Lecture in Literacy Studies
This talk will tell the story of how families separated across borders write -- and learn new ways of writing -- in pursuit of both love and money. Over the last decade, global economic inequity has resulted in a rapid increase in labor migration. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside the countries of their birth. The untold drama behind these numbers is that labor migration often separates parents from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the pocketbook, also poses problems for the heart.
Kate Vieira is Assistant Professor of English, Composition and Rhetoric, at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research focuses on the social history of literacy and migration. Her first book, ‘American by Paper’: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacies (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) details how migrants write to attain papers, how they write when they cannot attain papers, and how their writing can function as papers. All 40 million migrants currently living in the U.S. must negotiate papers, and they often do so through everyday acts of writing. The book describes how migrants in two communities—one from the Azores, largely documented, and one from Brazil, largely undocumented—come to experience literacy not as a means of assimilation, as educational policy makers often believe, nor as a means of empowerment, as literacy scholars often hope, but instead as papers, those authoritative bureaucratic objects that are the currency of highly literate societies.
Professor Vieira's current project, Literacy Learning in Migrants’ Homelands, asks how mass migration shapes writing in migrants’ homelands. Homeland residents often receive what she is calling “writing remittances”—the letters, emails, chats, and laptops that migrants send home to their loved ones. By detailing the local consequences of the global circulation of literacy, this project rethinks key literacy concepts, such as literacy’s ability to travel, from a transnational, digital, and materialist perspective. This project is funded by the Department of Education, The University of Wisconsin Research Competition, the Vilas Associates Award, and the Spencer Foundation.
The LiteracyStudies@OSU lecture series has made OSU the place for accomplished and emerging scholars to present major studies and preview works-in-progress.
For more information about this and other events, contact Michael Harwick (harwick.1@osu.edu) or Nora McCook (mccook.3@osu.edu).
Co-sponsored by Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy and Latino/a Studies in observance of Cesar Chavez Day.
Additionally, we have a second event with Dr. Vieira on Friday that is for graduate students: https://literacystudies.osu.edu/events/literacies-across-cultures. We would love for graduate students in your program to join Literacy Studies' GradSem about Vieira's work and literacies and culture (also in 311 Denney Hall) on Friday, 3/31 from 10-11:30am.
