Discussion Group

Academic year 2024-25.

Current Organiser: Karin Tusting k.tusting@lancaster.ac.uk

Hello and welcome back to the Literacy Research Centre Discussion Group. Please see below for the timetable for upcoming talks. Updates will be circulated via the LRDG mailing list.

28th February 2025

1pm UK time

Teams link

Jamie Duncan

Lancaster Literacy Research Centre (affiliate member)

Arts-activist literacies across a lifespan: An ethnographic biography of Ítala Isis and the (in)Visible Cities Movement in Rio de Janeiro

In this presentation, I discuss an approach to Lifespan Writing Research I developed through longitudinal literacy ethnography on social movements in Rio de Janeiro (Duncan 2021). Although that work covered a range of protest literacies over a ten year period (2006-2016), in this talk I focus on arts-activist literacies across the lifespan of one person and a small scale arts movement that she founded: Ítala Isis (1977-) and the (in)Visible Cities Movement (2009-2015). Whilst short form written genres are commonplace in arts practices (e.g., via graffiti in street art and textual anchorage in visual arts generally), little has been said in Literacy Studies about the development and interrelations of such writing across the lifespan of artist practitioners and social movements. How for example might memories of childhood literacy events shape the forms and themes of protest inscriptions? How do less obvious examples of inscription practices inform arts-activism, such as stencil, sewing, and xylography? Moreover, in what ways have these arts practices and trajectories of texts become forms of activism and resistance in Brazilian socio-political settings? I will present data on these and related themes. A book and video which I was involved in producing that documents a 30 year retrospective of the work of Ítala Isis will be made available.

9th May 2025

1pm UK time

Teams link

Victoria Barritt

University of Sheffield

 

What role does literacy play in criminal justice?  

My curiosity about literacy’s role in the criminal justice system was sparked when my son started school and began learning to read. This curiosity shaped my PhD research project.  The study partnered with a regional Probation Service to explore how probation practitioners consider and respond to literacy needs when delivering criminal justice services.  Literacy is a topic rarely discussed in criminal justice research.  Yet, it is hard to understand criminology’s absence when “reading and writing are central to almost every stage of the [criminal justice] process” (UserVoice, 2021, p. 12).

Previous year’s discussion group schedules

2023-24

2022-23

2021-22

2020-21

2019-20

2018-19

2017-18

2016-17