Activist Orientations: Wayfinding, Writing, and How Alumni Effect Change in the World

Abstract

This article examines what activism looks like in an age of “deep writing.” As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.

Although it is common to claim that college writing courses prepare students to effect change in the world, what does such work and activity look like?¹ How is it connected to the kinds of writing they have learned to do, as well as their ongoing development of writing abilities? And how does their awareness of social movements and community efforts affect their thoughts on what writing is and what it is useful for? We have come to such questions as we have analyzed data from focus group interviews as part of our ongoing Wayfinding Project, which surveys and interviews alumni who are three to ten years beyond earning their bachelor’s degrees from the University of California system. As we have discussed elsewhere (Alexander, Lunsford, Whithaus), wayfinding is our framework for mapping the complex and unexpected sources of writing knowledges and ability laminated by (1) the choices writers make over the course of their lives, (2) the varied signposts that orient them along their paths, and (3) the shifting identities they take on as writers. We have borrowed the technical term wayfinding from disciplines such as urban planning and architecture to capture how individuals navigate through different landscapes by following previously established paths or by taking advantage of serendipity. When used in writing studies, “wayfinding highlights the potential transience of the contexts in which people write, and focuses on participants’ fluid ability to not only move among those contexts, but also to create their own niches” (Alexander, Lunsford, Whithaus 124).

Among the many choices about their current writing lives our alumni mentioned, we noticed that several talked about forms of writing that could be grouped under the category of casual activism. To be sure, not all of these participants identified themselves as activists, but many of them articulated what we have come to call an “activist orientation,” an acute awareness of the world around them, including awareness of social movements, and the possibility of using writing to understand or even intervene in them. One of our participants, Greg, noted explicitly that people of his generation, his peers, do not want their lives to “revolve” only around work. Instead, as he puts it: “They could also still care a lot about politics or about adopting animals, et cetera. Something like that. So, there is that side of them that they want to lean into and express, they just may not do it professionally, but it’s still part of who they are. It seems like every millennial has at least one thing in that sense.”²

To capture a sense of what Greg is talking about, we might have to expand our understanding of what activism is. On our campuses, we have become accustomed to spotting activism as forms of direct action, such as students sitting in peaceful protest at UC Davis in 2011 as part of the Occupy Movement series of protests across the country–an occasion that resulted in the pepper-spraying of protesting students and still resonates in the UC system today as an example of student activism. But such direct, blatant action is not the only way people engage in collectively defined causes, although that is the accustomed vision of activism; as Risa Applegarth points out in “News that Isn’t New: March for Our Lives and Media Mobilization of Historical Precedent,” popular media tend to constrain representations of young people’s activism to familiar patterns. Rather, we note that in addition to the UC Davis sit-in itself, the circulation of satirical and outraged “pepper-spraying” memes in the aftermath of the incident constituted a significant form of resistance activism. And some memes were less any kind of overt activism than forms of engagement in snidely political commentary, or even entertainment.³

In whatever ways these activities may span the spectrum of what counts as activism, they all represent an orientation toward engagement–and often a form of collective engagement–with the world around them. Such an orientation may not look like explicit direct action politicking; rather, orientation for us captures a sense in which these writers are actively finding their ways toward using writing to engage and potentially change their worlds for the better. As Greg suggests, “activism” is woven into people’s lives alongside their other private and professional commitments, so that, in our interviews, participants frequently mention their activist tendencies in passing. Indeed, our alumni are finding many ways to be politically and socially involved, and they are often using their writing and media making as ways to forge connections, become engaged, and orient themselves through writing toward effecting change in the world.

In this article, we examine what such activism looks like in an age of “deep writing”–in which recent college graduates are often professionally and personally involved with a variety of communication platforms and in which they experience, again professionally and personally, what Deborah Brandt has called the “rise of writing” as an intimate part of their everyday lives. Even more specifically, as alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation we ask: What role does writing play in helping them orient themselves in relationship to social movements, and how does such an orientation help them refine and enhance their understanding of what writing itself does in the world? After reviewing relevant literature in the field about writing and activism, including some of the difficulties of defining what activism is, we turn to an analysis of data from our focus groups in which alumni participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. These alumni’s orientations toward activist writing suggest that college writing programs might draw more explicitly on the ways writers engage with the people, communities, and causes that are meaningful to them.

Activism in Writing Studies

The literature in the field of writing studies and composition that takes up issues of activism is diverse, touching on a range of topics. JongHwa Lee and Seth Kahn’s Activism and Rhetoric focuses on the activist projects of writing studies scholars, tracing how teacher-activists have engaged in activist projects such as antiwar, antipoverty, labor, or LGBTQ + movements. Many more scholars in the field have articulated stances that advocate for classroom activities that encourage students to engage with social issues and then build outward to work on socio-political issues the students are already engaged in from their own lives. It is not possible in the confines of this article to summarize the full breadth of these different approaches. With that said, we offer a sense of what that literature promotes, particularly since doing so allows us to differentiate between what the field has focused on and, later in our discussion, what our study participants have told us is important to them as they cultivate an activist orientation.

