The Reading-Industrial Complex: Making Reading a Public and Educational Problem

• In Event: International Studies of the Sociologies of the Knowledge of Science, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education, Part I

Proposal

This paper explores in what ways book reading is motivated as something valuable in the public discourse where specifically the research-society-school interactions are highlighted, assemblages which enable specific dominant interpretations of reading while shadowing others. These relational enactments of reading involve the creation of reading as a societal and educational problem as well as who counts as readers and non-readers.

Historically, reading can be understood as an activity that holds society together as well as carrying important cultural knowledge, and reading has often been motivated by humanistic ideas and ideals of understanding various dimensions of being human. Rationales for literature reading are hence often attached to issues such as the development of common cultural and historical references (see for example Author 2, 2019; Graff, 2010) and the acquisition of democratic skills (Langer, 2011; Nussbaum, 2003).

This study investigates how societal institutions, public and media discourse, local practitioners, and research reason and make arguments about the necessity of reading literature. In this we acknowledge an epistemic shift in the reasons and arguments put forward - from reading motivated by humanistic ideals into emphasizing the importance of reading with the use of ‘numbers’ aggregated through various measurements and quantifications, such as “the 30-million word gap” (Hart & Risley, 2003). Another example of such ‘numbers’ that circulate about reading are the amounts of words that seventeen-year-olds who read a lot are said to have (50 000 words), compared to those seventeen-year-olds who do not read a lot (15 000 words). These kinds of statements are rarely questioned, and they disseminate into the societal discourse of reading, but where is this kind of truth-making and knowledge created, what kind of empirical data is used for such statements, and based on what legitimacy do they act?

In the paper are investigated what I call “the literary-industrial complex” (Author et al, 2024), where a dispersed set of actors have the common feature of specifically and publicly define themselves as promoters of (book) reading. In the study I analyze primarily official websites with traditionally governing functions, and also commercial and cultural actors. Although it consists of mostly Swedish cases, the paper resonates well with a global tendency of quantification and measurement in education. With help of theoretical and methodological sensibilities from science- and technology studies (STS) the paper deals analyses what ways and with help of what logics reading becomes naturalized as a societal problem that school is expected to solve. How do the different actors in the literary-industry complex align numbers and quantifications in their arguments and rationalities? How is reading made political, or non-political, at different sites in the reading-industrial complex?

Author

• Elin Sundström Sjödin