By Emily Sok, Published April 4, 2024
Deborah Mutnick is a Professor of English and former Director of Writing at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, who currently serves as co-director of the Long Island University Brooklyn Learning Communities. Mutnick is the author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education, a book that traces the history of basic writing. In this book, Mutnick suggests a renewed commitment, in writing studies specifically, to helping students find agency within higher education.
Mutnick’s scholarship varies but focuses explicitly on community engagement and writing. Her chapter in the book The City is an Ecosystem: Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice titled “Making Our Own History: Urban Sustainability in a World Crisis” sees urban sustainability as rooted in historical awareness and social justice, whereas her Community Literacy Journal article titled “Write. Persist. Struggle: Education in the 1930s” describes the importance of writing as a tool for empowerment and resistance against oppressive social and economic conditions. Mutnick illustrates how writing workshops, adult education programs, and literary publications provided spaces for workers to express their experiences, aspirations, and critiques of society.
This line from Deborah’s chapter exemplifies her commitment to community engaged writing: “My primary goal as a teacher of writing and literature is to foster multidisciplinary, critical reading, writing, and analytical skills needed by non-specialists and specialists alike to evaluate and act collectively to change the world before it is too late” (p. 117).
Take a look at some of Deborah Mutnick’s publications:
The Virginia Community Writing Collaborative 