For instance, scholarly and pedagogical literature in the subfield of community writing has long advocated for service learning and other forms of community engaged writing that raise students’ awareness of how writing can be used not just to analyze but also address community concerns, issues, problems, and challenges (Parks and Goldblatt). Extending such work, other scholars promote explicitly the idea that teaching writing should focus on issues of citizenship, and perhaps cultivate students’ potential for activist interventions. Nancy Welch, in Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, argues forcefully that “we should be collectively concerned about the disturbing gap between actual demonstrations of mass public argumentation and what many of our students, in their classrooms and in the wider culture, learn about leaving arguments to the experts or until the next election” (143–44). Welch envisions writing courses that will close the gap and that will turn students’ attention to how they can use their critical reading and writing skills to understand, interrogate, and then address socio-political issues. Similarly, in “Writing to Assemble Publics: Making Writing Activate, Making Writing Matter,” Laurie Gries brings together new materialist approaches to assemblage, community, and “rhetorical responsibility” to consider the pedagogical possibilities of campaign organizing. At stake for Gries is a way of conceiving writing as action in the world by offering an invitation to students to consider themselves as agents–even within the increasingly complex rhetorical, political, technological, and material realities in which we are all embedded. As Gries puts it: “In order to take themselves seriously as responsible rhetorical beings, students must come to believe that they are viable agents in this complex, organic process–as citizens constantly assembling in response to various concerns but also as assembling beings–as rhetors with the ability to assemble and distribute discourse that can, in turn, assemble and reassemble bodies around a shared concern” (336).

While Welch and Gries want the classroom to become a space in which students’ sense of potential activism is oriented, or at least inspired, other scholars, such as Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt in “Student Activism and Rhetorical Education,” note the extent to which many writing courses do not prompt such an activist orientation–so much so that students, in a case study the authors explore in their essay, use student organizations to educate themselves and learn new literate strategies (for example, writing press releases) for engaging public spheres as activists. Such self-sponsored forms of literate education are not as surprising as they might at first seem. In The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, Deborah Brandt tracks through a series of ethnographic case studies the overtaking of reading by writing as the major marker of what it means to be “literate” in the contemporary world. While many of Brandt’s case studies focus on workplace forms of literacy and writing and how these forms are enabled, shaped, contained, directed, and sometimes controlled by conditions of employment, they frequently reveal how contemporary writers experience their writing as not just a set of instrumentalized tasks but as a powerful way of shaping the world around them. As Brandt puts it, “…we are just now entering an era of deep writing, in which more and more people write for prolonged periods of time from inside deeply interactive networks and in immersive cognitive states, driven not merely by the orchestration of memory, muscle, language, and task but by the effects that writing can have on others and the self” (160).

For Brandt, the emergence of complex, networked technological systems for the creation, dissemination, and exchange of information has helped shift the dominant experience of literacy from reading to writing–that is, to producing the information that is disseminated and exchanged through a multitude of internet platforms. As such, writers see the “effects” of writing–often writing that they create–on “others and the self.” Indeed, as we have listened to our focus group participants talk about their own experiences with writing, they remind us of such effects, but they have also prompted us to consider how those effects extend beyond the self and others to the world. Brandt herself maintains that “writing is a site of intellectual, moral, and civic development” (162). And while she focuses primarily on workplace and educational forms of literacy development and interaction, she recognizes the civic dimensions of the “rise” of writing. As she puts it, “writing unleashes language into the world, [and] it engages people’s sense of power and responsibility, even when they are writing anonymously or under someone else’s name. In the throes of composition, writers see their words take public shape, and the effects of these words do not stop with the reader” (162). Drawing on these exploratory acts of engagement that happen across writing contexts should shape our teaching about writing in the collegiate settings more so than they do currently. This sort of change is not about making writing pedagogies and curricula more activist as Welch and Gries recommend, but rather about providing ways to understand and acknowledge how students are already orienting towards activist forms of writing. Wayfinding suggests that writing development is occurring across classroom, extracurricular, community, family, professional, and leisure contexts. The writer is singular and at the same time navigates through these different contexts, these different networks. Pedagogies and curricula do not have to advocate for developing activist orientations but rather align themselves to support the stances students and alumni are already exploring.

The prominence of networked forms of communication, particularly amongst younger generations of American graduates, provides an opportunity for many of them to engage in activism. Scholars who study young people’s rich engagement with multiple communication platforms, such as Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd, all point to the increasing use of such platforms to promote socio-political and cultural awareness and, in some cases, engage in direct action. Indeed, while Brandt’s influential work has been important to the conceptualization of the Wayfinding Project, we are also mindful of and attentive to the work of scholars who understand the complexity of multicultural and multilingual dimensions of contemporary writing across a variety of spaces in which people are writing, conversing, and debating. Adam Banks powerfully asserts in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground that any attention to the use of writing in complex digital spaces that does not take into consideration how race (and racism) shape normative uses of language is fundamentally damaged. More importantly, scholars should particularly attend to the creative and innovative ways in which individuals and groups from varied cultural backgrounds use language and work through writing to share experiences, disseminate insights, and offer social and political critiques. Banks offers compelling arguments on how users might mobilize the benefits of digital communication technologies while also encouraging an acute and critical awareness of how those very same technologies can be used to exploit, even manipulate, those same users. Just recently, with regard to Black activism, this position has been reaffirmed by Ja’La J. Wourman and Shingi Mavima in “Our Story Had to Be Told! A Look at the Intersection of the Black Campus Movement and Black Digital Media,” in which the authors argue that “[c]oupled with unrelenting innovation within Black forms of literacies and rhetoric, the digital era could be more than just the battleground for equality as we venture into the 21st century: it may well be a critical avenue in the march towards freedom.”

It is vital to keep in mind that, while some young people (including some of the participants in our study we consider below), engage in direct and explicit forms of activism, other kinds of civic, social, and political engagement do not look like direct activism but constitute nonetheless what we refer to as an “activist orientation.” For example, as Sarah Riddick has argued, students’ social media posts may be interpreted as a form of whistleblowing, even though the posters may not have initially intended their texts to be forms of protest. More extensively, in Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics, Sonja Vivienne explores the ways in which digital storytelling can function as a vehicle for social change. Vivienne’s project examines how everyday LGBTQ + writers present user-created content on social media platforms. Building on Ken Plummer’s concept of “intimate citizenship,” Vivienne suggests that individual writers and media creators express complex, sometimes contradictory, selves as they tell personal stories across private and public spheres. One of her key examples is a case study that considers the digital storytelling practices found among participants in the Rainbow Family Tree project from Adelaide, Australia in which LGBTQ + participants share their stories about being queer and coming out, primarily as a way to build coalitions, find allies, and mobilize personal stories for political change. Vivienne’s work suggests more nuanced ways of understanding writing, storytelling, and digital identity than attempts to link one-to-one online identities and “authentic” offline selves.

