Elenore Long

Grounded in community literacy, Elenore Long's scholarship draws on a wide array of rhetorical methods to test the limits and potential of day-to-day democracy under contemporary conditions. With colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh’s Community House, she developed a rhetorical model for contemporary deliberative democracy and then tested and extended that model in other contexts. From her early work at the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh to her latest book on rhetorical arts, her scholarship examines what it takes for publicly oriented institutions to work responsively on behalf of their constituents in an era marked by shrinking public resources, cultural conflict, and deferred hope. This line of scholarship is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. It has contributed to Indigenous studies (Long, Raymond and Jarvis); literacy studies (Flower, Long, and Higgins); environmental studies (Goggin and Long); and art, media, and engineering (Kuznetsov et al). With Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins, Long wrote the leading article for the inaugural issue of the Community Literacy Journal. That piece, as well as “Gambian-American College Writers Flip the Script on Aid-to-Africa Discourse” (co-authored with Nyillan Fye and John Jarvis), earned awards for use-inspired, publicly engaged scholarship from the Academic Council of Learned Societies (the umbrella organization of the Modern Language Association). My third book, "A Responsive Rhetorical Art: Artistic Methods for Contemporary Public Life," is under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press and due out in 2018.