Sites Unseen: Reimagining Literacy Sites for Just and Equitable Futures

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Critiques from social geography, critical ethnic and Indigenous studies, and new materialism have complicated conceptions of “the site” in literacy research -- positioning such spaces less as bounded places of inquiry and more as hybrid contexts, constituted and animated by an interplay of people, artifacts, histories, beliefs, and practices. This symposium responds to and builds on such perspectives, exploring the meanings, uses, contingencies, and possibilities of “sites” through a range of empirical and theoretical projects. Bringing together scholars whose work engages varied intellectual lineages, methods, and contexts, the session explores how sites and spaces of literacy inherit and produce sociopolitical relations as well as tensions, and how such relations/tensions might be configured otherwise for more just and equitable futures.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chairs

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University

Papers

• Hidden in Plain Site: The Active Presence of School Histories - Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University; T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Space Is the Place: Black Girls Making and Claiming Space in the Fantastic - Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Recovering Black Place-Making: Toward a Poetics of Landscape and Literacy With Black Youth - Christopher Rogers, University of Pennsylvania

• Slowmation: Activating Mobile Sites of Visual Literacy in Education Research - Nikki Rotas, University of Western Ontario

Discussant

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto