The Top Event Advancing Community Literacy

Symposiums are small-scale events that focus on particular topics. The Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC) hosts biennial symposiums on topics around literacies, community accountability[1], rhetorics, and pedagogies.

In Fall 2022, along with the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas Christian University, the Brown Chair in English Literacy and CLC co-sponsored “Tracing the Stream: The Geographies of Black Feminist Literacies, Rhetorics, and Pedagogies,” a symposium paying homage to the life and scholarship of Black feminist Jacqueline Jones Royster. This three-day virtual symposium, honoring the 22^nd anniversary publication of Royster’s important book Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, brought scholars from Black feminist and Critical Race literacies, rhetorics, and pedagogies together in tracing the geographies and cartographies of Black feminist thought and traditions.

The ”Tracing the Stream” symposium lives at https://www.tracingthestream.com/, along with a correlating syllabus co-created and taught by Dr. Carmen Kynard (TCU) and Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard (UArk).

In Fall 2025, we’ll be hosting our second symposium, “Crafting the Irresistible: Creative – Critical Literacies and Communities”, which will explore how the interplay between the creative and critical bolsters literacies scholarship, pedagogical practice, political and activist expression, and community formation and transformation.

Our 2025 Call for Papers can be found at : http://tinyurl.com/2025CraftingIrresistible.

[1] A greater exploration of “community accountability” can be found in  Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s review of of “Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence,” a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order (Vol 37, No. 4, 2011-2012) edited by Alisa Bierria, Mimi Kim, and Clasissa Rojas. See “We Have Always Known: Embodying Community Accountability” Feminist Wire, September 18, 2012 <https://thefeministwire.com/2012/09/we-have-always-known-embodying-community-accountability/>

While each symposium has its own intentions, our symposiums bring expert and emerging voices in research, teaching, community activism, and creative practices together to support the development of scholarly and citizen research and pedagogy statewide, nationwide, and beyond.

Our symposiums are free and open to the public. We circulate registration forms for our symposiums on our social media pages. Anyone who registers can attend.

Our symposium topics are chosen by Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard, the CLC’s founding director, in consultation with the CLC planning committee, which is comprised of graduate assistants and other staff in the office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy.

Presenters are selected by the office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy’s planning committee, who read proposals and make determinations.

Our symposiums have been presented virtually via Zoom Events. We appreciate how the online modality has enabled us to respond to accessibility requests and accommodate presenters and audience members from across the United States and elsewhere.

In the future, we plan to introduce hybrid and in-person symposium events.

We’ll circulate a registration form across our social media platforms and newsletter.

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Reach out to our team at [email protected] for more information about our Symposiums.