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Current - 2013

See below the dates of forthcoming Literacy Research Discussion Group meetings this term. Details of talks are posted as they become available. Details of our recent Lent term meetings are available at the bottom of this page.

30 April
Informal discussion session led by David Barton and Mark Sebba, Lancaster University
Research methodology and other topics from recent conferences

David Barton and Mark Sebba will introduce a discussion on methodology based on their participation in the ESCR Conference on Researching Multilingualism held in Birmingham in March. The informal discussion is open to contributions based on other recent conferences.

7 May
Bronwyn Williams, Professor of English, Director, University Writing Center University of Louisville/Kentucky
Finding a Way In: Literacy, Popular Culture, and Points of Participation

Whether on computers or mobile devices, young people are often engaged in participatory literacy practices that involve reading and writing with print, sound, images, and video. What’s more, many of these digital literacy practices involve using popular culture texts and content as semiotic and rhetorical resources for composing, not just as texts to consume. Yet participatory popular culture is not only important for understanding “how” students engage with digital media, it is significant in understanding “why.” The desire to participate in popular culture contexts motivates students to spend substantial time and effort on digital projects, some of which can be quite complex and interactive. Understanding these motivations offers insights into how students perceive their identities as readers and writers, including their desire and agency to participate in literacy practices. I draw on observations and interviews with secondary and university students discuss how engagement with participatory popular culture shapes student motivation and practices in the composing and interpretation of texts. At the same time, it is important to understand how questions of power and ideology also factor in to questions of agency and participation. I will discuss how my current research on issues of literacy, identity, and participation connects to my previous work on popular culture and digital media literacy practices.  

14 May
Mariza Georgalou, Lancaster University
‘It’s very awful and none of us had expected it’: Greek crisis and stance-taking on Facebook

Occurring both at a personal and a socio-political level, crisis has disrupted Greek people’s daily life. In the contemporary social media landscape, with the perpetual user-generated and user-consumed content, stances that concern this critical turning point have found fertile soil to thrive. In this presentation I look at the means by which Facebook participants communicate emotions, thoughts, opinions and assessments towards the Greek crisis and its concomitants: unemployment, austerity, high taxation, governmental instability, riots, uncertainty, insecurity, and pessimism.
In consonance with Du Bois (2007: 163), I see stance not only as a linguistic act but also as a social act performed in public by a social actor, who deploys overt communicative means to evaluate objects, position subjects (self and others), and align with others, invoking shared systems of sociocultural value. Stance-taking, therefore, is an act of self-presentation and social judgement by which we inevitably say something about our view of the world (Thurlow and Jaworski 2011).
Drawing on findings from an ongoing discourse-centered online ethnography (Androutsopoulos 2008), I present a multimodal dataset of Facebook status updates, comments, video links, photos, and interview excerpts from four different Greek users. In my analysis I focus on the expression of stances through features such as affective and epistemic markers, pronouns, rhetorical questions, commonplaces, and irony.
One of the reasons to use Facebook is to position one’s self within the current crisis context and convey stances with a view to influencing, informing, validating, claiming or disclaiming. Different Facebook affordances lead to different ways of developing stances within the medium. I show that these stances can be interactional, multimodal, and/or intertextual. They range from the most obvious (explicit emotional disclosures and appraisals) to the least obvious (attitudes implied in song lyrics, visuals or articulated through irony). They can be plainly inscribed in a few words or in a smiley, or packed in longer threads or heated arguments. As public performances of identity, crisis stances on Facebook are not posted to the void but are co-constructed, shaped, enforced, measured, judged, aligned and disaligned by a viewing audience.

28 May
Joint event with LIP and the Department of Educational Research
NB: Different venue: B89 (Video Conferencing Room), County South
Gemma Moss, Institute of Education, University of London
Taking numbers to task: exploring PISA data on reading engagement

This paper will consider whether qualitative research traditions can interact with quantitative traditions in ways that work for the common good.  To date, critical exploration of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data and their role in policy discourse has tended to focus either on the reliability of the test instruments employed to assess participants' literacy levels; or on the use of the findings, expressed as country by country rank orderings, within policy discourse.  By contrast this paper will consider PISA data as an example of specialised knowledge making that travels out into policy domains, in the process losing the caveats, qualifications and uncertainties that characterise statistical thinking.  The paper will focus on the use of the term "reading engagement", as a key variable that explains variation in reading performance in the OECD reports, exploring how far this acts as a case study for the social construction of statistical data.  The paper will conclude by asking when and under what terms numerical data have a useful function to play; and the role qualitative research traditions have in making this happen.

