In Local Organic, Veronica House explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Framed by a study of language, power, and food both nationally and in Boulder, Colorado, the book offers teachers, organizers, activists, and scholars ideas and examples for building interdisciplinary and intercommunity coalitional ecologies through writing in a methodology for engagement that the author calls ecological community writing. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic is a book about collaboratively building community-derived definitions for resilient local food systems and how faculty and students can work to ethically partner with local communities using distributed definition building.

Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts.
 

Veronica House is faculty in the English Dept. and director of the Writing Center at Boston College. She has published widely on local food movements and community-engaged work in higher education. Veronica is the founding director of the Conference on Community Writing and founding executive director of the Coalition for Community Writing, as well as a coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. She is the recipient of the Campus Compact of the Mountain West’s Engaged Scholar Award, University of Colorado Boulder’s Women Who Make a Difference Award, and numerous teaching awards.