Other forms of storytelling have activist implications even if they are not themselves direct forms of political intervention. For instance, in “Risking Disclosure: Unruly Rhetorics and Queer(ing) HIV Risk Communication on Grindr,” McKinley Green describes how young people living with HIV communicate on social media apps such as Grindr in ways that question the assumption of public disclosure of seropositive status as the dominant and most efficacious way to prevent risky forms of sexual intercourse. By resisting the equation of disclosure with risk prevention, these young people push through their use of social media for alternative ways to articulate risk prevention that are not tied to identification in a biopolitical context that still stigmatizes HIV-positive status; they also push for greater responsibility from health care organizations and governments for promoting risk prevention in ways that don’t place the burden squarely on individuals but that instead see the promotion of sexual health as part of a larger ecology of care and mutual wellbeing.

As these scholars demonstrate, writing and networked platforms are critical to young people’s sense of activism, but perhaps not always in the overt ways that the field has used to define and identify “activism.” We may miss young people’s development of awareness of social movements and how they are beginning to engage with such movements if we focus too strictly on just explicit and direct forms of activism. Indeed, our primary intervention in this article is claiming that a too narrow definition of activism will miss the rich ways in which our students and alumni are engaging their worlds, becoming acutely aware of social movements and using writing to shape their worlds. We turn in the next section to a consideration of what activism is and how we might define it to accommodate what we have come to call an “orientation toward activism.”

Activist Orientations

Notably, we did not ask our participants whether they were activists or whether they participated in activist projects; instead, the theme emerged from their responses. We suspect that had we asked, many of our participants would not have identified themselves as “activists.” That hesitancy might be attributable to a variety of causes, not the least of which might be a wariness of “activism” as a term. When Donna M. Bickford and Nedra Reynolds recount examples of service-learning in their article, “Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism As Acts of Dissent,” they note the extent to which their students did not readily identify with the terms “activism” or “activist,” despite their interest in service learning and service work. Bickford and Reynolds maintain, though, that while “service” might be understood as oriented toward people and “activism” as oriented toward “structures,” the term activism broadly “argues for relationships based on connection” (237). Likewise, our participants’ activism was often a nuanced experience related to their communities, their lives, and in many cases the experiences of family members. As you will see, all of our participants forefront in their descriptions of their activities the value and power of connection. In the examples we report on below, activist orientations originate from participants’ sense of belonging in a community, in a family, in ways that are activist, but not always in ways that are easily recognized as activist in formal, institutional contexts.

With that said, however, we still have to acknowledge that any hesitancy to declare positively who or what counts as “activist” is also likely reflected in the considerable variation in definitions of activism–amongst scholars and lay people as well as amongst activists from diverse racial and ethnic groups. We have chosen to follow Alexandra Corning and Daniel Myers’s expansive view of not activism per se, but orientation toward activism:

In this article, activist orientation is defined as an individual’s developed, relatively stable, yet changeable orientation to engage in various collective, social-political, problem-solving behaviors spanning a range from low-risk, passive, and institutionalized acts to high-risk, active, and unconventional behaviors. This definition of activist orientation is intended to broadly encompass the many more specific definitions of activism that have been offered by social movement and collective behavior scholars.⁴ (704)

As scholars of political engagement, Corning and Myers developed a survey instrument called the Activism Orientation Scale (AOS) “to assess individuals’ propensities to engage in social action” (703). Their scale has become influential, in part because it is less interested in providing definitive answers to whether a certain identity, action, or convention counts as “activist” in the abstract, and more interested in whether individual participants are likely to orient their own actions according to their own perceptions of collective behavior. We became interested in the orientations toward activism that our participants indicated in their interviews through their reported behaviors, especially in regard to writing.

For our purposes, Corning and Myers’s concept of “activist orientation” aligns well with two modes we see as inherent in, even constitutive of, wayfinding: people can follow already determined and well signposted pathways to their goals, or they can serendipitously find new ways of pursuing their goals–and perhaps discover new goals as well (Alexander, Lunsford, Whithaus). Analogously, “[a]ctivist orientation,” Corning and Myers explain, “ranges from the quite conventional (e.g., participating in the electoral process) to the highly unconventional, risky, or both (e.g., physical confrontations with police officers, damaging public property, risking serious injury)” (704). The environment shapes possibilities as much as the wayfinder shapes the environment, and what counts as conventional or unconventional is open to (re)interpretation. We will discuss examples both of conventional activism–writing tasks that participants simply do so regularly that they mention them in passing to us–and more unconventional forms, such as accidentally finding oneself identified as an activist, or experimenting with genres to develop new ways of expressing activist motives and goals.

We want to emphasize that last point: experiences with activist proclivities and experimentation with different or new forms of writing often go hand-in-hand in these accounts. In some examples, the selected genre (say, a newsletter) provides a conventional way of signposting specific utterances as activist, even though our participants may not have initially realized the force of that convention. In other examples, the selected genre or set of genres allows the participant to reflect on and work through issues, identities, and disciplinary expectations that ultimately are oriented towards collective problem-solving. Tellingly, a few participants highlighted their experiences as the most meaningful writing they had done, regardless of whether or not a project succeeded in effecting a certain change in the world. At other times, participants emphasized their awareness and consideration of the social-political contexts in which their writing would be received, especially as they were trying out new forms. In reporting on participants’ responses, we aim to narrate the broad variety of ways they were conventionally or unconventionally orienting themselves to collective action through writing.