29 May
Joint event with the Department of Educational Research
NB: Different venue: B89 (Video Conferencing Room), County South
NB: Different time: 12.30-2pm
John Potter, London Knowledge Lab Department of Culture, Communication and Media, Institute of Education, University of London
Researching digital media and learner lives
 
This seminar, based on a series of case studies with younger learners, explores the arguments for shifting the focus of research into education and technology away from specific devices and artefacts and into an engagement with the lived culture and new literacy practices of the digital age. I will draw on a set of research experiences, tracing the trajectory from a doctoral study of young children’s video-editing practices through to others which research both learner lives and the possible interrelationships between media production and educational experiences. There will be opportunities to look at research data, videos and other kinds of work by children and young people, particularly those in which children are agentive in cultural forms which are significant to them.

11 June
NB: Different venue: Cavendish Coll., Faraday Building
Charles Bazerman, University of California, Santa Barbara

18 June
Joint event with UCREL
Kim Witten, University of York
Sociophonetic and allographic variation of 'MeFi': A case study of orthography as social practice

Lent term

15 January

Ruth Page, University of Leicester

Narratives and Evaluation in ‘The Murder of Stephen Lawrence’ Wikipedia Article

The content produced in Wikipedia articles must comply with the core principle of Neutral Point of View (Myers 2010).  However, the apparent ‘neutrality’ of perspective is determined by the selection of ‘reliable sources’ used to verify Wikipedia articles, sources which reflect and constitute their ideological contexts of production and reception. 

This paper will examine the evolution of a particular Wikipedia Article: ‘The Murder of Stephen Lawrence’.  The article was first authored in 2003 and continues to be revised in 2012, with over 1000 revisions available in the page history.  Through a narrative analysis of selected article revisions, this paper will show that the tellability of the article is determined by reports of the events which circulated over time in the mainstream media.  While the initial stub first authored in 2003 narrated the events of Stephen Lawrence’s murder as an unevaluated Recount (Martin and Plum 1997), the revised article current in 2012 is rich in evaluative statements (Labov 1972).  The added evaluation influences the structural sequence of the narrated events, transforming the earlier Recount to a plot-like pattern of a ‘fully formed narrative’, and signals the importance of the Lawrence case within wider national agendas which continue to contest racial inequality and injustice. 

I argue that the development of the narratives within the Stephen Lawrence article is not neutral, but shaped by wider agendas of news value (Fowler 1986).  In addition, the architectures and archiving principles of Wikipedia are also shaped by ideological principles which suppress counter-narratives and controversy in order to promote a superficial appearance of consensus.

22 January

Reading and discussion session, led by Uta Papen, Lancaster University
Bartlett, L. et al. (2011) State literacies and inequality: Managing Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic

Available through Lancaster University Onesearch at:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059311000228

12 February

Julia Gillen, Lancaster University

Making sense of Twitter as professional practice: an exploratory case study

In this presentation I demonstrate a sociocultural approach to Twitter as a literacy practice.  In researching the Web 2.0 interactions of Jonathan Agnew, the BBC's cricket correspondent, I develop a methodology through which I seek to integrate understandings of specific use of Twitter within a media ecology.  In this case I show how practices of this "change agent" can be approached in the context of his overall professional practice and that of cricket, as a specialist media domain in a particular era.  Through this exploratory case study I look forward to discussing with participants the potential and limitations of a virtual literacy ethnography.

19 February

Guy Merchant and Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University

'Points of View: reflections on a virtual world in a classroom (or was it a classroom in a virtual world)’?

