Unsettling Literacies: Directions for literacy research in precarious times [Hardcover]

This book asks researchers what uncertainty means for literacy research, and for how literacy plays through uncertain lives. While the book is not focused only on COVID-19, it is significant that it was written in 2020-2021, when our authors and readers working and personal lives were thrown into disarray by stay-at-home orders. The book opens up new spaces for examining ways that literacy has come to matter in the world.

Drawing on the reflections of international literacy researchers and important new voices, this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. These difficult times have surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice.

The book considers varied and consequential events to explore new ways to think and research literacy and to unsettle what we know and accept as fundamental to literacy research, opening ourselves up for change. It provides direction to the field of literacy studies as pressing global concerns are prompting literacy researchers to re-examine what and how they research in times of precarity.

Part 1. Shiftings.- 1. Trajectories of Being and Becoming: Relationships across Time that Keep us Humble (Catherine Compton-Lilly).- 2. Can a Research Space be a Third Space? Methodology and Hierarchies in Participatory Literacy Research (Sara Hawley & John Potter).- 3. Sharing the Screen: Reconfiguring Participatory Methodologies for Digitally Mediated Literacy Research (Bethany Monea).- 4. A Felt Presence: Affect, Emotion, and Memory as Literacy Researchers (Bronwyn T. Williams).- Part 2. Openings.- 5. Attending to our Response-Abilities: Diff/Reading Data through Pedagogies of the Other-Wise (Am?lie Lemieux, Kelly C. Johnston, & Fiona Scott).- 6. Connected to the Soul: Autoethnography, Neurodiversity and Literacies in TlƒÈ