Toward a Sociohistorical Writing Ethnography: Community Writing as History-Making

Abstract

This article makes the case for studying community writing using sociohistorical writing ethnography, an approach that combines ethnographic and historical research methods to produce “deep theorizing” about present writing activities grounded in felt senses of history. Drawing from a study of a community writing group, the author demonstrates how individuals’ writing practices become entangled with a community’s literacies throughout time, highlighting how this methodology provides deeper insight into this research context.

Introduction

Despite longstanding critiques of ethnographic research as too presentist and local in its analyses of writing and literacy (Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Duffy, 2007; Heath & Street, 2008), an “ontological gap between text and context” persists in work involving communities (Lillis, 2008, p. 382). Building on interrogations of ethnography as methodology (Blommaert, 2007; Lillis, 2008), I argue that minimizing the role of history in writing studies research perpetuates this gap by obscuring the full depth of meaning made through writing. For the qualitative methods privileged by community writing research (Vie, 2010), I offer a way to resituate literacy in the historically produced structures that underlie these activities and to reveal community writing’s history-making possibilities. Such an approach requires recognizing ethnographic work as historical inquiry, rather than treating the past as context. This methodology of “sociohistorical writing ethnography” combines ethnographic and historical research methods to produce “deep theorizing” (Blommaert, 2007; Lillis, 2008, p. 355) about present writing activities that are grounded in felt senses of history. Through an extended example from my research, I model how community writing researchers can go beyond what is usually observable through ethnographic methods when we treat history as generative and lived.

Methodological Gaps in Writing Studies Research

Following sociolinguists such as Dell Hymes (1972), writing studies’ research on literacy in communities has largely taken up ethnographic methods to reveal “writing as it occurs in its specific cultural setting” (Moss, 1992, p. 156). This approach rightfully assumes that writing practices must be analyzed in the context of when, how, and why writers produce texts. Alternatives to “autonomous” models of writing that foreground the social nature of literacy (Street, 1993) have helped the field better understand how writers navigate social worlds through literacy, and ethnographic methodologies assume literacy is inextricably social and cultural “at a very deep level of theory” (Blommaert, 2007, p. 685).

Yet ethnography may produce impartial, limited understandings of writing: Brandt and Clinton (2002), for example, suggest that a focus on writing’s social context may end up “exaggerating the power of local contexts” in literacy’s meaning-making (p. 338). This risks overlooking global forces, including historical structures, that inform writers in local contexts. Duffy’s (2007) study of Hmong literacy points to this problem and outlines “how literacy in the ‘ethnographic present’ may be seen as a product of a culture's encounters with other cultures, states, institutions, and other powers in the past” (p. 10, emphasis added). His research attempts to bridge the problem of presentism in ethnographic research. Theresa Lillis (2008) has also critiqued how ethnography yields flattened understandings of writing when it is used only as a method, suggesting the need for “deep theorizing” to fundamentally challenge the conceptual separation of “text and context in writing research” (p. 355). ¹

Following this call, I aim to highlight what else writing studies can learn if we revise our research methodologies to consider how all writing is historical. Writing studies’ long tradition of archival research is not the focus of this article, since composition historians have already critiqued archival methodologies as too grounded in a historian’s interpretive lens (Brereton, 1999; Connors, 1992; L’Eplattenier, 2009). Less focus has been given to how contemporary writing is a history-making activity. While my focus here is to outline the affordances of a methodology that explicitly rejoins ethnographic and historical methods, especially for community writing research, I see this conversation echoed by discussions in writing studies more broadly that push back on implicit understandings of different contexts as “worlds apart” (Dias et al., 1999, p. 14). Though Dias et al. centralize questions of writing knowledge transfer from universities to workplaces, their assessment that these distinct contexts are separate spheres evokes how ethnographic research has tended to treat home, school, work, and community sites. This tacit approach to writing studies research has been pushed back on, particularly in academic and workplace writing contexts (Alexander et al., 2020; Prior & Olinger, 2019; Roozen, 2020). Still, as Alexander et al. (2020) point out, much research on writing in communities proceeds from these assumptions. In other words, community writing research that uses ethnography may, in its attempt to represent a community’s context complexly, inadvertently characterize the community as a world apart, siloing the findings of this research. Methodological innovations can produce more robust understandings of how writers engage in social contexts across time and space, even when they are situated in local sites like communities, governments, or workplaces, as this special issue recognizes. Researchers who use sociohistorical methodologies reject the idea that community writing happens in worlds—spaces and times—apart.

