Community Positionality

A version of this statement was published in a chapter I wrote for Challenging Antisemitism: Lessons from Literacy Classrooms (2023) titled, “Community Engagement Positionality Statements: An Introduction.”

You can download a PDF of this positionality statement here.

———

All communities produce cultural knowledge, but not all cultural knowledge is valued equally within academia. Growing up, I would latch onto the stories my Indigenous Iraqi Jewish grandmother shared with me about the jinns’ unseen hands rifling through our drawers, grasping at our clothing. These stories may have taught me more about non-human agency than posthumanism, but as other scholars have observed or hinted at (see Riley-Mukavetz, 2020; Torrez, 2018), only certain bodies of knowledge are considered “scholarly.” Community-based knowledge like my grandmother’s stories is often left uncited and therefore undervalued; consequently, so too are the everyday cultural meaning-making practices that shape how many see and approach the world. Hence, I see community engagement as a call to create social justice driven spaces within academia for culturally diverse ways of knowing, framed by the recognition that the university is historically welcoming to some communities and hostile toward others.

As a white-reading member of a ‘model-minority,’ I understand the privilege and responsibility of being a Jewish academic. My bifurcated status as the beneficiary of white privilege and the ethnic, racial, and religious ‘Other’ has shown me that research produced within and for the academy is tied to networks of social capital that impact local communities. I therefore see social justice as the equitable redistribution of ‘academic legitimacy’ or the power that comes from having cultural ways of knowing acknowledged as rigorous, paradigmatic, and scholarly. At the same time, social justice involves what many Jewish communities characterize as tzedek, an understanding of justice that “involves compassion for the other and an integration of equity with mercy, truth and peace, love and justice” (Frank, 2004, p. 76).

Compassion has a way of seeping through our curriculum. Throughout middle school and high school, my predominantly non-Jewish teachers would have me and my predominantly non-Jewish peers watch and rewatch footage of emaciated Jewish bodies. The idea was to “teach us” about the Holocaust, something most people in my community are already intimately familiar with. Sometimes the bodies would be standing upright by wooden cabins, other times they would be piled on the front of bulldozers; they would always stare into the camera. The way I learned about my cultural community in school was through the visual repetition of damage, with the actual evidence of that damage relegated to tattooed arms and palpable absences in family trees. These experiences as a student inform how I create spaces for community-engaged thinking and being in my teaching and research.

Creating community-oriented, social justice driven spaces—spaces hospitable to difference—within the academy entails making room for cultural knowledge and ways of knowing that emerge between and within communities harmed by normative power dynamics (i.e., the status quo). I draw here on scholars like Eve Tuck (2009) to inform my understanding of why studying, citing, teaching and most importantly honoring different cultural approaches to meaning-making matters. Describing how damage-centered research narratives affect her community, she explains that academic knowledge influences how communities perceive themselves and are perceived by others:

Our evidence of ongoing colonization by research—absent a context in which we acknowledge that colonization—is relegated to our own bodies, our own families, our own social networks, our own leadership. After the research team leaves, after the town meeting, after the news cameras have gone away, all we are left with is the damage. (p. 415)

What stands out to me is the implicit assertion that academic research moves bodies (e.g., research teams and camera crews) into action while selectively denying community knowledge, the “evidence of ongoing colonization by research” (p. 415). When our dominant research methods and methodologies are informed by one culturally dominant approach to scholarship and a narrow definition of robust experience, scholars are liable to shut out whole worlds while disengaging communities.

Respectfully acknowledging and promoting different cultural and communal bodies of knowledge (with prior consent!) within our teaching and scholarship can assist in repositioning how the university engages with, in Tuck’s (2009) case, colonized communities. I cite, quote, and abstract from Tuck because my experiences with pedagogy as a student resonate deeply with her discussion of damage-centered research. Our experiences are not identical, but they stem from similar spaces of intellectual whitewashing.

A through-line in my research is the exploration of fluctuating boundaries between insider and outsider groups, as well as the knowledge created within and between these spaces as they manifest through writing and rhetoric. My first publication for example takes a cultural rhetorics approach to technical communication by exploring how a local Jewish settler-community created a space for themselves through bilingual technical documentation design (see “Along the Cow Path,” 2020). This piece was heavily informed by Jewish rhetorics and Indigenous approaches to technical communication, drawing on scholars like Angela M. Haas, Michael Bernard-Donals, and Janice W. Fernheimer. Similarly, my article in Rhetoric Review titled ‘‘‘The Woman Who Talks’: A Qualitative Case Study in Feminist Jewish Rhetorics” examines how an anonymous group of nineteenth-century Jewish American women create a shared identity using Jewish rhetorical topoi to challenge racial and gendered prejudice. More recently, I have published an article in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics about how a Confederate monument in my local community creates different publics while also materializing white supremacy (see “The Geopolitics of White Supremacy,” 2022).

Each example mentioned above works toward the creation of culturally accessible research spaces, spaces in research where non-dominant worldviews and epistemologies (i.e., theories of knowledge) are valued as robust ways of knowing in conjunction with or instead of canonical doctrines. Without conflating the differences between cultural and physical accessibility, I lean here on the work of poet and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) in her collection, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. For Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Making Space Accessible Is an Act of Love for Our Communities” (p. 74). By creating spaces for scholars who, like myself, might ordinarily feel alienated by academia, I hope to demonstrate tzedek or a radical love for my cultural communities as well as for others.

Radical love is a mode for reallocating the social capital that comes with having a named, published, and/or recognized theory, methods, and methodologies to those groups for whom damage-centered narratives are the norm. I do not pretend that this work can fix or solve the monumental issues at hand, but I also recognize that it would have left a meaningful impact on me as an undergraduate student first discovering writing studies. Community-engagement within the university is made possible by radical love only and shapes, to borrow from Tuck’s (2009) description of “a theory of change,” what is “considered data, what constitutes evidence, how a finding is identified, and what is made public or kept private or sacred” (p. 413).

When we normalize radical love in our scholarship by giving space to other voices, we develop a richer understanding of how our work (e.g., data collection and publication) is related to and engaged with the communities around us. This understanding will naturally find its way into our pedagogy. For instance, I taught an expository writing course focused on students developing their writer’s voice by drawing on their participation in their own cultural communities and the knowledge developed therein—an idea that originated from my research on Jewish and cultural rhetorics. Students practiced writing in a variety of expository genres centered on their identities as scholars, community members, and cultural and linguistic inheritors, culminating in students writing their own community positionality statement. In short, my students practiced a radical love for their communities as they wrote, marking the two (i.e., writing and community) as indistinguishable.

Creating spaces for alienated cultural communities to not only define themselves but also share in academic meaning-making through our pedagogy and research is, I believe, a radical means of community engagement. In both my research and my teaching, I practice radical love for and enter into community with others by making academic spaces accessible, opening room for new voices, ideas, and possibilities.

References

Bernard-Donals, M.F., & Fernheimer, J.W. (2014). Jewish rhetorics: History, theory, practice. Brandeis University Press.

Frank, D.A. (2004). Arguing with God, Talmudic discourse, and the Jewish countermodel: Implications for the study of argumentation. Argumentation and Advocacy, 41, pp. 71-86.

Haas, A.M. (2007). Wampum as hypertext: An American Indian intellectual tradition of multimedia theory and practice. Studies in American Indian Literature, 19(4), pp. 77-100.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.

Riley-Mukavetz, A. (2020). Developing a relational scholarly practice: Snakes, dreams, and grandmothers. College Composition and Communication, 71(4), pp. 545-65.

Ríos, G.R. (2015). Cultivating land-based literacies and rhetorics. LiCS, 3(1), pp. 60-70.

Slotkin, A. (2022). The geopolitics of white supremacy: A case study on monuments and monumental rhetoric. The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 6(1), pp. 3-13.

———. (2020). Along the cow path: Technical communication within a Jewish cemetery. Communication Design Quarterly, 8(3), pp. 16-25.

———. (2020) “The woman who talks”: A qualitative case study in feminist Jewish rhetorics. Rhetoric Review, 39(4), pp. 457-70.

Torrez, J.E. (2018). Responsibility, reciprocity, and respect: Storytelling as a means of university-community engagement. In M. Castañeda & J. Krupczynksi (Eds.), Civic engagement in diverse Latina/o communities: Leading from social justice partnerships in action (pp. 143-58). Peter Lang Publishers.

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), pp. 409-27.