The Coalition for Community Writing invites you to co-create with us in community, to explore collaborations, and to activate radical imagination at the fifth biennial Conference on Community Writing. The conference brings together community residents, organizers, nonprofit leaders, writers, artists, journalists, digital storytellers, mindfulness teachers, school teachers, students, scholars and more, who all theorize, enact, and write the stories of community change. CCW focuses on community writing, capaciously defined, as a framework to explore how change happens. In the work of social change, community writing is necessary, contemplative, therapeutic, coalition-building, and action-based. People coordinate strategies, design courses and curricula, preserve stories of the past, make public art, contest local histories, compose grant proposals, perform community theater, create protest signs, and much, much more.

In 2023, the Conference on Community Writing will be held in person and online and will engage the theme “Activating Radical Imagination.” Building on multiple lineages of activists, Denver-based social work professor and social justice imagineer Ozy Aloziem invites us to use radical imagination as a tool for joyful practice and “imagining a world that doesn’t exist” (1) in order to construct more just worlds in the present. Given the entrenched and interconnected violences that structure our worlds, this work can feel impossible, especially in the midst of grief and anger.

While we make inroads and build coalitions through hundreds of projects in our neighborhoods and across the world, unless these structures of oppression are tackled “radically,” from the Latin “root,” systems will not change. Radical imagination is both influenced by and influences longstanding traditions such as Black feminist thought, disability justice, trans liberation, queer of color critique, Indigenous sovereignty and efforts to repatriate stolen land, and many more movements that not only foundationally center community flourishing but also direct us toward transformative, life-affirming social change.

At its core, all of this root work requires imagination. As Aloziem explains,“Crisis blows open the door to what is possible,” urging creativity and wonder over fear and despair. Radical imagination, then, can serve as a spark for what Carmen Kynard calls “doing the work” (2) toward disrupting the violences perpetuated by universities and other institutions. So too must our community work of envisioning and co-creating more just worlds be collectively guided by and called into being through a joyful practice rooted in what bell hooks called “a love ethic” or “love as a practice” (3). Only through such an ethic of collective care and reciprocal support can these possibilities be realized.

Similarly, radical imagination is a collective practice and a process. In The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, Khasnabish and Haiven explain, “The radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It’s about bringing those possibilities back from the future to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today.” In Freedom Dreams: Black Radical Imagination, Robin Kelley asks: “How do we produce a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals? How do we transcend bitterness and cynicism and embrace love, hope, and an all-encompassing dream of freedom?” Coming together to practice radical imagination we hope to, to paraphrase Mariame Kaba (4), let this moment radicalize us, rather than lead us to despair. The conference will center BIPOC voices and theoretical frameworks in discussions of and actions toward the “radical transformation” of institutions that Ersula Ore, Kimberly Wieser, and Christina Cedillo call for in their four journal special issues (5) published in the last year in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies. Radical imagination offers a framework, a tool, and a process for radical transformation that allows people to imagine a more just world than currently exists and to begin to collaboratively work that world into being.