History in Community Writing Research

A methodology of sociohistorical writing ethnography is one way to scope usefully beyond a personally lived past to also recognize the historical structures that produce writing experiences. Sociohistorical methodologies are especially apt for community writing research, which already attends to history in several ways. As illustrated in one of its main journals, the Community Literacy Journal, the subdiscipline produces innovative developments in pedagogy, research ethics, and public program building. Much of this work takes up the interstices of writing and history-making, with emphases on studying communities from the past (e.g., Muir, 2024; Reddy, 2019) and spearheading projects involving archives (Brock Carlson, 2023; Pauszek, 2019), historic sites (Iddrisu, 2024), and oral history projects (e.g., Gottschalk Druschke et al., 2022; Grobman et al., 2015). ² In much community writing research, writing might be used to make history by supporting writers doing public history projects, but writing is not always studied as an explicitly historical process in and of itself. History is treated as context or is framed as a product, which reproduces the ontological gap mentioned previously.

To understand the full extent of the complex, multiple, and intertwined social worlds revealed in community writing research, history must become part of the text that researchers analyze. Rather than treat history as background, a sociohistorical writing ethnography shows how the presence and impact of history is concurrent and co-instantiating of written text. (See, for example, Prendergast’s (2003) recontextualization of Heath's Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983)).

Why Sociohistorical Writing Ethnography?

Before defining sociohistorical writing ethnography, I highlight sociohistorical scholarship that I admire and hope to extend. Carmen Kynard’s Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies (2014), for example, challenges conventional narratives of college composition by highlighting how Black student protest from the 1920s to now, Black Freedom Movements, and Black scholars of composition have structured literacy in higher education. Kynard approaches history as “the material practice of constituting and sustaining the past as alive in the present” (Phelps qtd., 2014, pp. 19–20) and shows how her own teaching is rooted in this historical trajectory. One particularly compelling example centers on Rakim, a CUNY student who used his rhetorical skills to challenge students and professors alike. However, Kynard explains,

Students like Rakim have remained largely absent from the ethnographic and qualitative landscape in which the students of first-year composition have been figured. We are more likely to misrepresent and stereotype Rakim's literacies to a stereotypical set of stock, racial performances rather than call them rhetorics of black activism . . . all of this constitutes, for me, a major pedagogical and historical dilemma for our scholarship, research, and teaching. (pp. 80–81)

Kynard’s work is more historical than ethnographic and is not a study of community writing, though she is a community writing scholar. Still, this work shows how attention to history can more accurately reveal the depth of writers’ composing processes.

For sociohistorical writing ethnography specifically, I am motivated by Paul Prior’s work on “chronotopic laminations” (Prior, 1998; Prior & Olinger, 2019; Prior & Shipka, 2003), which highlight how “literate activity is about nothing less than ways of being in the world, forms of life. It is about histories (multiple complexly interanimating trajectories and domains of activity), about the (re)formations of social worlds” (Prior & Shipka, 2003, p. 181). In particular, Prior and Olinger (2019) focus on writers’ becoming across their lifespans as semiotic activities laminate over multiple contexts and across time. My work adds to this body of scholarship by demonstrating how social histories structure moments of community writing and how these moments constitute these histories as well.

Defining Sociohistorical Writing Ethnography

Sociohistorical writing ethnography uses both traditionally ethnographic methods (e.g., Heath & Street, 2008; Spradley, 1979, 1980) and historical methods to reveal the socially meaningful uses and effects of literacy. Research questions like “How do community members use writing to navigate contemporary social changes?” require more than methods that can capture what community members write (participant observation, artifact analysis) and what sense they make of this writing (interviews); sociohistorical writing ethnography identifies these questions also as historical inquiries, necessitating investigations into the larger conditions that structure the contemporary changes people write through. Sociohistorical writing ethnography looks beyond individual pasts and highlights how community histories shape and are shaped by participants’ writing. Archival and public history methods can address these considerations.

The National Council on Public History (2025) identifies public history as “history that is applied to real-world issues,” with an explicit focus on archives, historic sites, monuments, oral history, and more. Sociohistorical writing ethnography incorporates public history’s examination of these sources and its commitment to working with communities to critically examine and represent the present’s connection to the past (e.g., Caswell et al., 2016; Dallett, 2017; Kelman, 2015; Lonetree, 2012; Miles, 2015). Public history is both a practice and a framework for research, with particular emphasis on producing research that utilizes “historical methodology and perspective on matters of and for the benefit of community, government, and private sectors,” a focus echoed in this special issue (Johnson, 1978, pp. 9–10). Public history is as rigorous as academic history, and its focus on public impact evokes rhetoric’s own investment in this area. Analyzing public history sources can be readily adopted into rhetorical frameworks, although scholars who have begun to do so (Noy, 2015; Weiser, 2017) have acknowledged that, so far, “there is almost no overlap in their scholarship” (Weiser, 2017, p. 18). Writing studies research could uncover more about writing’s history-making potential if we allow public history approaches to shift how we conceptualize ethnographic methodologies. I provide one possibility for how to do this with the following example. Here, sociohistorical writing ethnography highlights how writing makes history by responding to and creating personal and community change.

Research Example: Community Writing as History

This example is drawn from a larger study of a community writing group I created and facilitated at the public library in Chicopee, MA, a small city in the rural northeast. ³ This excerpt draws on traditional ethnographic methods (participant observation of group meetings; discourse analysis of writing samples; literacy history and discourse-based interviews) and archival and public history methods: analyses of two histories of Chicopee written for mainstream audiences, Collins G. Burnham's “City of Chicopee” (1898) and Thaddeus M. Szetela's History of Chicopee (1948); “live” historical programming, such as a walking tour of downtown Chicopee from September 2023; and public art, monuments, and other parts of built environment. This approach considers how this community constructs an identity through public representations of the past.

The focal participant for this article, Catherine, is a white woman in her late 60s who has lived in Chicopee for over 40 years. Recently retired, she has been coming to the writing group since it began in March 2023. Her writing activities most notably consist of writing letters, constructing family genealogies, and drafting short memoirs to share with her family. To highlight the utility of sociohistorical writing ethnography, I first show what can be revealed about Catherine's literacy practices through ethnographic methods, a compelling but comparatively narrow account of historically interested family literacy. Then I highlight how much more is uncovered with attunement to the weight of history, namely, how Catherine’s writing practices embody a community literacy connected to Chicopee’s history of immigration and assimilation.

A Limited Methodology: Ethnography Without History

Ethnographic methods provide a compelling snapshot of Catherine’s literacy practices but overlook the community significance of Catherine’s writing. Ethnographic sources include fieldnotes from writing group meetings during the period of observation (September 2023-June 2024), analysis of four short memoirs, and two semistructured interviews. These data reveal what genres Catherine writes most frequently (memoirs and letters); why she writes (to create or maintain familial relationships); and how she does this (giving her writing to family). This snapshot is best encapsulated by a scene from participant observation. At the end of the writing group’s October 2023 meeting, Catherine took out a family tree she made, which traced five generations of her family. She had given it to her children, compelled by the realization that 15 of her children's 16 great-great-great grandparents were born outside of the United States, primarily in Ireland or Poland. She was dismayed to realize that “it didn’t mean anything to them,” but described how this motivated her to write more about her family’s past as a way to “preserve that.” Thus, she turned to memoir, a life writing genre commonly used “to preserve or remember” (Lindenman et al., 2024, p. 89).

