Sylvan Rhetorics: Roots and Branches of More-than-Human Publics.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2019.1549408

Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, And the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

LaDuke, Winona @winonaladuke. Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/winonaladuke/

Lam, Anita, and Matthew Tegelberg. “Witnessing Glaciers Melt: Climate Change and Transmedia Storytelling.” Journal of Science Communication, vol. 18, no. 2, 2019, pp. A05. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.18020205

Mareck, Anne. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Community Literacy, Sustainability, and the Environment.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1-4.

Martinez, Tyler. "Everything You Need to Eat: Food, Access, and Community," Community Literacy Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, 2022, pp. 41-49. DOI:10.25148/CLJ.17.1.010645

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and Durable Futures. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.

Meyers, Suasan V. “Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America, by Lynn  Horton.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2009, pp. 105–09. doi:10.25148/clj.4.1.009459

Osorio, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani. Remembering Our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻAina, and Ea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Peters, Jason. “Public Art as Social Infrastructure: Methods and Materials for Social Action at Environmentally Contaminated Sites.” Reflections, vol.19, no. 2, Fall/Winter, 2019-2020, pp. 106–29.

Propen, Amy. At Home in The Anthropocene. Columbus: The University of Ohio Press, 2022.

Sackey, Donnie Johnson. Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space. Columbus: The University of Ohio Press, 2024.

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom as the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Tsing, Anna. Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, editors. Feral Atlas, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2021. https://feralatlas.org/

Whyte, Kyle, Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer. “Indigenous Lessons about Sustain- ability Are Not Just for ‘All Humanity.’” Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, edited by Julie Sze, New York: New York University Press, 2018, pp. 149-179.