Inequalities and crossings: Literacy and the spaces-in-between (original) (raw)
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Moment by moment: contexts and crossings in the study of literacy in social practice
2006
The concept of literacy practices has occupied a central place in the New Literacy Studies. It is seen as enabling the conceptualisation of literacy beyond the single instance 'event', and therefore the making of claims about literacy, power and social structure. In this thesis I draw on multi-site ethnography to trace movement beyond the single instance in an exploration of the role of literacy in carrying meanings across contexts. The data was drawn from a 'participatory development' project in South Africa, where homeless people were building houses, interacting with NGOs, architects, engineers and suppliers. A language of description was derived, in which contexts (at micro and macro levels) were conceptualised as activity systems and sequences of activities identified as meaning making trajectories. Recontextualisations of meanings within trajectories were analysed as strips and the identification of nodes within these strips demonstrated that a focus on crossings across instances illuminates the study of communication and power (with writing seen as one amongst many modes of communication). The work extends theoretical and methodological categories in the New Literacy Studies and locates concepts of multimodality firmly within social practice. The idea is explored that entextualisation processes and text artifacts can be reified or naturalised in an ongoing interplay between sociality and materiality. The claim that recontextualisation leads to more durable forms of meaning making and to stability and permanence within human environments is scrutinised, and an argument developed that within economies of signs and meanings characterised by inequality, disrupted lives and pre-bureaucratic practices such claims need to be treated with caution. It shows, however, that in the tracery of chaining of meanings, reification tends to occur in chaotic processes where there is no standardisation, while naturalisation occurs in more predictable text-regulated processes. The study therefore has implications for theories of bureaucracy and complexity.
2005
This is a study of the application in South Africa of a social practices approach to the study of literacy. A social practices approach conceptualizes literacy practices as variable practices which link people, linguistic resources, media objects, and strategies for meaning-making in contextualized ways. These literacy practices are seen as varying across broad social contexts, and across social domains within these contexts, and they can be studied ethnographically. I examine how this approach is applied across four critical themes of study in South Africa, namely: the uses and valuations of reading and writing by adults without schooling; the historical circumstances whereby literacy comes to be identified as a resource of European culture in colonial South Africa; children's early engagement with literacy in formal and informal contexts; and reading and writing in relation to electronic and digital media. I review examples of ethnographic research in each case, in which I have participated as a researcher, and examine how the approach has been applied, tested and modified in each case of its application. The research in each case showed literacy's incorporation in complex and variable ways in situated, located human activities. Whereas the first application of the social practices approach, that of the SoUL project detailed how literacy operated as everyday practice amongst people with little or no schooling, the research lacked a theoretical perspective to explain how these practices came to take the form and status that they did, as regards the influences upon them from outside the immediate settings that were studied. Over the subsequent studies I developed a revised approach to the study of literacy which detailed the explanatory usefulness of studying how literacy practices that network across larger domains than the local have effect on the construction of local practices, in both historical as well as contemporary examples. Literacy practices were not simply the products of local activity but involved rather the particular local application of communication technologies, language and artefacts that originated from outside the immediate social space. However, local applications involved original, indeterminate and varied uses of those resources.