In this article, we report on data collected as part of the three-year pilot phase of the Wayfinding Project. This multi-year, multi-campus research project is being conducted by PIs at three campuses in the University of California system, and it received IRB approval from each campus. The pilot included surveys with current undergraduates (n = 275) and focus-group interviews with alumni (n = 22) who identified themselves as having received a bachelor’s degree within the last 3-10 years. In the focus groups, we asked alumni about the writing they had done post-graduation, what they had learned further about writing, what writing they had found meaningful, and what conversations about writing they had had with others. These participants were located across the U.S., representing the physical distribution of our alumni. Each of the focus groups comprised three to five participants with two interviewers, and they were audio-recorded via the Zoom platform and transcribed. Note that we use the term “alumni” to identify our participants as opposed to other terms, such as “college graduate” or “recent college graduate.” “Alumni” marks the fact that we have chosen to recruit participants using campus alumni listservs and social media from our respective campuses. The former term identifies these former students as all having finished a four-year degree program within a Research 1 university system, as opposed to the more generic and less specific term “college graduate.” While we do not speculate at length about the impact of that difference on our participants’ discussions of their post-collegiate writing lives, we believe it nonetheless worthwhile to mark the specificity of our interlocutors’ educational experiences. This article reports solely on the focus-group data, and all names used here are pseudonyms.

In particular, we focus on comments from six participants: Sophia, Greg, Annie, Julissa, Francine, and Max. They represent a range of majors and experiences within the UCs, and their post-graduation lives have seen them utilize writing in a wide range of activities. As we discuss their participation in the focus groups, we introduce each of them in more detail. However, here, we want to provide you with the general context in which these interviews took place. Specifically, given the COVID pandemic and the calls for social justice that followed the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we want to locate our conversations with Sophia, Greg, Annie, Julissa, Francine, and Max within the tumultuous events of 2019-20. Sophia participated in a focus group that occurred on March 6, 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic began and before Taylor’s and Floyd’s murders. Our conversations with the focus groups that Annie, Francine, Max, Julissa, and Greg were in occurred in April, 2020, after COVID-19 had spread to all fifty states in the U.S. and after Taylor’s death on March 13th, 2020, but before Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020. April was a month full of tensions and fears, with claustrophobia setting in as we realized that working from home and social distancing was going to last months or years rather than weeks. It is important to keep that timeframe in mind as we consider how interviewees were working and writing during the early months of the pandemic, but prior to the larger protests during summer 2020 and before the tumultuous events around that November’s election. Our participants’ orientations towards activist forms of writing and social engagement reflect the flickering uncertainty and unrest from that moment in time. But they also reflect longer developmental arcs in Sophia’s, Greg’s, Annie’s, Julissa’s, Francine’s, and Max’s lives and development as writers.

In the remainder of this article, we provide examples to demonstrate the range and forms of activist orientation that our participants mentioned. Specifically, we focus on alumni’s use of writing to move into and effect change in the world around them, and then we examine complex intersections amongst multiple forms of writing and activist engagement.

Moving into the World: Volunteering and Work-Driven Occasions for Activism

The sheer range of experiences that our participants described was remarkable, and as they discussed their post-undergraduate writing lives, there was a particularly fascinating synergy among volunteering, workplace transitions, and activism. In this section, we focus on four participants whose experiences exemplify the ways in which alumni moved into the world professionally and used writing to help them navigate that transition. At the same time, it is not just writing that is important to these participants, but the ways in which writing as an orientation to the world becomes an important component of navigating college-to-career transitions. Such navigation often consists of an action orientation; that is, it is action-oriented in these participants’ interest in moving audiences and interlocutors and, at the same time, also action-oriented in that it contributes to how the participants come to understand and shape their own self-positioning as professionals, and as people working in the world. Activism in all four examples plays an important role. Sometimes that activism becomes a career, sometimes not. These four participants each took part in different focus groups, so the synergy and the dynamics around volunteering and activism occurred across multiple focus groups.

As we explore moving into the world, it is important to have a sense of the four participants we are focusing on in this section: One participant, Sophia, describes writing for a hospice shelter; another participant, Annie, works in marketing for a software cloud company; Greg works in PR and writes frequently for his green energy firm; and Julissa had worked in publishing for a while but has since become a full-time union organizer. The diverse experiences of these participants show how engagement with activism connects with writing. They also demonstrate how writing in general as well as particular types of writing provide a bridge as participants moved from one job to another. Their experiences foreground the roles that writing for a purpose and writing for particular audiences play when writers embrace activist orientations in their personal and professional lives. In particular, all four of these alumni recount writing experiences where they are getting people to do things. In experiencing and understanding writing as rhetorically forceful, they start to see writing as a communicative modality that leads to action in the world. But this framing of writing is not only about what happens to the people that Sophia, Annie, Greg, and Julissa are writing for; it is also about how they themselves are framed–or rather how they orient themselves–to writing as action, a change in the world.

One important dimension of our alumni’s activist orientation is the way in which they used writing to build community through volunteering or through workplace-based actions. Veronica Barassi and Sonja Vivienne have each documented powerful ways in which young people engage in “everyday activism,” which is one way that an activist orientation can manifest. The alumni in our study appear to continue–or perhaps even increase–their activism after they graduate and move into the world. One route for this sort of activism is volunteering for community organizations. Another perhaps more interesting, and for us unexpected, path into these everyday forms of continued activism was corporate-sponsored, or work-driven, occasions for activism.

