A Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry into Societal and Power-Relational Contexts of an Activist Writing Community’s Textual Events

Abstract

This article describes experiences with a community literacy approach to writing instruction in a cultural studies and literary criticism workshop in Tehran, Iran (2009-2014). The writers narrate the process of writing a book undertaken by a group of Iranian feminists, who chose to write about and critique dominant discourses in Iranian hip hop, in an attempt to start a conversation with young underground Iranian rappers. Adopting collaborative practitioner inquiry, the researchers discuss different steps of the process of writing and publishing the book, and also the pitfalls and challenges that they encountered in the project and the ensuing interventions. In the course of sharing their reflections, the writers highlight the sociocultural and power relational contexts of their writing process to sensitise writing instructors to the often invisible social and political layers of the act of writing.