Catherine’s other common writing genre, letters, became central in our two interviews. When I asked about important writing she had done in her life, Catherine recalled writing her son letters when he lived in another state. She highlighted how prolific of a letter writer she is by counting that she had sent 20 letters out in only 15 days that year. Catherine connected this literacy practice to her past by detailing how her father had written to her when she was at camp as a child: “I had fourteen letters from my dad. And I still have them, you know, so. I think I probably got it from him too” Catherine thus characterizes writing letters as important family literacy, going on to note, “my son writes beautiful thank you notes. I taught him well.” These data also reveal how letter writing maintains familial relationships across distance, which adds to scholarship that highlights how letters can build relationships across generations (Markowski et al., 2024).

Analysis of ethnographic data reveals how Catherine maintains family connections: by giving her writing to others. While giving writing is inherent to letters as a genre, this act structures how Catherine’s memoirs also create family connection. Catherine writes short memoirs to give to younger family members. Two writing samples submitted for discourse analysis were gifts she gave to her adult son and daughter. This practice rose to the top of my analysis of our interviews as well, such as when Catherine described giving writing to her daughter’s stepchildren: “I think it’s important to kind of keep that connection, so I think if we’re not there as much as I’d like to be, at least they’ll be learning a little bit about us and kind of bonding through letters.” Writing stories about her life to give her grandchildren forges a relationship because they are given the opportunity for “learning” about Catherine’s life.

Catherine’s interest in family history as part of this connecting practice is also salient in the ethnographic data. Interview data highlight how Catherine writes to her grandchildren not just to form a relationship with them, but also to welcome them into family traditions they might not otherwise know about. In our second interview, Catherine showed me a draft of a short flipbook she is writing for her granddaughter about Irish-American traditions, where she would also “learn a few Irish words and stuff.” Explaining the heritage the grandchildren are now a part of is one way Catherine encourages family connection. Connecting to her family’s past motivates much of Catherine's writing. She has traced her family tree, has visited Ireland to do research, and has studied Irish at the local Elm's College, which she describes in her memoir, “Becoming Multilingual (Or Not),” discussed in greater length below. For Catherine, writing creates family relationships, helps her connect with younger generations, and gets them interested in family history. However, this ethnographic methodology captures this writing only as an individualized pursuit within families. To understand Catherine’s writing as a complex community phenomenon, a researcher would need to turn to historical inquiry.

Deeply Theorizing Through Sociohistorical Writing Ethnography

Sociohistorical writing ethnography reveals how Catherine’s writing practices respond to more than her family history; they are structured by larger U.S. histories of immigration and assimilation, and her writing contributes to ongoing history-making around these subjects. In moving beyond the immediate context of writing for her family, we see how Catherine’s writing is entangled with larger community writing practices at longer timescales. Recall this moment from participant observation: Catherine learned that 15 of her children's 16 great-great-great grandparents were born outside the United States. Public history research has identified genealogy as one of the primary ways Americans engage with the past (Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998), reinforced with the rise of digital genealogy tools (De Groot, 2015). Considering Catherine’s genealogical writing as within the scope of investigation about the writing group compels research into how histories of immigration shape this social scene. This reveals how community writing also responds to history. Ethnographic data certainly point to the historical attunement of the writing group as a whole; when Catherine shared this genealogy, another member of the writing group approached Catherine to show her a binder of old family stories he found, typewritten by an elder member of his family. He was inspired to add his own stories to the front of the binder, creating a living intergenerational document, and remarked that writing Catherine had shared previously had prompted him to preserve these family stories. Writing, particularly in this community context, produces and responds to history in a way that moves beyond individual practice, and other members share a historiographical orientation. Catherine’s writing, as well, includes identifications with a larger community, challenging and contributing to a community history-making project.

