Catherine Kell

‘Making Things Happen’: Literacy and Agency in Housing Struggles in South Africa

Abstract While ethnographies of literacy have played an important role in the shift towards understandings of literacy as situated social practice, these understandings have not necessarily impacted on day-to-day development work. This article draws on data collected during two periods of ethnographic work on the literacy practices of participants in grassroots social movements engaging in struggles around housing in South Africa. In this focus on the quotidian tactics of the participants in such projects, mundane everyday texts (like hand-written lists, memos, bank cheques, plans, invoices and so on) were central to the carrying across and projecting of meanings into new contexts and important in the construction of agency for individuals (in the cases reported here, for three individual women). Through the use of multi-site, micro-ethnographic methods, a language of description was developed for identifying, reconstructing and analysing the sequences of events through which people acted to change their living conditions and make things happen. However, recontextualisation and projection of meanings did not require literate individuals, nor did it always require alphabetical texts; it could be accomplished by groups in which literacy was viewed as a distributed capacity or it could be carefully mediated by development workers with a focus on capacities rather than deficits, it could draw on a wider range of mediational means like physical occupations of sites, or building extensions. The research showed that a lack of attention in organisational procedures to the detailed politics of recontextualisation and projection of meanings in such trajectories indicated the reification of literacy and its use as a marker of status and stratification. On the other hand, when careful attention was paid to this detail, literacy became naturalised, as a pragmatics of engagement in textually-mediated practices, less implicated in gate-keeping and conflict. Some studies in the critical discourse tradition in a range of fields have explored ‘chains of discourse’ and make claims that discourse is recontextualised and resemiotised as it travels through contexts, tending towards legitimacy and authority, and this in turn leads to permanence and stability in infrastructures and environments. The article argues that in contexts of extreme poverty, conflict and lack of resources, such uni-directionality cannot be assumed.

“Making people happen”: materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories

Trans-contextual analysis focuses on the distribution of meanings over space and time and the variable resources which come into play to configure this distribution. This article traces two lines of inquiry: first, it outlines a unit of trans-contextual analysis which involves the tracing of recontextualizing and resemiotising moves within meaning-making trajectories. This proposed unit of analysis takes mobility as its premise and provisionality as its condition, and it asks what do we learn about meaning-making and about society from the examination of this distribution and these resources? I compare two different sequences of events, one from a visit to a remote village in Tanzania; the other from an ethnography in a house-building project in South Africa. I detail the recontextualizing and resemiotising moves and the resources that come into play in each. The second line of inquiry focuses on the “joins” that link meaning-making across contexts, enabling its projection beyond the local. The article seeks to understand the role of objects together with language in contributing to meaning-making across space and time, and to problematize the different ontologies and theoretical accounts that have been offered for interpreting the relation between language and objects. I argue that the unit of trans-contextual analysis and a return to objects together can contribute more precise lines of inquiry to the development of a sociolinguistics of mobility and complexity.

Objects and language in trans-contextual communication

In their recent book titled How Matter Matters, Carlile et al. (2013) cite Barad (2003, 801) who lamented that: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in...

Book Review: Literacy in the New Media Age

This is the ninth book to appear in Routledge’s series ‘Literacies’, which aims to publish books which ‘situate reading and writing in its broader institutional contexts where literacy is considered as a social practice’. This approach is generally known by the term ‘new literacy studies’ (Gee, 1990; Street, 1993, amongst others). Kress’s is the first book in this series to address literacy as such, not literacy practices, nor does it specifically address literacy ‘in context’. In fact it largely extricates literacy from context. In this approach, Kress implicitly addresses himself to a number of questions which have been raised in the past few years about the new literacy studies. Worth noting here are the very interesting questions raised about the materiality of literacy in Brandt & Clinton (2002) as well as Street’s presentations around the problems connected with using the term literacy as a metaphor for areas unrelated to print (1997). This book therefore addresses a gap and/or presents a challenge. Kress states that his interests are partial, they lie in the materiality of the resources whereby people communicate and make meaning: