Materializing Literacies in Homes and Communities: How Literacies Are Materialized in Things

• In Event: (Im)materializing Literacy: Making Sense of New Contexts for Research

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation explores our second proposition: literacies are materialiased in things. We can see this by considering how experiences, memories, feelings and perspectives (the immaterial) are materialised in texts. This perspective enables us to see texts as traces of social practice. They are objects that carry different identities sedimented (Rowsell and Pahl, 2007) within them: of their creators and revisers and of those who interact within and around them. Each brings their own personal meanings so that prior and contemporaneous material worlds live on in texts. The session aims to show this through a series of short accounts of meaning making in homes and communities, drawing on an ethnographic study of writing in the home and in the street.

Theoretical Framework
The making of texts can be seen as part of a realm of meaning making that could be described, from Holland as ‘figured worlds’ (Holland et al 1998).. From this perspective, textual worlds can be seen as spaces of improvisation or ‘as if’ realms. They are, however, also ‘situated’ realms and link to social practice (Street 1993b). Literacies can be understood as materially situated in homes and communities (Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic, 2000). However, literacies can also be seen as vernacular and linked to other less visible practices (Barton and Hamilton 1998). It is often these invisible or ephemeral literacies that capture the workings of culture as a verb (Pahl 2002, Street 1993a).

Methods
This presentation draws on an ethnography of home literacy practices as well a study of writing in the street. This ethnographic research project involved regular visits to homes in Rotherham, UK, as well as a series of community walk arounds and street walks with children from a particular community in Rotherham.

Findings
Evidence from homes included writing that was secret and also draw on place and spaces of meaning making as well as the lost literacies associated with travelling, such as bus tickets, traced inscriptions in dust on cars, street literacies such as street art and oral stories; in short the complex, meshed ‘stuff’ of everyday cultural life in which literacy plays a part (Miller, 2010).

Scholarly Significance
This field of study combines material cultural studies (Eg Miller 2010) with sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) together with a new lens on situated literacies in homes and communities (Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic 2000).

References
Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge.
Barton, D. Hamilton and M. Ivanic, R. (Eds). (2000) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge.
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Author

• Kate Heron Pahl, The University of Sheffield