Kate Pahl, our CMLL Visiting Scholar, will be in residence at Teachers College this month, April 13th – 15th. There will be several opportunities for anyone interested to learn more about her work. Kate Pahl is Professor of Literacies in Education at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of ‘Materializing literacies: The uses of literacy revisited’ (Bloomsbury 2014).

On April 14th, she will present in our Speaker Series: Co-producing literacies: ways of knowing in communities.
Time: 6:00p (reception at 5:30p)
Room: 152 Horace Mann
RSVP 

This presentation will describe a collaborative ethnographic research project that is currently underway in Rotherham with a focus on ‘Imagining better communities and making them happen’ funded by the ESRC through the Connected Communities programme. At the heart of the project is an exploration of how different ways of knowing or ‘unknowing’ (Vasudevan 2011) can inform understandings of community literacy practices. Drawing on the concept of ‘materializing literacies’ as a touchstone for generative research, this presentation will describe different understandings of literacy in communities.These ways of knowing incorporate textiles, art-work, images, oral stories and draw on the magical spaces of the everyday. This presentation will re-think the way literacies are conceived and understood through collaborative ethnographic research with girls and women, using literary and post-colonial theory. By bringing together a hermeneutic understanding of the social, drawing on post- colonial literary texts, a complex picture of literacy as meshed with ‘the fabric of our lives’ will be presented. This presentation draws on Pahl (2014) – an approach to literacy that combined multimodality with aesthetic and literary theory together with the New Literacy Studies to re-think how literacy is understood within multilingual community contexts.

Learn more about Pahl’s work in her article titled, “The Aesthetics of Everyday Literacies: Home Writing Practices in a British Asian Household,” recently published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly.

Image: ‘The Fabric of Our Lives”: The ‘Listening Voices – Telling Stories’ project in Rotherham