The Power of Interpretive Scale for Exploring Aesthetics in Social Life

• In Event: Aesthetics & Literacies across Educational Spaces

Abstract

Recently, scholars have called for research on aesthetics in literacy—issues of form in addition to that of the content of language—as a way to better understand otherwise hidden or implicit inequities (Cottom, 2023, Hull & Nelson, 2009). Aesthetic literacies research takes seriously that figurative language, connotation, font size, and many other aesthetic markers can work to inscribe inequities just as denotational meaning. Similarly, literacy researchers have also noted the power of scalar analysis to reveal inequities as literacies move across time and space in social life (Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016). This paper brings together these two lines of inquiry to understand aesthetics and scales in ways that contribute to understanding inequality in literacies.

This paper is part of a multi-method multi-year study that took place in a digital summer literary salon. Inspired by queer-led literary salons and radical queer bookstores, this salon engaged youth of color, many of whom also identified as queer, in discussing a wide range of digital texts. This paper draws approximately 200 hours of recordings and transcripts of youth talking about literature in the salon in addition to 140 verbal protocols from sessions where youth read and thought aloud about literary texts (Pressley & Afflerbach, 2012). The youth in this study (n=25) discussed together a wide range of texts across myriad genres.

Data analysis of the salon session transcripts and verbal protocols focused on tracing interpretive scales—I noticed that the ways youth analyzed literature sometimes seemed more zoomed in to be at the literal level within the text world while other times seemed more zoomed out to be focused on real-world society. To systematically trace how youth used and moved between different scales for interpreting literature, I drew on linguistic anthropology’s use of Peirce’s (1902) semiotic theories of indexicality. Specifically, following Wortham & Reyes (2015), I identified all the deictics in the data. Deictics are words or phrase that requires contextual or social information to understand its full meaning. The word “yesterday” is a deictic because one needs context to discern the date to which the word “yesterday” refers. Pronouns, temporal words, and spatial words are deictics. I identified over one thousand deictics in the data and used them to understand how youth employed interpretive scale in the literary salon.

I found that youth engaged across four interpretive scales (literal scale, aesthetic scale, communal scale, and societal scale). I then use these findings to discuss how people in positions of power such as teachers and evaluators of high stakes assessments would likely assign value to different scales in ways that reinforce social inequalities. Tracing interpretive scale in youth literacy practice reframes how researchers have typically thought about how power and inequality functions in that it demonstrates the often-implicit role of the aesthetic in inscribing inequalities across social spaces.

Author

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY