Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, edited by Jessica Restaino and Laurie Cella, explores short-lived university/community writing projects in an effort to rethink the long-held gold standard of long-term sustainability in community writing work. Contributors examine their own efforts in order to provide alternate models for understanding, assessing, and enacting university/community writing projects that, for a range of reasons, fall outside of traditional practice. This collection considers what has become an increasingly unified call for praxis, where scholar-practitioners explore a specific project that fell short of theorized best practice sustainability in order to determine not only the nature of what remainshow and why we might find value in a community-based writing project that lacks long-term sustainability, for examplebut also how or why we might rethink, redefine, and reevaluate best practice ideals in the first place. In so doing, the contributors are at once responding to what has been an increasing acknowledgment in the field that, for a variety of reasons, many community-based writing projects do not go as initially planned, and also applyingin praxisa framework for thinking about and studying such projects.Unsustainablerepresents the kind of scholarly work that some of the most recognizable names in the field have been calling for over the past five years. This book affirms that unpredictability is an indispensable factor in the field, and argues that such unpredictability presentsin fact, demandsa theoretical approach that takes these practical experiences as its base.

Laurie Cella is associate professor and director of the First-Year Writing Program at Shippensburg University.Jessica Restaino is associate professor of English and director of First-Year Writing at Montclair State University.

Introductionby Laurie CellaPart 1. Short-Lived Projects, Long-Lived ValueChapter 1. After Tactics, What Comes Next?by Paula MathieuChapter 2. Tales from the Crawl Space: Asserting Youth Agency Within an Unsustainable Education Systemby Paul Feigenbaum, Sharayna Douglas, and Maria LovettChapter 3. Strategic Speculations on the Question of Value: The Role of Community Publishing in English Studiesby Stephen ParksChapter 4. Everyone Loved It and Still It Closed: When a Writing Program Isn't a Core Mandateby Emily Isaacs and Ellen KolbaPart 2. Community Literacy, Personal ContextsChapter 5. Sustainability Deferred: The Conflicting Logics of Career Advancement and Community Engagementby Thomas DeansChapter 6. Hope and Despair, Risk and Struggle: (j)WPA Work, Service-Learning, and the Case for Baby Stepsby Michael DonnellyChapter 7. Mobile Sustainability: An Adjunct's Development of a Permanent Practiceby Karen JohnsonPart 3. PedagogyChapter 8. Assessing Sustainability: The Class that Went Terribly Wrongby Ellen Cushman and Lorelei BlackburnChapter 9. The Idea of a Literacy Dulaby Hannah AshleyPart 4. Toward a Transnational SustainabilityChapter 10. No More Than Fire Belongs to Prometheus: Techne, Institutions, and Interventions in Local Public Lifeby Elenore LongChapter 11. Mastery, Failure, and Community Outreach as Stochastic Art: Lessons Learned with the Sudanese Diaspora in Phoenixby Jennifer CliftonConclusionby Jessica RestainoAfterwardby Eli Goldblatt