In this presentation we will explore theoretical and methodological issues emerging from a study of children’s interaction and meaning-making in a virtual world. As researchers we  sought to generate data from different perspectives - both in-world and in the classroom – in order to better understand how children made sense of each ‘place’ in relation to the other. Juxtaposing these different perspectives enables us to explore the complexity of the relationship between the material and virtual. We will describe how children moved seamlessly between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ appearing to make meanings through inter-connecting pathways between the two, producing hybrid spaces that were constantly under construction. Drawing on Deleuze’s ideas of the baroque (1993), we suggest a more nuanced interpretation of the online/offline dichotomy – one that acknowledges fluidity and instability. We will suggest that the implications of this work go beyond the study of digital literacy and virtual worlds and contribute to debates about how we conceptualise the situatedness of literacy. Our analysis highlights how the qualities and boundaries of space, and associated relationships and meanings, seem to change from moment to moment and differ for individuals or groups as they interact with and around texts. It argues for a view of new literacies that acknowledges this complexity.

26 February

Margarita Calderon, Lancaster University 

Connections and disconnections on home and school literacy practices in Chile               

This presentation explores the school and home literacy practices in economically disadvantaged settings in Chile. To do so, an ethnographic and participatory approach was developed to observe home and school on a sample of 20 students. Participants in the study were 7 to 10 years old Chilean students from two different schools. Both schools are situated in disadvantaged areas of Santiago, the capital of Chile. Participants were interviewed to discuss their practices and perceptions and then visited at home to observe their environment and routines regarding literacy practices.
Preliminary findings raised interesting issues in regard to the role of school literacies at home. School literacies are perceived as a standard of good practice of literacy at home. In consequence, parents and children assume school literacy practices as the correct way to practice/develop/teach/use reading and writing in any context. This means that parents and children will assume that other practices, not imparted at school, are wrong or not worthy.    
All in all, by analyzing literacy practices at school and home I reflect about the role of literacy in this particular environment and to what extent and how the context impacts on literacy practices.

5 March
Virginie Thériault, Lancaster University
Critical ethnographic research of literacy practices used in youth community-based organisations in Québec: what ethical concerns?

General ethical principles such as informed consent, confidentiality, participants’ physical or psychological well-being and the absence of preventable harm should be respected in any research project. However, those guidelines cannot help researchers in specific situations, when they face a difficult situation in the fieldsite: this is what is called an ‘ethical dilemma’ (Goodwin, et al., 2003) or ‘everyday ethics’ (Guillemin & Heggen, 2009).
However, what are the ethical implications of doing qualitative research with vulnerable groups of people considering that they are “potentially vulnerable on a variety of levels, because of their marginalized social, political and economic position.” (Laverick, 2010, p.76)? Moreover, the voices of vulnerable or marginalized groups are generally not heard in society and often they have little power in the research process (Pyett, 2002).
In this presentation, I will discuss my own experience as a young researcher doing a critical ethnographic study in two organisations working with young people with low levels of formal education in Québec (Canada). At each site, I conducted regular observations over a period of two months, focusing on group activities. During that period, I experienced various ethical dilemmas that challenged my role and position towards the participants. In my talk, I will expose some of the ethical dilemmas encountered in the two fieldsites. I will explain how I dealt with them and what their implications for my study are.

12 March
Caroline Tagg, University of Birmingham
The discursive construction of communities in social media

On social media, which is predicated on notions of connectedness and the establishment of social networks, acts of alignment are very much to the fore, and affordances for realising and displaying connections with others are built into the infrastructure of the applications people use to communicate. A long tradition of research into new media communication has focused on determining the extent to which users exploit such structural affordances to form ‘virtual communities’, which may or may not be judged to meet the prerequisites of offline communities (i.e. a shared set of cultural references, a regular pattern of interaction, some sense of belonging). In this talk, however, I am interested less in the structural elements of community formation, or the extent to which online communities compare to offline ones, and I focus instead on the ways in which social media users imagine and discursively construct online communities.
Drawing on examples from my own research, as well as that of other researchers, I will outline how social media facilitates different types of social organization – around shared interests, ambient affiliation (Zappavigna 2010) and/or the extension of offline groups – and how particular patterns of group interaction develop as a result. Reflection on the nature of these online communities raises questions over the consequences for the way people communicate via social media.

19 March
Reading and discussion session, led by Tony Capstick, Lancaster University
Blommaert, J. (2012). Writing as sociolinguistic object. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 42.
Available on: http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/babylon/tpcs/ (Paper 42)

NOTE: 10-12 April
Conference: Twitter and Microblogging: Political, Professional and Personal Practices
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/event/4059/