Case studies

Archambault 2011

• Many African communities have seen couples break up due to the way that mobile phones provides a space to air out issues that usually remain hidden

• Mobile phones reshape intimate relationships by making communication traceable and enabling surveillance

Archambault - implications

• Challenges early positive views of technology by showing that mobile phones have mixed effects: they help people stay connected and share information, but they also create conflict

• Much like conventional forms of  literacy we must adopt a flexible approach - phones are neither good or bad but depend on how they are used.

Gow 1990 - background

• Piro communities have high literacy rates due to the Summer Institute of Linguistics educational programmes in 1940 - piro see this as the moment they were liberated from slavery

• Literacy came to stand for freedom

Gow (1990)

• The Piro interpreted writing through shamanic and aesthetic frameworks e.g Yona, ayahuasca,

• Indicates that literacy gains meaning through local cosmology and power relations rather than simply decoding text.

Love Letters in Jungiau Nepal - Ahearn 2004

• Increasing female literacy rates in Nepal have seen a rise in love letter and came to be seen as a marker of a ‘developed’ person

• This idea of development is promoted by government sponsored texts that promote nationalism and age/gender hierarchies

• Can lead to abuse - women realise their lovers may be crueler than they thought/leave them after they have eloped when they are isolated from family

The Vai of Liberia - Scribner & Cole 1981(In Street 1994)

• Different literacies (Vai, Koranic, English) produced different cognitive skills - e.g Koranic literacy is good for memory activities

• Shows that it is the social practices of literacy—not literacy itself—that shape thinking, challenging the autonomous model.

Heath 1983

• Studied three communities in the rural American South

• Children’s success in school depended on how closely their home literacy practices matched school norms → schooled literacy is culturally specific and reproduces class inequality.