Student Activism, Literacy, and Ethics

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: New Methods for Rethinking Research, Design, and Activism

Abstract

This paper examines how a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) used a literacy practice to work out and mobilize an ethic, or a way of posing and answering the question, “How should I act, here and now, as part of a whole life lived well with others?” Specifically, the paper considers how the literacy practice situated the GSA in a particular social setting where the GSA’s ethic was challenged and the group reworked its ethic to withstand the challenge. Few if any studies that view literacies as social practices, as this study does, have asked how people use literacies to work out and adapt ethics.

Author

• Ross Emmerson Collin, Virginia Commonwealth University