Dr Claire Lee

Unsettling Literacies is a book that provides inspiration and 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. This edited volume explores conceptual and methodological challenges associated with researching literacies in a rapidly changing, interconnected world characterised by political unrest, the rise of nationalism, big data, climate change and environmental degradation, threats to personal security and health, rampant social injustice, and a post-truth society. In such a world, literacy researchers must wrestle with complex procedural and pragmatic concerns as texts move far and fast, practices quickly spring up and fade away again, literacies span hybrid on/offline sites, and reaching and working with research participants entails practical difficulties. For many literacy researchers, the experience of COVID 19 brought such pressures into sharp relief, as the challenge of ‘staying safe’ intersected with attempts to research in ways that matter in the world, and this raised questions with much wider resonance for researching literacies in an age of precarity. Face-to-face research was impossible, for reasons of personal safety and security or physical distance. However, these difficult times have also surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice. Drawing on the reflections of a truly international group of leading literacy researchers and important new voices – generated both from experience of working through a global pandemic and from sustained engagements with social injustice over many years – this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. Authors in the collection move across 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. Through doing so, they both unsettle how literacies are conceived and hence researched in the context of a rapidly changing and precarious world, and explore ways in which literacies themselves can work to unsettle normative views and practices. Such perspectives are needed for literacy researchers to navigate the focus and conduct of literacy research now and into an uncertain future.
 
 

In this latest instalment of our blog series, we hear from two research projects – one based in India, the other in the Maldives and the UK – that have used pedagogical practices to help young learners respond to climate change through futures framing and cross-cultural dialogue. These projects illustrate how emergent, creative pedagogies are enabling teachers to explore environmental injustices in ways that help learners overcome their eco anxieties and look to the future with hope.

This report demonstrates that digital inequality impacts life chances, quality of life, social
inclusion and participation – challenges that will persist beyond short-term lockdowns – and
Bristol needs a joined-up, coherent and ongoing policy response. That policy must recognise
the specific challenges for different communities across the city.

Children from armed forces families are often characterised in popular discourse as
stoic little soldiers or vulnerable objects of sympathy. Research, mainly from the US,
seeks largely to identify whether, and how, factors such as mobility and parental
deployment support children’s resilience or hinder their psychological, behavioural or
educational functioning. This thesis looks beyond posited disorders, norms and
functioning. It aims to contribute a more nuanced, critical understanding of the
complexities of UK service children’s learning lives, their priorities and interests, and
the sociocultural contexts, policies and practices that shape their activity and their
sense of self.

Over fourteen months I spent an afternoon a week in dialogue with seven service
children aged 9-11 in a primary school. Developing a third space (Soja, 1996) which
unsettled curricular boundaries and usual classroom practices, relationships and
expectations, we talked, made things, drew, painted, wrote, sang, danced and played,
and explored what mattered to the children. My theoretical and methodological
approach combines theories of dialogism and utterance (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) with
attention to spatiality, objects and multimodality. I sought to understand the
children as meaning-makers, investigating how they made sense of and presented
their worlds and themselves.

This thesis makes visible the methodological, ethical and pedagogical potential of such
a third, dialogic space, and its effects on the children’s sense of self and their
relationships. It also contributes towards our understanding of primary-school-aged
children’s affective responses to challenge and change, and how they deal with these;
their desire for belonging and connectedness; their chafing at constraints; their
preoccupation with relationships, and their active use of social resources, objects and
spaces to create coherent self-narratives, help one another to do so, and pursue their
personal development. Drawing on this evidence, I propose questions for practitioners
and decision-makers that prompt reflection on policy and practice.