About the Author

Hannah Ashley has had the pleasure of working as a professor of both English and Community Change Studies at West Chester University since 2001. She taught community-based literacy for five years in Philadelphia before studying at Temple University’s Interdisciplinary Urban Education program to obtain her Ph.D. She is a mother, partner, friend, cook, always has a fiction book to read, and is obsessed with jujitsu. You can contact her here.

About WQR

At a time when the world is confronting interconnected crises—climate change, political instability, economic uncertainty, and the erosion of education and information, I wanted to know: what the heck is the point of teaching writing, or any of the humanities. WQR is the project that grew out of that question. Community Organizing Humanities is my attempt at a forward-looking paradigm that grew from the wisdom of my friends and colleagues in a network of faculty and community staff teaching Community Change Studies with Black, Brown, immigrant and low-income students around the U.S, primary in public colleges and universities.

My conclusion: the humanities are not merely relevant but essential to humanity’s survival—provided we radically transform how they are taught. Drawing on three strands—the practices of collective struggle and those who are actively teaching others about them, the decolonial thought of Sylvia Wynter, and the opportunities of fluidness and performance offered by queer theory—Community Organizing Humanities proposes that the humanities must embrace their potential to cultivate “revolutionary collective subjects”—new ways of being human that reject entrenched ideas shaping our society, such as isolation, hierarchy, and myths of progress and individualism, and reimagine our shared future.

Community Organizing Humanities is for educators, scholars, organizers, and anyone invested in reshaping the human story.