Cosmopolitical Approaches to Intersectional Readings of Literature

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium will re-envision pedagogical approaches to culturally relevant literary reading, considering ways that a variety of educational spaces have taken up cosmopolitical approaches to intersectional ways of reading literature. We counter deficit approaches to English instruction by embracing wider conceptions of interpretive communities that emphasize critical communal practices (Toliver, 2020) and sociopolitical engagement (Author et al., 2019). These papers consider what it means to invite a fuller range of interpretive possibilities and understandings when we read together, centering the cultural interests that (young) people bring with them.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Dianne T. Wellington, SUNY - College at Cortland

Papers

• "Silence Has a Way of Speaking": Presence, Absence, and Proximity in Middle School Literature Circles - Ty Walkland, University of Toronto; Rob Simon, University of Toronto

• Constructing Interpretive Communities Through Indexicality in Text-Based Classroom Talk - Scott Storm, Bowdoin College; Karis Michelle Jones, Empire State University - SUNY; Sarah W. Beck, New York University

• Rethinking the Role of Aesthetics in Critical English Language Arts Classrooms - Beth Krone, Kennesaw State University

• "Language Lives in Our Bodies Not Just Our Heads": Embodied Reading and Fluid, Anticolonial Becomings - Shawna Carroll, Okayama University

Discussant

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign