Democratic Futures Project
Publications
Transformations works from the premise that everyone is an intellectual, possessing valuable insights and strategies on the most pressing global issues. As such, the journal intends to amplify the too often unheard voices of local change makers who are using non-violent strategies to reinvent public spheres, marked by conflict, into peaceful civic spaces premised on tolerance and inclusion. To this end, the journal will feature the insights of advocates, peacemakers, organizational leaders, and community members who will discuss the implications of their public work. Beyond supporting the work of these communities, these insights will also be used to expand the ability of academic scholarship to engage with those whose work is reinventing locally central concepts such as peace, human rights, and community to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Reflections, a peer-reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on public rhetoric, civic writing, service-learning, and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and topics.
New City Community Press began as a literacy project in the public schools of Philadelphia.
The original goal of New City Community Press was to support urban school children in their efforts to use writing to give power to their lives. As the students' work began to be published and circulated, New City was approached by neighborhood organizations, community groups, and unorganized groups of concerned citizens, who also wanted to use writing to share their stories with the larger city. Working with these residents through writing, art, and photography classes, New City began to publish work focused on immigrant communities, such as Espejos y Ventanas and Chinatown Lives, laboring communities, Working, and disabled communities, No Restraints. Throughout, New City maintained its commitment to public school students by writing curriculum which would allow the voices of New City Community Press to become part of their daily curriculum— placing the voices of their community elders into the midst of their education.
Today, New City Community Press sponsors writing groups, after-school programs, and author assistance programs designed to support community writers and community organizations in their efforts to express a true vision of the streets on which they live. New City Community Press publications have gained a national and international audience, finding readers across the globe.
THE WORKING AND WRITING FOR CHANGE series began during the 100th anniversary celebrations of NCTE. It was designed to recognize the collective work of teachers of English, writing, composition, and rhetoric to work within and across diverse identities to ensure the field recognizes and respect slanguage, educational, political, and social rights of all students, teachers, and community members. While initially solely focused on the work of NCTE/CCCC Special Interest Groups and Caucuses, the series now includes texts written by individuals in partnership with other communities struggling for social recognition and justice.
