“This Meeting at This Tree”: Reimagining the Town Hall Session

Abstract

Much of the language at academic conferences is purely metaphorical, so it is important to understand the cultural–historical significance of the metaphors used in constructing organizational gatherings, especially the metaphor invoked by the town hall meeting. Town halls/meetings were spaces where members gathered for democratic rule in a particular geopolitical space that was stolen, settled, and colonized. They often excluded women, indigenous people, and people of color. In using this name, then, Literacy Research Association (LRA) engages in settler colonialism in as far as it is considered townish and aspires to recreate the metaphorical essence of town meetings. However, the historic interconnectedness of LRA, the town hall, and settler colonialism can be upended. In fact, LRA can reimagine the entire concept of the town hall and create new metaphors upon which to base the gatherings. This article departs from the idea of the town hall, and it also departs from the traditional structure of academic papers. Specifically, this article highlights position statements written by five scholars who embody numerous social and individual identities. In each statement, the scholars discuss their ideas for the future of LRA—their concerns and their hopes. Additionally, the article includes symbolic sketches of LRA members to represent the people who are often muted within the organization. Essentially, we, the authors, begin an imagining process as we speculate on what LRA meetings can look like when marginalized voices speak out not only about their questions and concerns but also about their solutions.

Empowering Indigenous Knowledge in Deliberations on Gene Editing in the Wild

“…Drawing on our personal experiences working with Indigenous peoples (including communities with which we personally identify) and cross-disciplinary ideas in participatory design, deliberative democracy, psychology, education, development, global public health, performance studies, and cultural anthropology, we offer the following recommendations to foster a deliberation process that longitudinally recognizes and cultivates Indigenous ways of knowing. 28 While we have derived these recommendations specifically to address the inclusion of Indigenous communities, we invite readers to consider how certain recommendations may have import for the inclusion of other key stakeholder groups whose knowledge and life ways may be excluded under dominant or normative modes of deliberation.…”

“We Believe in Collective Magic”: Honoring the Past to Reclaim the Future(s) of Literacy Research

“…Literacy research has always been a contested space used to shut out, surveil, and silence Black and Brown bodies, at once a site of imperialism, coloniality, resistance, transformation, revitalization, and liberation (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In the last few years alone, our fellow literacy scholars of Color have highlighted concerns with the “centuries-long harm emerging from and perpetuated by English education onto racially and linguistically minoritized US communities” (de los Ríos et al, 2019, p. 2) and the role that LRA has played in maintaining colonial ways of being through practices such as town halls that make claims about democratic rule while excluding who the late poet and activist, June Jordan, has referred to as silent minorities (Toliver et al, 2019).…”

This Is Us: Discourses of Community Within and Beyond Literacy Research

“…Such spaces often excluded women, Indigenous people, and people of color. Literacy scholars Stephanie Toliver et al in their 2019 LR: TMP article offer a way of reimagining how we gather as an organization, abandoning our engagement with settler colonialism and identifying metaphors for the decolonization of this community. We do not have to maintain systems and structures because “that’s just what we’ve always done.” Besides, who is the “we”?…”