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Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. Contributors bring their lived experience as listeners in, to, and alongside the communities whose praxes they surface in chapters that enrich and complicate the deep interrelationship of listening and storytelling. Affirming that storytelling is the vessel through which community listening is made, unmade, and remade, the stories in this collection probe what it means to listen from community vantages and to bring such listening into academic conversations. Collectively, the contributors to this multidisciplinary collection advance scholarship that has community as the locus of iterative knowledge seeking and sharing.

Through classroom ethnography, student interviews, analyses of settler archives, and personal reflection, There Is No Making It Out addresses the legacies of settler colonialism and settler rhetorics and their continued impact on how (subaltern) peoples see the world, walk through it, and interact with others. Romeo García argues that concepts of decoloniality prompt crucial counter-rhetorics and writing that are necessary but perhaps ultimately unattainable. In the demand for something else, and at the intersection between a praxical theorizing and theory-building actioning, There Is No Making It Out works to de-link and reclaim an archival approach as a critical method and also reclaim a theory of archival impressions as a theoretical apparatus deeply attuned both to tilling the ground on which power takes root and to a full spectrum of Matter (living, nonliving, nonhuman). García offers no definitive resolutions but, situated between two rhetorical standpoints—stories-so-far and the possibilities of new stories—There Is No Making It Out channels a hope and struggle for wor(l)ding otherwise.
 

HONORABLE MENTION, 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in Edited Collection!

A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.
 
What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.
 
Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline’s assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.
 
Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.