Networks of Public Scholarship in Digital Spaces

• In Event: Pluriversal Scholarship: An Intergenerational Discussion of Writing and Literacies

Abstract

In centering voices of historically marginalized scholars, teachers, youth, and community members, we have placed a particular emphasis on broadening access to literacies scholarship and provided a public platform across greater literacies communities. Through a foregrounding of diverse voices, we highlight populations often called voiceless. We reject and refuse this dominant notion, recognizing and affirming that everyone has a voice. By situating check-ins virtual communities, academics, teachers, and community members across disparate spaces, we engage in humanizing discussion of how our lived experiences contribute and relate to our literacies scholarship, teaching, and praxis.

We have engaged #literacies chats with Justin Coles and Tracey Flores that traversed scholarly institutions and called for furthered solidarity across all of our communities. In one of our more recent #literacies chats, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz challenged us to dig deep into our understanding of ourselves and to engage archaeology of the self (Sealey-Ruiz, 2020) as an opportunity for consciousness-raising. When we think about the discussions our Twitter chat has facilitated, we think about the consciousness-raising that takes place for the community. In attending to this consciousness-raising, we position opportunities to take up a broadening of our understanding of #literacies in both our scholarship and our practice. We think about the shift in mindset and practice that may or may not take place in scholarship, and understand the complexity and vulnerability that we invite during these #literacies chats, which call for a meditative and iterative approach and understanding of one’s own truth(s), especially in an ongoing global racial uprising.

During an ongoing pandemic, it is especially important to think about the preparation of literacy teachers, students engaged in literacies, and community engagement in our literacies research, teaching, and organizing. We recognize the urgency of a variety of learning opportunities, including virtual and digital learning, that foregrounds further opportunities for equity in literacies. Further, we acknowledge that historically marginalized populations are specifically impacted by an even greater divide due to a gap in social mobility and lack of access to digital learning. We understand that it will take a commitment to move past “tolerance,” advance anti-racist action that refuses existing harmful practices in our literacies research and teaching, and dismantle oppressive structures to allow for more equitable approaches to literacies.

Finally, we consider the pluriversal call to move outside of western and North American spaces for #literacies scholarship by taking up a call for #globalacademics in our #literacies chat with Raul Alberto Mora and Jayne Lammers. In this chat, we broadened our understanding of what it meant to be a global academic by creating new horizons for literacies. We provided a platform to both support and discuss the barriers that make glocal literacies challenging, and we defined glocal as an interconnection between global and local systemic and institutional oppression/liberty. With this, we hoped to bridge gaps of support in varying communities with similar oppression(s) and liberty.

Authors

• Rae Leah Oviatt, Eastern Michigan University

• Dianne wellington, Indiana University - Bloomington