Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

For many transnational students in North America, digital literacies entail precarious participation—the adaptive engagement in digital literacy practices under conditions of systemic vulnerability and instability. This multiple case study examines how Chinese international students at a Canadian university perceive and navigate the precarity of their digital literacy practices across national and cultural boundaries. Findings reveal that the four participants exhibit tacit sensitivity to transnational digital precarity, employ strategic adaptation, and engage in measured resistance that cautiously transgresses digital norms. These insights contribute to broader discussions on digital literacies, transnational literacies, and digital precarity, extending and complicating existing frameworks in writing studies, literacy studies, and media studies.

This article explores the writing and reading requirements of the literacy practices, events, and texts characteristic of work mediated by the online labor platforms of the gig economy, such as Airtasker and Freelancer, which bring together people needing a job done with those willing to do it. These emerging platform-based discourse communities and their associated literacies are a new domain of social activity. Based on an examination of seven gig economy platforms, the present article examines the core literacy event in the gig economy, the posting and bidding for tasks, together with the texts that enhance and support this process. While some tasks require written texts as the outcome or product, all tasks involve the creation of some form of written text as part of doing the work. These texts are both interactional and interpersonal. As well as being a part of negotiating and then getting a task done, they relate to the complexities of building the identities, knowledge, and relationships required of those working in a virtual work space rather than a traditional workplace. While most of these texts reflect familiar text types, the core text cycle is argued to be an “emergent” genre. Implications for education are presented.

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students’ multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students’ literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

This article examines students’ literacy practices during Mass and other Catholic religious services in a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It discusses three dimensions of their literacy practice: (a) how parents, teachers, and priests draw on the tradition of Catholic schooling and ritual to structure what constitutes literacy during Mass; (b) how students use body posture and performative orientations to the text of the liturgy to engage in these structured practices; and (c) how students strategically use these performative literacy practices for advantage and social positioning. These results invite complicating what literacy practices are valued in contemporary urban Catholic school and how opportunities to draw on these literacy practices are unequally distributed among students for unequal gain.

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.

While transnationalism has emerged as a growing area of interest in Writing Studies, the field has not fully examined how migrants’ movement across national borders shapes their literacy practices. This article offers one answer to this question by reporting on an ethnographic study of the transnational religious literacies of a community of undocumented Brazilian immigrants in a former mill town in Massachusetts. A grounded theory analysis of (a) participants’ accounts of their literacy experiences before and after migration, (b) their writing, and (c) ethnographic observations reveals the following: As participants crossed a border and were excluded from state documentary projects, they began to write within other literacy institutions, namely, transnational churches, that have historically documented subjects and whose reach extends across national borders. The author concludes that as the field of Writing Studies continues to explore transnational literacies, it would do well to take into account the materiality of national borders, which can shape possibilities for written communication in a global context.

This article reports on a digital ethnography that examines writing, authorship, and self-publication in an online niche market. Drawing on interview and web data collected over 3 years, it focuses on the writing practices that have supported the production, distribution, and sanction of 13 ebooks self-published by online poker players. The article advances an understanding of authorship as sustained interaction among writers and readers as the work of publishing becomes absorbed into online networks as literate activity. In lieu of the capital investment of publishers that produces the materiality of the book, participants in these spaces have manufactured valued texts through collective literacy practices, coming to a loose consensus on what constitutes a book, and working together to enable proprietorship over texts, even amid environments of mass collaboration.

In teaching and researching English for Law, considerable effort has been put into the fine-grained description of legal genres and accounts of associated legal literacy practices. Much of this work has been carried out in the academic context, focusing especially on genres encountered by undergraduate law students. The range of genres which must be taught in professional legal writing and drafting courses is comparatively underresearched in the applied linguistics literature. This article explores one such underresearched genre, the barrister’s opinion. The article reports the findings of a genre analysis (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990), drawing on the written opinions of five Hong Kong barristers, individual interviews with the barristers, and data from background information questionnaires.The study adopts a multi-perspective approach to genre analysis, drawing on the accounts of specialist informants to explain the genre as socially situated rhetorical action. Thus, the genre is analyzed in terms of its intertextual and interdiscursive writing context, generic move structure, and lexico-grammatical textualization. It is suggested that the findings may usefully be applied to the teaching of legal writing and drafting in a variety of contexts.

