Kells, Michelle Hall. “The Rhetorical Imagination of Writing Across Communities: Nomos and Community Writing as a Gift-Giving Economy.” Reflections, vol. 16, no. 1, Fall 2016, pp. 149-166.
Kells uses the classical concept of nomos to position writing across communities (or WACommunities) “as a counter-discourse” to other models of writing curricula (153). Kells explains nomos as defining socially constructed norms, explicitly drawing on gift-giving as her lens to explain WACommunities.
Kells describes University of New Mexico’s WACommunities program as a “student-governed, community-centered approach [that] maps its conceptual umbrella around three spheres of literacy education: academic (curricular), civic/cultural (social and environmental justice), and professional (institutional/administrative) literacy practices influencing the health and wellbeing of the communities” in and around UNM (155). The values that Kells defines throughout her article resonate with writing center work, particularly in terms of forwarding translingualism, linguistic diversity, and support across socioeconomic and racial divides. My difficulty with this article is that, as someone who had never heard of WACommunities before, I finished reading still not knowing what a WACommunities program looks like. I can get behind the conceptual framework here, but I don’t know how a WACommunity program can look.
Rhetorical Notes 