In her conversation with us, Sophia emphasized her volunteer work. She had graduated more than two years before the interview, had started her college career majoring in physics but switched to English, and is planning to go to graduate school in linguistics. She is particularly interested in cognitive science and language, especially American Sign Language, which suggests an interest in communication practices in particular community contexts. While she was working full time at a lab and applying for graduate school, she was also “volunteering with an upcoming homeless hospice shelter.” She reported that she was “doing a lot of writing projects for them.” She said that “a majority of my writing right now is writing feature articles and promotional materials for that upcoming shelter.” When asked for more details about that writing, Sophia spoke at length:

It’s usually feature articles for our newsletter that we send out to supporters and the community. So it’s a lot doing interviews of community members who are participating in different programs that are gonna be a part of the shelter. It’s a homeless hospice shelter, so it’s for the terminally ill homeless, and a lot of programs for veteran honoring services or for different kinds of activities for them to do, having libraries, and music, and stuff like that.

So I do a lot of interviews of people who are leading those projects so that we can put that out in our newsletter so that people can hear more about what the shelter will be doing and how important it is for the people’s lives to have these types of things.

I think it’s really important because the homeless aren’t necessarily given a lot of attention, in terms of if they were speaking for themselves. So being able to have other people speak to how important it is for things like that is good. So it’s basically promotional, but it’s a lot of feature writing that’s kind of promotional as a side.

Sophia’s activism provides her an opportunity to develop very particular writing skills, including interviewing and summarizing the work that others are doing in a way that will catch attention. As she puts it,

I think being able to interview somebody and put that interview into a form that the public not only can witness by reading it, but also be led into what’s important to learn from those people. So being able to ask the right questions, to get answers that are meaningful, and be able to present them to the public in a way where it’s not just saying, “this person is honoring homeless veterans, and it’s really great,” but saying it in a way that conveys how important it is that we do things like that for the homeless, or how important it is to the homeless.

Just as important–and perhaps particularly important for her affective labor in working on these newsletters–is her interest in giving a voice to the homeless. A little later in the focus group interview, she says specifically: “I think that it’s important work because of the fact that the homeless population isn’t given a voice.”

Sophia’s use and understanding of writing here is complex. On one hand, it’s about giving the homeless population a voice, as she puts it, but on the other hand, it’s just as much about making sure that people listen to the concerns of the homeless. Sophia presents a sophisticated overview of the problems of activism through her discussion of the problems writers and PR people encounter when trying to raise awareness about homelessness. She says:

Even if [the homeless] are given a voice, nobody is willing to listen to that, or I think people already presume to understand circumstances of things like homelessness, and don’t really know how to help. And so, I think the writing that I do, of featuring people that are helping the homeless, is a really important way to communicate to the public that it is possible to help other people in situations that seem very foreign to us, or situations that seem like it’s not our place to help.

Sophia is able to use her ability to write effective feature articles to achieve an activist end, such as raising awareness about the situation of homeless populations. Such work bridges–and further develops–a variety of writing skills and abilities, particularly her journalistic writing skills. Indeed, on her own and in a post-collegiate context, Sophia is bridging the “disturbing gap” that Nancy Welch identified between the classroom and the “wider culture,” re-orienting her writing from her completed English major to a specific form of civic engagement and community awareness (143-44).

But more importantly, she locates within this writing a personal movement into the world, a form of personal activism that she is exploring as she makes the transition from student to professional. Sophia sees her writing as not just her own personal orientation to the world, but as a way of helping orient others to incorporate activism into their lives. She describes worrying about how some of her friends are sometimes paralyzed and unable to be activists or even to help, and thus sees her work, her writing, as pointing a way forward for people through this paralysis:

Where, maybe [people might be thinking], “the government should be helping,” or “someone else can do something.” And so, writing articles about people that are actually doing important work, I think, is really important to inspire or just educate the public on the things that are possible, and the thing that they can contribute to. Even just by donating money to the people who are doing the work, or doing small acts of kindness, and stuff like that.

Certainly, Sophia sees her writing as rhetoric in terms of audience awareness, but it’s just as much about activism, about using writing to encourage people to do things. Sophia finds her way to activism through writing and then understands writing as a way to orient others to similar kinds of activism.

Indeed, other participants focused some of their comments on the importance of promoting activist thinking and orientations, even sometimes as an outgrowth of their professional work and identities. Greg had studied communication in college and minored in English and graduated five years before our interview with him. Upon graduating, he immediately started working in advertising for a tech firm in California. He moved into project management and his professional writing spans the gamut of social media writing, preparing training manuals, creating PowerPoint and other presentation decks, updating web pages, and different forms of technical documentation. He has also written articles for company newsletters as well as ghostwritten articles for company websites. Greg has since transitioned to working in PR and marketing for a green energy company, or what he refers to as the “sustainability space,” for which he feels more connection and “purpose.” In discussion with us, Greg noted that at the advertising/PR/social media firm where he worked, employees were encouraged to volunteer or take part in community-based projects. He described a volunteer project but also noted how it was tied to corporate interest in cultivating skills among employees. That is, the firm he worked at wanted to encourage activism and community-engagement, but doing so was also aimed at having employees develop social networking skills. Greg said: “So the way that they framed it was, ‘These projects that you can do for fun, it is a way for you to meet other coworkers. It’s a way for you to practice skills that you might not normally use in the professional setting.’” Interestingly, Greg and his co-workers tried to create an app that might enable other young people to become more civically-engaged. When describing this project, he said:

There was one of those pet projects that me and some coworkers were doing and we were looking into, [and we thought,] “Oh, could we curate an app or some sort of website for volunteering?” We were thinking, “Oh, there doesn’t seem to be a very easy way to get volunteers that appeals to the millennials Gen-Z generation.” […] It’s like, “Hey, I want to volunteer. I realized I have nothing to do this Saturday. How do I easily do that?” In the time of convenience where you can order food super easily, or stream a show, do whatever very easily in this modern day, it’s surprising that that as a service wasn’t invented yet.

Greg and his group worked on this app as a way of creating a convenient form of volunteering. His corporately-sponsored project, designed to help him and his co-workers develop social marketing skills, turned into a way for them to design a platform to connect like-minded young people with activist opportunities.

Greg’s experience with (at least initially) corporately-sponsored forms of activism, connects with other participants who were thinking about the relationships amongst activist orientations and professional work. Annie, for instance, noted the complexities of how corporations are increasingly mindful of activist implications of their work, particularly as they engage with socially-oriented forms of writing. Annie began her undergraduate trajectory as a biological sciences major, but, after experiencing research labs and work in a hospital, chose to earn a minor in science communication to give herself more career options. These included first copyediting, then content creation for social media, and then strategic marketing for a technology firm. In discussing her workplace’s response to COVID-19, Annie said: “We have to be really careful with what we say because we don’t want to seem like we’re capitalizing on it. And we’re launching some Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives in light of it.” She elaborated further:

We did a tongue-in-cheek plan, words from that, which is like, “WiFi from hell, because it’s work from home.” But then we changed all our advertising, to then be much more sensitive and just have it be like, “We know it’s really hard right now and that…” Looking at the analytic stuff, it’s doing a lot better. […] We’re not saying, “Buy this, we have an offer going.” It’s just been very interesting navigating that.

Such sensitivity suggests, perhaps, the influence of a generation of workers, represented by some of our alumni participants, whose general activist orientation, or at least socially-engaged awareness, prompts some employers to pay more attention to the activist or socially-conscious sensibilities of their markets, clients, and other interlocutors.

Julissa provides us another key example of how, in Brandt’s words, writing becomes a powerful “site of intellectual, moral, and civic development” (162). She described transitioning from her position as an editor at a university press to working as a union organizer “with media workers, nonprofit workers and journalists.” Her work continues a trend that we noticed in the focus groups–the intersection of professionalism and activism. In Julissa’s case, she became involved with the union by volunteering and attending trainings. Later she transitioned from being a union member to being an organizer, while intriguingly maintaining a side gig as a makeup artist whose work appears on social media.

Writing and activism played an important part for Julissa personally and professionally before she transitioned to working for the union. But writing itself was a bridge, an activity that she adapted and relied on, in her new form of work. In describing the process of moving from editorial and marketing work to being a labor organizer, Julissa reported:

I got involved doing trainings and such with the organizations before I started working for them. During that time I was helping out, building questions, attending a lot of trainings, talking to my colleagues about it but then once I left the job then I started working with other groups, newer groups, and now that’s my role, [in] New York. New groups who want to do this in these few industries, I am their resource.

In her position with the union, Julissa found that she continued to write quite frequently. At first, she “focused on helping them with press releases.” But over time, she realized that she was doing “lots of training” and writing “lots of training material.” Her interest in labor relations and union organizing intertwined with her professional and personal writing activities. For Julissa, her work on press releases and training materials for union members paired with her development of knowledge about writing and about organized labor. She said:

It’s really interesting. I love it. I’m trying to help new people [inaudible] unionize. That’s what my job is. It’s still taking these kind of complex ideas about the law or stuff that we just don’t know about, as a country that has really poor labor law, and trying to communicate it to people who are starting unions in their workplaces. A totally different kind of writing but now helping people who are in my former industry as well.

For Julissa, her previous knowledge about law and research around labor and the workforce overlapped with writing and the more activist stance in her job as a union organizer. But we also note how she describes different genres of writing being used to effect her transition from working at a university press to union organizing. In sum, all of these participants show how their work lives connect, prompt, or even in some cases enable their wayfinding, either toward a more activist orientation for their writing or even toward direct activist work done largely through writing.

Intersecting Orientations: Ecologies of Activism

One focus group, consisting of two participants, Francine and Max, was notable for the ways in which both alumni spoke eloquently about the many intersecting ways in which they understand and use writing as an activity to orient themselves more to the world–and perhaps even engage in direct forms of activism. For these two alumni, writing is simultaneously personal, oriented toward the world, and a potential tool for direct activism–a way to engage and change the world. Interestingly, as the conversation progressed, both Francine and Max seemed to inspire one another to make more and more connections amongst the kinds of writing they do and how they understand that writing.

Francine is a high school teacher who lives in an urban area in California. In addition to her undergraduate degree, she has an MA in Urban Education with a focus on social justice. She is an active and engaged teacher, serving as advisor for student organizations at her school. During the focus group, she discussed her travel blog, writing on Facebook, and her activist work with the teachers’ union. She sees herself as an active social media user, frequently posting about a wide range of issues. Max left the U.S. after earning his Bachelor’s in Philosophy. He now lives in a large midwestern city. During the focus group, he spoke about a number of different writing projects including emails, developing presentations for work, personal journaling, and working on a disaster relief book. He sees persuasive writing as being everywhere now, especially on social media. In his conversation with us and Francine, he emphasized how flexibility and understanding were keys to have political conversations. For instance, he said: “I think that even if you are such a Bernie fan, I think in this day and age, I do think as myself included, we need to be flexible in having conversations about that.” As focus group participants, Francine and Max had a lively discussion with us and each other.

As with many other participants, their discussion began with consideration of journaling and other forms of personal writing. Francine, who had some early experience with journalism, values telling stories, even only now for herself:

I feel like my focus and maybe it comes with the journalism stuff, has much more been about storytelling. People say I’m good at telling a story, I guess. And bite-sized chunks, which I think social media has trained us to do. But I do find journaling to be a very powerful learning tool.

As with other participants we have interviewed, Francine identifies a tension between the short-form (“bite-sized chunks”) of much social media platform writing and the more expansive, exploratory kinds of writing that can be engaged through personal journals.

Francine, though, also journals as part of her work as a teacher, which she seems to conceptualize as a form of activism vis-à-vis promoting reading. While she said that she would like to try her hand at fiction, she has been content so far to teach, given her ability to foster reading amongst her students not just as a skill but a potential lifelong pleasure:

As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I’ve definitely had more time and maybe more maturity to be able to get into fiction. […] I try and push on my kids this value of reading for pleasure, of doing nothing else, but just reading to enjoy and to find things that you care about. So I’m always on like a matchmaking spree. When kids say that they don’t like reading, I’m like, “What do you like?” […] And I try and find the books and throw them at them. Because I’m just like, as soon as you find the one, you’ll get them hooked.

Interestingly, Francine later in the interview describes writing for her teachers’ union as an important form of writing with which she is engaged, a writing that helps her advocate for the welfare of fellow faculty.

Max’s description of his engagement with writing, often rendered in response to Francine’s comments and questions, reveals a similar orientation toward the world, toward seeing writing as action in the world. For Max, that approach to writing also encompasses his reading practices; he recounted how he “read[s] a lot of kind of the coastal elite publications. Like The Times and The Post […] I read a lot of just online publications and articles. I really like The Economist and The Atlantic and I have my friend’s subscription to The New Yorker. So I try to read some of those.” Such reading habits reveal a strong desire to be informed, to understand major world events and trends. In terms of his own writing, Max detailed important lessons about writing he learned as part of his participation as an intern in a business startup:

I went to Santa Barbara and there was a bunch of startups down there. And one of the startups, I had a business development internship, which I didn’t know what that meant at the time. Really great, because I learned that I didn’t like sales like that. But then when they’re like kind of teaching the interns, they’re just like, “Don’t bury the lede.” And that really stuck with me, because it just made so much sense. But no one had really kind of laid it out. […] Because I think how I had always thought about writing before, was much more like writing is an art. There’s 1,000 ways to write something, but really it’s like, there are certain ways to really take advantage of rhetoric and be clear, and then there are places for some more lofty framing. But to have that tool definitely just helped me create a lot more. I think it just changed the way that I thought about writing. And I still think about it today. So, hard to beat.

What’s fascinating to us is the way in which the internship experience helped Max make a directional turn in his own career choice, specifically away from sales. At the same time, his experience of the internship cannot be accounted a failure given what he learned in particular about writing–“don’t bury the lede.” His story provides an important illustration of how writing development happens across school, internships, and early career lives–with lasting lessons for how Max understands writing and its impact on others, its action in the world.

Perhaps the most compelling story we heard during this focus group was Francine’s response to our request to describe a time in which participants used multiple forms of writing for a single purpose. Before telling us her story, she says, “I’m struggling,” and at first we thought she was struggling with coming up with a good example. But as she told us about experience with writing a multi-form piece, we learned that her struggle had as much to do with the content she was writing about and her use of writing in the pursuit of what is essentially a grassroots form of activism–and confrontation. She began her story this way:

The one that’s coming to mind and I’m assuming it meets the standard, so again, I was trained in journalism, I did it in high school and I studied it in college. This is very randomy. But personally, I had a personal blog where all I did was write stories about every single interaction of sexual harassment and assault that me or any of my friends experienced. I had a bunch of people throughout my high school and college career who just didn’t believe it happened as much as they said it did. And so I just started cataloging them. And then one thing that happened in college was it became very obvious that there was a teacher that I had been close with in high school and then after I graduated, who is, I can’t say he’s a pedophile, but he was a groomer. Like he would groom students from like 12, when he would get them until convincing them to have sex with him when we were 18. And he had tried to do it with me, and I didn’t realize until I was in the middle of college.

Perhaps inspired by the #MeToo movement, Francine describes how she began documenting instances of sexual harassment on her personal blog, an impulse toward documentation that she traces to her earlier involvement with journalism in school. Given that this documentation was not just about her experiences but her friends’ as well, she had the opportunity to compare notes with others and began focusing on one high school instructor in particular.

The sharing and posting of stories developed until Francine decided she needed to take action:

So I ended up using my journalism techniques and combining them with my blog skills and my storytelling stuff. And I basically convinced him to sit down with me and have an interview about his… I basically was trying to get him to either admit or apologize for his behavior. And he just kind of hunkered down or whatever. And I basically wrote a 10-part series on my blog, where I basically recounted my personal experience. Cited quotes from personal messages he’s had with me and other people, combined them with interviews I had with him in person, and combined all of these materials until I had this very long, I guess, expository writing piece about this man.

Combining her skills in investigative journalism and storytelling with a desire to confront this instructor, Francine turns her writing toward activism in which she tells the story of her and others’ experiences of sexual harassment. Although she provided her former high school with this information, she reports that no action was taken given the inability of the school to demonstrate that anything actually illegal had taken place.

Despite the seeming “failure” of this writing to effect specific change, we nonetheless see Francine’s work as important on several levels. At the very least, it provides a powerful example of what Jenkins, Ito, and boyd identify in Participatory Cultures as an active engagement through social media, in this case a blog, with a pressing social issue. Indeed, the mobilization of different genres and writing abilities for a particular activist cause–to talk back against the experience of sexual harassment, even just to dare to talk about it at all–constitutes a significant moment of not just activist writing but of the development of an orientation toward activism, one of the most interesting and complex we have yet encountered in our focus groups and interviews with students. She demonstrates a powerful form of wayfinding through multiple genres and modes of writing that steadily orients her toward taking action; documentation through blogging leads to a multi-part story and a confrontation that puts words into action–or reveals how writing itself is already a form of action in the world.