Literacy's verb: Exploring what literacy is and what literacy does
International Journal of Educational Development, 2008
'what literacy does.'' First, the article reviews in-depth the ways in which development discourses define literacy, and the claims made in development discourses about the ''consequences'' of literacy for economic and political development. I then draw on 24 months of ethnographic research in Brazil with 41 highly impoverished literacy students from four literacy programs in two cities in order to demonstrate that there is no predictable ''impact'' of literacy on development. Instead, I show that the opportunities afforded by literacy depend greatly on the types of literacy and the types of literacy programs made available to students, as well as students' cultural understandings of literacy and the social, political, and economic contexts within which they attempt to assert new literacy practices. The article concludes that we should not consider literacy as an actor with some ''impact''; instead, we should examine how people use literacy in ways that are conditioned by social and cultural forces. r
Editors’ Introduction: Decentering and Decentralizing Literacy Studies: An Urgent Call for Our Field
Research in the Teaching of English
A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The field itself-through its programs, research agendas, journals, and professional associations-has been grappling with pressing societal issues and how to open new spaces for new ideas, with varying degrees of success (Toliver, Jones, Jiménez, Player, Rumenapp, & Munoz, 2019). To remain sustainable in the current times as a counternarrative (Mora, 2014) to policies and practices that perpetuate white supremacy and far-right ultranationalism, we need to decenter and decentralize our views of how we understand literacy as a global construct. This involves bringing to light efforts to retheorize it that are happening outside of traditional knowledge centers (Mora, 2016b). We need to recognize that overlooking certain regions of the world is detrimental to the literacy academic community at large, for our field cannot move forward if our frameworks for literacy are still ingrained with marginalizing views of different regions. When we talk about decentering and decentralizing as two related ideas, we emphasize the need to move the conversation away from historically dominant groups (decenter) and geographical locales (decentralize). Decentering and decentralizing means that, for example, we need to reconsider how many ideas and theories that we rely on stem from colonial knowledge centers in the Global North and Anglo communities (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, to a certain extent). This necessitates rethinking our relationship with the different languages at play in terms of knowledge production-such as the dominance of English. This shift in relationship implies, revisiting McLuhan, that English is a neutral medium to share messages coming from different parts of the world, but itself needs to be situated historically and
Literacy and literacies: Texts, power, and identity
2003
Assumptions are interesting, not just for what they reveal about our thinking, but also for the insights they can provide into why we think as we do. Within literacy studies, assumptions that underlie "the literacy thesis" or "the great divide," for example, influence among other things how people define oral language in relation to the printed word, how they measure cognitive development or interpret social progress, and how they make policies that affect children's learning and identity as literate beings. In Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity, James Collins and Richard Blot present a comprehensive account of the durability of such assumptions despite vigorous challenges from socioculturalists and ethnographers of the New Literacy Studies. Perhaps more importantly, however, they offer a pathway for thinking beyond the virtual impasse that exists between those who view the literate tradition as being universally deterministic across culture and time, and those who take exception to that view. Collins and Blot argue (along with others, such as Brandt & Clinton, 2002) that socioculturalists and ethnographers, in trying to correct for an earlier conception of literacy as a deterministic force in social evolution (Goody, 1986), have relied too heavily on localized, or contextualized, accounts of literacy practices. They point out that although revisionist historical research and situated ethnographic studies of people's multiple literacies have largely discredited an autonomous view of literacy-a view that argues for the cognitive and social consequences of literacy and assumes a spoken/written dichotomy-the fact remains that scholars of the New Literacy Studies have yet to account for the tenacity of these key aspects of the autonomous model. It is toward such an accounting that this book is aimed. Specifically, Collins and Blot's stated goal-"to argue for a way out of the universalist/particularist impasse by attending closely to issues of text, power, and identity" (p. 5)-is what makes their book important. The degree to which the authors achieve their goal, in terms of the approach they take, is the focus of this review. As an organizing tool (and in keeping with the book's organizational structure), I address issues related to text, power, and identity in that order, though in reality they overlap throughout and come full circle in the last two chapters of the book. The question "What is a text?" receives much attention, and rightly so, inasmuch as Collins and Blot's goal of moving beyond the universalist/particularist impasse requires a fresh foray into pervasive and long held assumptions about the superiority of a written-text tradition. Although the works they trace in support of this tradition are well known from earlier debates surrounding "the literacy thesis" and its emphasis on distinguishing between
Introduction: Renewing literacy studies
2008
Mastin Prinsloo and Mike Baynham Renewing literacy studies Literacy has emerged strongly in recent times as an applied linguistic research focus, exemplifying in many ways the expanding scope of applied linguistics. There is now a network of literacy researchers from many parts of the world who are engaged in the empirical and theoretical study of literacy practices in a wide range of settings and social contexts. The AILA Special Interest Group on Literacy has contributed to the international networking that has brought together these scholars, furthering collaboration through international seminars, colloquia and conferences, that started in Tokyo in 1999, and has continued in Campinas,
2009
In this paper we explore the ways in which policy discourses have historically constructed rationales for addressing adult literacy and inequalities over the last 50 years. We offer an overview of the gradual "discovery" of adult literacy in rich, western countries during this period and look in detail at two key policy documents from the UK: the Right to Read manifesto of the 1970"s campaign and the Skills for Life Strategy document produced in 2001 by the New Labour administration of Tony Blair. These two documents were produced during different policy periods, the first at the end of a period of welfare reform concerned mainly with social justice; the second a product of neo-liberalism that provides an international back drop to national policy. Our discourse analysis reveals both continuities and differences across these different policies in the construction of the goals of programmes and of the adult learner as citizen.