Abstract
This issue centers the stories of people who (re)define what meaningful literacy practices are from such positions as an aging mother, women refugees, a returning student, and formerly incarcerated people.These articles explore how literacy practices shift and change over the life course and across contexts in ways that ask us to reorient our own understanding of the relationship between literate subjects and the knowledge they produce.In this issue's lead article, "Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing, " Louise Wetherbee Phelps undertakes the study and analysis of an unpublished body of lifespan writing by her late mother, Virginia Wetherbee, as part of her own contribution to retrospective lifespan studies and "literacy lives in relation" (2).Phelps begins by asking how to undertake the daunting task of a project that has challenged her in multiple ways: "challenges of methodof genre of grief, responsibility, and learning under the condition and unpredictable trajectory of [her] own aging" (ibid).One of the sayings Phelps inherited from Wetherbee, "proceed as way opens, " provides a framework for a series of articles in which Phelps considers the intersections of longitudinal and lifespan studies, late-age literacies, cross-generational literacies, slow composing, and ecosystemic and chronotopic approaches to literacy.In this article, Phelps charts the relationship between her own composing project on parenting and her aging literacy in figures that visualize a pattern of moments of disruption and resilience that Phelps terms "bouncing back." Ultimately, Phelps reminds us that our understanding of the intersections of literacy and aging are, to quote an embroidered saying that Wetherbee passed on to her and that hangs by her desk, "It's not as simple as you think."Katie Silvester examines how women refugees living in "protracted displacement" (39), or "decades-long displacement and massive refugee resettlement process" (ibid), use dialogue, narrative, and re-story to offer perspectives on literacy learning across their lifespans.In "At the 'Ends of Kinship': Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement, " Silvester draws from an ethnographic study of women's literacy learning experiences in the Bhutanese refugees resettlement process and considers the relationality they take up as they negotiate various people, places, and contexts.Specifically, she elaborates on "the ends of kinship" (40), which she defines as "a dialogic space of negotiating relational ties that have become stretched and transformed by localglobal forces" (ibid).This dialogic space allows women to "kin-script and (kin)figure their own ideas about and practices of literacy in relation to kin and friends as these relational ties stretch, contract, and become transformed throughout a protracted displacement and ongoing resettlement process" (42).In the process of kinship, friendship, and woman-centered community, these women were able to redefine their literate subjectivities, relationships, and practices through grounded, embodied, and imaginal means.Silverster argues for a dynamic methodological and theoretical approach to better understand adult literacy learning in migration through "the tensions and contradictions of everyday living in relation to others over time" (46).Maggie Shelledy's "Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry" uses case studies to explore "the literacy myths that surround higher education in prison" by foregrounding formerly incarcerated people's experiences with and the effects of their participation
- Journal
- Literacy in Composition Studies
- Published
- 2023-05-17
- DOI
- 10.21623/1.10.2.1
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