The ancestors Catherine traced are part of a wider history of European immigration in Chicopee and around the northeast. I offer a compressed examination of how Catherine’s writing evokes the larger heritage of the city as a whole, attending to everyday, public sources of historical insight to understand how this history is lived contemporarily and reconstructed through writing. Like many cities in the northeast, Chicopee has been materially shaped by histories of immigration and industrial development. The area now known as Chicopee is home to the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Agawam peoples, and members of these Indigenous nations still reside there (Native Land Digital, 2023). In the 17th and 18th centuries, Chicopee developed as part of Britain’s Massachusetts Bay Colony. The early 19th century saw an industrial boom as the Chicopee River was dammed and factories sprung up to fulfill a regional need for cotton textiles, metal, rubber, and more (see Figure 1). Immigrants primarily from Ireland, Poland, and France worked in these factories, forming what is now the downtown area where the Chicopee Public Library is located (Burnham, 1898; Comeau, 2023; Szetela, 1948). This history is present, felt during everyday life in the city.

Figure 1.

Defunct Chicopee factories.

Historians, only one or two generations removed from this wave of immigration, depicted this period complexly. In the later 19th century, the population of Irish migrants in Chicopee grew and settled in Chicopee’s West End, where an ethnic enclave remained until into the late 20th century. This demographic change led to social conflicts with the primarily Anglo-descendent, Protestant residents of the city. For example, Szetela (1948) writes about “shocking” behaviors that “offended Yankee sensibilities,” including drinking rum and not remaining indoors during the Sunday Sabbath (pp. 82–84). Accounts like this highlight how urban life was bounded by cultural norms, which extended to language performance, education, and other literacy-related activities. Take Burnham's (1898) account of the city’s Polish population:

They form a numerous part of the Babel chorus of tongues one hears on our streets. . . . Many read and write in their own language, and some of them have aspirations . . . they are building homes and churches and establishing parochial schools, and some children are in the public schools . . . the influences of their new surroundings will mould them, as they have other nationalities who have left the old world for the new. (p. 378, emphases added)

Burnham’s comments about Polish immigrants’ “Babel chorus of tongues” juxtaposed with “our streets,” and his assurance that they can be “mould[ed]” by joining into Chicopee's existing public institutions, suggest that immigrants would assimilate into existing hierarchies. Irish and Polish populations throughout the United States faced racialized discrimination as they assimilated into whiteness (Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 2005), and literacy plays a large role in this transformation.

A less fraught version of this history is lionized today in Chicopee, including in this statement from the city's website (2023): “Although once defined by the predominant nationality of its immigrant occupants, historically largely Polish and French Canadian, these neighborhoods are now occupied by people of many cultures while still maintaining their historical, ethnic charm” (City of Chicopee). This account trivializes the city’s “ethnic charm,” casting this as solely “historical” as if “immigrant occupants” are part of a past that is no longer part of contemporary experiences. This framing overlooks the substantial Hispanic and Latino immigration to the city in recent years ⁴ as well as the living presence of this history in public life and residents’ literate activities. Through a historical lens, we see how Catherine’s writing contributes to and challenges community efforts to construct historical identity.

Close attention to the city’s built environment reveals the persistence of this history in downtown life today, in churches, historic colleges, parks, and public art commissioned by members of Chicopee-based immigrant groups and civic organizations (see Figure 2). Evidence of assimilation processes is evident throughout the city as well, including at the library where the writing group takes place. The plaque above constructs a deeply rhetorical relationship between Polish-American civic engagement and Chicopee’s identity as a city. The attention to the mayors’ names is one such marker of Chicopee’s immigrant identity, one that is not just historical. Community members live this history every day, and Catherine’s own literacy experiences demonstrate this.

Figure 2.

Examples of public history commemoration of Chicopee’s immigrant history.

In her memoir, “Becoming Multilingual (Or Not),” Catherine tells the story of language learning throughout her life: learning French at family reunions in Quebec, taking Polish and Irish classes as an adult, and attempting to learn Spanish online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Catherine’s description of these experiences again underscores the familial element of this literacy: “My next encounter with a foreign language, when my kids were students at St. Stanislaus School, was to study Polish . . . I jumped at the chance to expand my knowledge and perhaps impress my in-laws (only one of which could speak any Polish)” (pp. 1–2), which she characterized in one interview as “ridiculous.” As a researcher, if I relied only on ethnographic data—the humorous tone of “Becoming Multilingual (Or Not)” or Catherine's dismissive comment about the ridiculousness of trying to fit in with her marital family—this focus on language learning would be interesting context but might not become analytically significant to my understanding of the community writing group.

However, treating the history I have outlined as part of this case identifies Catherine’s writing as a practice of community history-making. This history looms large in the writing group, signified directly with the presence of a sizeable painting of historic Chicopee landmarks in our meeting room (see Figure 3), overtly bringing this history into our present literacy activities. As Catherine mentioned, her kids attended the local Polish Catholic school, and she wanted recognition within her husband’s family, who had lived in Chicopee for generations. Following her pattern of using literacy to forge family connections, Catherine began taking courses at Elm’s College, the site of Chicopee’s Polish Center, which seeks to preserve “the history and cultural traditions” of Polish-Americans (The Polish Center of Discovery and Learning, 2025). The presence of this heritage center speaks to the ubiquity of this history in Chicopee. For example, in “Becoming Multilingual (Or Not),” Catherine recalls, “I sat next to a lady about my age who, although she was also a beginner, remembered hearing her grandmother speak Polish when she was a child. When we learned a phrase, she often said, ‘Oh, I remember my grandmother saying that!’ and so on” (p. 2). Catherine’s attempts to learn Polish emerge from the same impulse that motivated Catherine to gift her grandchild the Irish heritage flipbook. This also highlights the community nature of this literacy practice: language learning is not just tied to a family tree but follows the urban literacy network of Chicopee, a community Catherine embraces and has fostered connections to, as she has with the younger generations of her family.

Figure 3.

Mural of Chicopee landmarks.

Catherine has placed herself in the larger community’s history. When coding the ethnographic data, one salient thematic category centered on how participants claimed or represented Chicopee. Catherine described, “I think I’m at the point now where I can converse with people about, like this is my hometown” (emphasis added). Catherine has adopted Chicopee and its wider heritage as her own. This is evident in attempts to learn French, Irish, and Polish, all of which are parts of the city's linguistic landscape. Through a sociohistorical lens, Catherine’s literacy becomes not just about intimate familial ties, but also about cultural tradition, an identification with place. Most recently, Catherine is attempting to learn Spanish, which she hopes will allow her “to converse with some of the people” at the emergency food distribution service she volunteers with, which often serves low-income Spanish-speaking residents. Catherine implicitly recognizes how the city is changing and challenges representations of immigration as solely historical, showing how that history lives on and requires a new literate response. Unlike Burnham’s hope that Chicopee “mould[s]” immigrant residents, Catherine herself adapts. Her writing of this memoir thus rewrites the conventional history of Chicopee.

Conclusion

This is just a small glimpse of what is revealed through combined historical and ethnographic methods in the larger study. Admittedly, this example is one participant who is explicitly engaged in history, and my role as the researcher who is attuned to history cannot be overlooked. Acknowledging my lens is necessary to ethical historical analysis, and best practices like member checking, follow-up interviews, and sustained relationships for community work can confirm when history is part of the research’s story. However, I suggest that sociohistorical writing ethnography should be taken up even when participants are not overtly engaged in history-making. There are participants in my study who write fiction and do not necessarily see their writing as historical, yet engaging in a sociohistorical writing ethnography still enriches understandings of what their writing is doing and the possibilities afforded by community writing in general. For example, one participant of my study, Jake, is working on a high fantasy novel, which he has brought excerpts of to our group. On its face, such writing has nothing to do with real-world history, but Jake’s writing also responds to historical forces and makes history as well. In our first interview, Jake explicitly connected why he joined the writing group to the way “social networks [are] disintegrating” and to the “epidemic of loneliness.” Inquiring into how these feelings have been produced by larger structures and connects to specific changes in the context of Chicopee requires me to reinterpret how Jake’s fictional world also responds to his own felt sense of history.

Sociohistorical writing ethnography opens up space to explore social forces that impact people’s literacy practices. Careful consideration of historical significance in the production of writing can provide ways of deeply theorizing community literacy. As I hope this example has demonstrated, engaging in historical research is compatible with other analytical approaches in writing studies more broadly.