In what ways do students understand and document literacies within out-of-school communities in their school-sponsored writings? How can community literacy sites and public perceptions of community disrepair stimulate students to create written responses on the politics of place? These questions are at the heart of this article's investigation into relationships between writing and contexts. Drawing on research in writing and place as well as in out-of-school literacies, the author examines undergraduate writing students' investigations of literacy practices and acts of meaning making. She details how these acts can motivate students to both document and critique literacies within a local urban community in close proximity to their university setting. The author concludes by discussing how students critiqued forms of community literacies through writing, acts that have implications for the ways writing researchers can work to bridge distances (e.g., cultural, sociological, ideological, political) across school and community spaces.

In the research project Literacy Practices in Working Life, the role played by reading and writing in common nonacademic occupations in Sweden was investigated. The results highlight not only some typical ways of using writing to frame units of work but also differences reflecting the main focus of work (“people” or “things”) and overall organizing principles. This article deals with patterns in the use of writing, which may be related to modern ways of organizing work (efficiency and flexibility, personal responsibility, identification with the company, etc.). Case studies show a range of literacy practices—running from extensive and rather complicated uses of writing connected with individual responsibility to very restricted and dependent uses of reading and writing governed by a top-down organization. Examples illustrate how emerging ways of governing work through written discourse, related to the new, knowledge-based work order, create very different roles for workers.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

This article builds upon the concept of hybridity to affirm the relevance of poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture in the lives of urban youth. Its focus examines the blending of seemingly disparate forms to understand how young people, in particular young people of color, negotiate their multilayered social worlds. One of these worlds is that of Antonio’s, a 17-year old African American male, whose interest and practice of creating poetry within and outside of classrooms offers a lens into a growing community of youth poets in U.S. cities. An analysis of Antonio’s case suggests how intersecting literacy practices served as viable building blocks for realizing and expanding his ability to write. Central to the argument is the notion of hybrid literacy learning and why it is important to recognize youth’s cultural and literacy practices that both excite and engage them while continuing to develop their reading, writing, and other communicative skills.

This article presents findings from case studies of two Latina bilingual high school writers engaged in a year-long research and writing project. Both young women demonstrated unique patterns related to their approaches to inquiry and performance of literacy practices. By using an ecological framework to integrate a multiple literacies perspective into the study, the author argues that both young women engaged in “hidden literacies” that indicated potential toward the development of academic English. The article closes with suggestions for a reframing of common approaches to the study of academic English.

The emphasis on the individual in Western culture has blinded us to how social relationships affect literacy acquisition and, conversely, how literacy transforms these relationships. This article deals with the literacy practices, specifically, letter writing, of Lithuanian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the end of the 19th century. For these immigrants, reading and writing were collaborative activities, not the individual, solitary acts that we often assume them naturally to be. Individuals often turned to more literate neighbors for assistance in tasks involving reading and writing, an extension of the concept of talka, the Lithuanian tradition of collective assistance. Parents also frequently engaged the help of sons and, especially, daughters in writing letters to relatives in Lithuania. Letter writing thus not only fostered solidarity between immigrant and their relatives in Lithuania but also between Lithuanian immigrant parents and their increasingly literate, Americanized children.

This article treats the representations that are studied in situated literacy and an associated methodological approach based on semantic analysis that characterizes the representations in a systematic and principled manner. Application of the method is illustrated for four situated literacy examples: (a) mother-child word-naming games, (b) children's story writing, (c) journalistic writing, and (d) technical writing. The description of representations that is obtained constitutes an explanation of the literacy actions in that it reveals cultural, social, and cognitive influences on these actions.

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

This study is a phenomenological reading, or documentary account, of one child's early experiences as a writer. Through narrative, explication, and argument, I attempt to analyze Samantha's activity as a writer within a fuller portrayal of her as a person, by embedding her early literacy practices within the broader context of her expressive needs, social interactions and interests, and learning patterns in both formal and informal settings.