front cover of Faith and Community
Faith and Community
How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society
Rebecca A. Glazier
Temple University Press, 2024
Places of worship are important anchor institutions in communities, helping to create social capital through discussion groups, soup kitchens, and neighborhood clean-ups. While congregations face increasing pressures, from declining attendance to political polarization, community engagement is an overall positive for their members and for democracy.

Faith and Community shows the benefits of religious people taking action in their communities. Through more than a decade of multi-method data collection, Rebecca Glazier surveyed over 4,000 congregants and nearly 500 clergy in Little Rock, Arkansas to gather opinions from members and leaders on community issues and engagement. Together with interviews and case studies, her findings indicate that active congregants are happier and more civically involved.

Faith and Community provides valuable insights into the relationship between religion and community engagement. The data illustrates how community engagement benefits individuals, congregations, and democracy and offers one solution to what ails religion in America today.
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front cover of Field Rhetoric
Field Rhetoric
Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion
Edited by Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric, and fieldwork

A variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric within the contexts of its use and circulation. Employing field methods more commonly used by ethnographers allows researchers to capture rhetoric in action and to observe the dynamic circumstances that shape persuasion in ordinary life.

Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion gathers new essays that describe and theorize this burgeoning transdisciplinary mode of field-based scholarship. Contributors document and support this ethnographic turn in rhetorical studies through sustained examination of the diverse trends, methods, tools, theories, practices, and possibilities for engaging in rhetorical field research.

This fascinating volume offers an introduction to these inquiries and serves as both a practical resource and theoretical foundation for scholars, teachers, and students interested in the intersection of rhetoric and field studies. Editors Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke have assembled scholars working in diverse field sites to map and initiate key debates on the practices, limitations, and value of rhetorical field methods and research. Working synthetically at the junction of rhetorical theory and field practices, the contributors to this collection build from myriad field-based cases to examine diverse theoretical and methodological considerations. The volume also serves as a useful reference for interdisciplinary qualitative researchers interested in doing research from a rhetorical or discursive perspective in various disciplines and fields, such as English, composition, communication, natural resources, geography, sociology, urban planning, anthropology, and more.
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front cover of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn, 2023
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam.
 
This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process.
 
Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
 
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