Literacy, Economy, and Power - Duffy et al

Duffy, John et al, eds. "Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives." Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

Each chapter of this collection is informed by and in reaction to Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives.  Many of them use Brandt's conception of literacy sponsors as "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way" (Brandt in Duffy et al 63).  Many of them complicate this definition.

Cushman uses as an example of the editor for the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper to show the complex negotiation processes sponsors take on while Moss and Lyons-Robinson later relate a story of an African American Women's club to show that literacy sponsorship is just one aspect of a sponsor's identity and resources that must be negotiated within and across a social network.  Christoff shows how sponsors can be misrecognized or distributed, decentralized systems when contrasting how Islam has more impact on literacy practices in Zanzibar than the ministry of education there (and despite literacy ideologies of progress and development).  Donehower's example of rural sustainability follows Brandt's idea that literacy is more than understanding a text, but keeping track of perspectives and learning from texts and literacies precisely because of different perspectives.  Prior traces three approaches to phenomenology to show how Brandt's work aligns with a phenomenological sociology for investigating literate practices.Two other chapters are more particularly useful for my own particular research interests, which I will expand in the following paragraphs.

In Horner & Lu's chapter "Toward a Labor Economy of Literacy: Academic Frictions," they contrast three different approaches to literacy, which are included below:

• Foundationalist model: adheres to universal, uniform, and fixed conventions and procedures is necessary and sufficient - pedagogy of transmission with few advocates in literacy & composition fields, but prevalent in mass media and academics in other fields
• Accomodationist model: recognizes a plurality of conventions across languages and disciplines, but remains static with occluded or fixed power relations - the "silo" model of multilingualism and transmission pedagogy come from identifying a set of conventions and accommodating them (for mastery), not overwriting or challenging them
• Translation model: sees "translation as a constant and inevitable feature of language use" (111) as people communicate across difference as a norm - approaches within this model vary including "neutral," discrete code-switching, fetishizing code-meshing, and emergent (with the authors advocating for emergent and all-encompassing view of all literacy practices as acts of translation)

They use the metaphors of "flow" and "friction" within an economic and labor model.  For the first two approaches, difference is seen as a problem that prevents flow while the third takes difference and friction as inevitable processes that contributes to greater understanding.

Selfe & Hawisher pick up Brandt's thread that "what it is to be literate has seemed so shift with nearly every new generation" to describe new research interests and methodologies related to digital affordances (Brandt in Duffy et al 185).  They point out an intimate relationship between learning English and acquisition of digital literacies in and across transnational contexts of the "globalized eduscape" (189, 192).  In their own research, they used feminist theory to decrease distance between the researcher and participants according to ethnographic fiction that scholars can and should control subjects in the modernist approach as their participants expressed their literacy narratives in digital mediums from the position of coauthors and contributed in the interpretation.  They found that literacy narratives were twice encoded because they provided both practices and artifacts as participants engaged in self-translation (194).  Of particular use, they credit additional semiotic information to alphabetic representations of research and coining the term "born-digital text" to refer to a project's content that "cannon be fully or even adequately, rendered by only print on a page" (197).