Ignite Change Through The Creative – Critical

The Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC) presents its 2025 virtual symposium, “Crafting the Irresistible: Creative – Critical Literacies & Communities.” The symposium will be held on October 20 – 21, 2025. Inspired by Toni Cade Bambara’s quote that “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible,” this symposium will explore and celebrate the interplay between the creative and critical (henceforth, “creative – critical”) and how that interplay can bolster and animate scholarly, creative, artistic, community, and activist practices both on and off the page.

Keynote, roundtable, panel, and workshop sessions will explore the creative – critical in relation to the CLC’s guiding tenets centered on an ethics of 1) justice, 2) imagination, 3) community accountability , and 4) love. All sessions will be virtual and are free and open to the public with registration. The symposium and related events are hosted and sponsored by the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas. The Community Literacies Collaboratory (CLC) is the signature program of the Brown Chair.

This symposium and site are successors to the extremely well-attended 2022 “Tracing the Stream: The Geographies of Black Feminist Literacies, Rhetorics, and Pedagogies,” and its website, co-sponsored by Dr. Eric Darnell Pritchard (University of Arkansas) and Dr. Carmen Kynard (Texas Christian University). Just as “Tracing the Steam” paid homage to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s scholarly, pedagogical, and Black feminist rhetorical legacy, “Crafting the Irresistible” will continue the tradition by recognizing and honoring the work of Gwendolyn Pough on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of her groundbreaking book Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop, and the Public Sphere as well as her numerous publications from scholarly – at the intersection of rhetoric, literacy, and popular culture written for both academic and nonacademic audiences – alongside her authorship of several novels.

[1]1 A greater exploration of “community accountability” can be found in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s review of of “Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence,” a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order (Vol 37, No. 4, 2011-2012) edited by Alisa Bierria, Mimi Kim, and Clasissa Rojas. See “We Have Always Known: Embodying Community Accountability” Feminist Wire, September 18, 2012