Conclusion: Activist Orientations, Active Voices

Wayfinding participants have steadily drawn our attention to the many ways in which they are coming to understand–and practice–their writing as a consequential activity after completing their undergraduate studies. They have reported on how the act of writing shapes not only their understanding of public, civic issues but also enables them to produce effects in the world. Lee and Kahn have defined activism for writing scholars in ways that foreground explicit and direct forms of political intervention, but our alumni are demonstrating that there are other ways activism appears in the world that writing scholars must also consider. We also find that what our participants show us diverges a bit from the rhetorical activist student trajectory that Parks, Goldblatt, and Welch advocate. Parks, Goldblatt, and Welch have argued that writing faculty should more explicitly show students how to be activists by having assignments that require them to engage in public debate and direct action. In their approaches, rhetorical education oriented towards activism leads students to become more active and engaged citizens after they graduate. Our alumni participants, however, are showing us forms of activism–or activist orientations–that seem a bit more complicated.

How so? The alumni in our study oriented themselves not primarily based on causes but rather on impulses, sometimes accidentally, based on family interactions, encounters with friends, and the need to navigate complex work environments. These familial, social, and professional contexts sometimes contained conflicting demands and mandates, both internally and across the contexts. This work often occurs across networked publics and relies on/pushes the boundaries of social media writing. These acts of writing, and thinking about writing, provided a means for both navigating through these conflicts and for shaping the participants’ responses to their lived situations. Writing may be a skill that helped at work, or even helped a particularly skilled writer get a job, but it was also a process of orienting within familial, social, and professional life worlds. What’s interesting is that this act of orienting the self – of situating the self– post-graduation often seemed to carry with it an activist impulse.

These impulses, then, are being played out through experiments with writing. Certainly, some of our alumni, while they were students and then after graduation, were involved in and greatly benefited from experiences of what we might call direct activism, organized around particular causes and through particular structures and entities. While not all, or even most of our participants, identified with or worked through a particular activist organization, many of them expressed an activist orientation, not only a willingness, but an eagerness to engage in writing about social, civic, or environmental issues. On one hand, our alumni seem to be finding their way toward activist orientations without having received a specific rhetorical education aimed at enhancing their ability to interrogate and then address socio-political issues. On the other hand, our alumni note at times how their experiences in college oriented them toward engagement with others and their communities. This process of developing an orientation towards activist impulses connected with the act of writing does not seem to be the result of a particular, activist-directed rhetorical education, but rather the product of multiple experiences that cut across academic, professional, and personal activities.

Instead, we wonder how we might attend more to these already existing, already emerging activist voices. They appear to be developing activist orientations as they move across academic, professional, and personal domains. Wayfinding helps show how they are working across networks where friends, family, community members, co-workers, and others come together to talk and write about issues that matter to them. The activities that students participate in as undergraduates that orient them towards these activist stances exist both outside and inside of our classes. They cut across work, school, and play and often involve a variety of robust communication platforms and new experiences in terms of relating to others. Students and alumni are involved in activism when they engage in internships, when they join clubs, and when they volunteer. And even if they all do not become activists, they are–if our alumni are anything like yours–perhaps more open to thinking about social issues through writing. As an approach for studying writing development, Wayfinding highlights how alumni value the process of thinking through writing as a way to engage social issues that are meaningful to them over an extended period of time.

Ultimately, for these alumni, writing offers a powerful way to explore their ethical engagement with the world, if not through outright activism, at least through an activist orientation. More importantly, these participants are showing us how they are deeply invested in thinking about–and changing–the circumstances of their lives in ways that align more with their values and sense of fairness. With that said, we do not see these alumni and their stories as a call to seed our composition and writing courses with more opportunities for directed involvement with activism. Rather, we call on the field to recognize how our alumni already appear to be orienting themselves toward activism, or at least robust engagement with the worlds around them, both during college and afterwards. In the end, we want to ask about how we might attend more directly to what our students and alumni are already doing. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how students and alumni experiment with different forms of writing as they explore their personal ethical commitments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Lunsford

Karen Lunsford is an Associate Professor of Writing and Director of the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her latest book, with James P. Purdy, is The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies: Ethics, Sponsors, and Academic Knowledge-Making. She is currently working on a project called STEM Stories. She is the corresponding author and can be reached at [email protected].

Carl Whithaus

Carl Whithaus is a Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies writing technologies and digital cultures; edits the Journal of Writing Assessment; and works on a variety of projects related to writing in the sciences, engineering, and agriculture. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning (Routledge, 2008) and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing (Erlbaum, 2005). He has served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for splash! milk science update since 2017.

Jonathan Alexander

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also director of the Humanities Core Program. His most recent book is Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing.

Notes

1 The authors gratefully acknowledge RR peer reviewers of this article, Heidi McKee and Shirley Rose. This article was supported in part by a UC, Santa Barbara Academic Senate grant.

2 All names for study participants are pseudonyms. Quotations from the focus group interviews are occasionally edited for clarity. Ellipses in brackets indicate an elision in the transcription that we have made; ellipses without brackets indicate that the speaker has paused momentarily in talking.

3 See Jeff Rice’s “Occupying the Digital Humanities” for another take on the incident at UC Davis and its digital afterlives.

4 Corning, Alexandra F., and Daniel J. Myers. "Individual Orientation toward Engagement in Social Action." Political Psychology, vol. 23, no. 4, 2002, pp. 703-729.