31.090 - Productions of Time-Space in Literacy Studies: Scale, Movement, and Texts

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores how literacy researchers, drawing on trends in critical geography and sociolinguistics, are seeking to understand the movements of texts, people, and artifacts by theorizing the asymmetrical and hierarchical dimensions of meaning-making across space and time. Bringing together scholars from diverse metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Great Britain to present on a range of empirical projects across schools, communities, and digital spaces, we examine how people’s literacy practices become differentially valued across time and space and how people strategically and actively engage in those valuation processes. We argue that notions of time, space, and scale offer literacy researchers a flexible set of tools and frames from which to examine educational inequities.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Scaling as Literacy Activity: The Labor of Global Connectivity - Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania; Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Pennsylvania

• Language as Material Practice: Exploring Tacit and Embodied Communicative Repertoires in Youth Contexts for Social Justice - Kate Heron Pahl, The University of Sheffield

• The Social (re)Construction of Scale in Video Documentaries on Immigration - Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University; Amy A. Chang, Northwestern University; Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University; Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• The Fated Knot: Class, Racialization, and Linguistic Inequality in South African Schools - James P. Collins, University at Albany - SUNY

Discussant

• Catherine F. Compton-Lilly, University of Wisconsin - Madison