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With the continued deepening of socio-economic and cultural ties across traditional borders, the teaching profession has also increasingly become characterised by mobility. In Thailand, non-local (migrant) teachers of various professional and lingua-cultural backgrounds have become an integral part of the education system. Digital literacies appear a key part of this phenomenon, as much recruitment now takes place online, in particular in informal settings like social media. In this presentation, I will examine data collected from one such recruitment space, a Facebook group with a large and diverse population. I will focus on two over-arching themes: Translocalism, examining especially how themes from current socio-political debates across the globe were introduced into various debates within the group, and translingualism, discussing attempts to enforce an English-only policy in the group and how these were resisted through creation of ad hoc translanguaging spaces.

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In this talk, Dr. Jayne Lammers (University of Rochester, NY, USA) shares from her experience of conducting research in Indonesia with her local partner, Dr. Puji Astuti. In the study, they sought answers to question what are the digital literacy practices of Indonesian secondary students, and collected data through surveys and focus groups with 618 participants from seven secondary schools in Central Java, Indonesia. Using abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) to engage in systematic defamiliarization and theorizing, they have traced chains of meaning that began with surprises in their data. Positioning the researchers and participants as global meaning makers (Tierney, 2018), Lammers will explore both the enactment of the collaboration and the lessons learned from the youth.

CANCELLED – in support of UCU strike

Adriana C. Lopes, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro

1pm UK time

During the 2020 pandemic I struggled as a researcher at heart because the whole notion of ‘going into the field’ became challenging if not impossible. Of course, the urgency and uncertainty of the pandemic disrupted familiar research practices because the world was in crisis. But I had the good fortune to engage in a digital/analogue research creation project by sheer serendipity with Harriet Hand and Mark Shillitoe that led to one of the most fascinating research journeys I have experienced to date. For this presentation, I will talk through the intergenerational research study on mapping and multimodal creations with nine-and-ten-year olds online in Delft, the Netherlands, undergraduate students at the University of Bristol, and middle-aged researchers.

RESCHEDULED TO

Friday 25th February

3pm UK time

Adriana C. Lopes, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro

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This talk is grounded on our fieldwork in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. For a decade, we have been interested in how residents of peripheral neighborhoods – the Complexo do Alemão favelas and Baixada Fluminense, a group of cities in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro – oppose the commonsense elitist discourse that they live in a state of “deprivation”, and therefore education ought to bring them food, culture and civilization. Our interlocutors in the field instead appropriate technologies, resources, and cultural tropes that have enabled them to strive as ethical subjects and to “survive” social inequities, such as necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) and the penal state (Wacquant 2012) – legacies of colonialism that disproportionately affects Brazilian peripheries.

“Literacies of survival” refer to practices of appropriation of writing that exceed modern binaries such as literality and metaphor, code and inference, life and death, school and society, rule of law and penal state. For this talk, we will focus on two case studies that display literacies of survival.

In the first case, we build on Liliana, a 7-year-old girl from Baixada Fluminense who was caught up in a media scandal involving her ability to read. Since an early age, she had been visiting the Paulo Freire library in the area, and news about her prolific reading skills travelled to news outlets. Yet one of TV shows displaying her story invoked an autonomous model of literacy (Street 2003) to prove that her reading skills and her rituals of reading to family members would have been “faked”: according to the media narrative, she only staged her reading, but did not “decode” sentences.

In the second case, we focus on Raphael Calazans, a human rights activist from Complexo do Alemão who has had a trajectory of schooling in middle class spaces. In a series of interactions with us, he challenges dominant dichotomies, such as socialization “within” and “outside” schooling, code and inference, and life and death. In questioning his own positionality within and outside hegemonic schooling institutions and the favela, he further complicates commonsense assumptions about literacy and language.

We intend to think through both case studies with the audience and discuss what these empirical cases have to teach us about literacy, agency and survival to longstanding inequities of capitalism

1pm UK time

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From July-August 2020, we ran an online survey investigating the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic affected the UK public’s reading habits. We gathered responses from 860 participants, including nearly 100,000 words of free-text responses, which forms a substantial amount of data ready for analysis. In this paper, we discuss our corpus-driven analysis of responses to the survey in order to investigate whether people had increased or reduced their reading, preferred or avoided particular genres, revisited books from the past, and refined the ways they read and talked about reading with others. Focussing on keywords, we extracted salient topics including those of escapism and re-reading as a form of comfort. We reflect on how such data can be used to better understand the coping strategies people use in times of crisis.