A transdisciplinary archival project, this dissertation uses counter-institutional student literacies emanating out of the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1990s--placing them within much bigger political, educational, and geographic contexts--to think through the dynamics of ground-up resistance in the face of profound, institutionally sanctioned raced-classed dispossession. In this decade, New York and the US were marked by increased racial-economic inequality, notably via intensified policing and incarceration in Black/brown neighborhoods alongside cuts to public resources like schooling. As the city's only public college option, serving mostly multilingual, low-income students of color, CUNY was especially targeted by such budget cuts. Most vulnerable were programs, such as "basic writing," supporting minoritized students accepted via Open Admissions, a 1970 policy won by Black/Puerto Rican student organizers guaranteeing college admission for all New Yorkers. Yet budgetary attacks culminated in the policy's 1999 reversal, and a move toward a more exclusionary CUNY. In response to these classist, ableist, xenophobic, and anti-Black policy shifts on and off campus, multiracial, cross-institutional student activist coalitions organized and spoke out, turning to grassroots rhetorical practices to do so. Across varied student-run publications--feminist zines, radical newspapers, hip-hop literacies, organizing materials, early blogs--"The Act of the Paper" traces these students' insurgent rhetorics to re-write a more just education system and world, and the ways that they cultivate community and activist praxis through writing. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]