WPAing in a Pandemic and Beyond
Revision, Innovation, and Advocacy
“The construction of the book itself is an enactment of the principles around ecological community writing, distributed definition building, and the theory-practice blur. Veronica House brings this holistic approach to life beautifully.”
—Rachael Wendler Shah, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
"This is a timely book. Food security is one of the greatest challenges of our time. As we saw with the supply chain disruptions in the early days of the 2020 pandemic, local food is crucial to community resilience in times of crisis. But the foundations for these resilient systems need to be built now, before the next crisis occurs."
—IEEE Professional Communication Society
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.
