today is day 1 of the 42 days of our department’s version of the general exam process (it’s actually 56 days if you count the 2 weeks that the committee gets to read what you’ve produced in those 42 days).
the first of the three questions on which I’ll be writing is as follows:
In recent decades, the field of literacy studies has expanded, been challenged and revised. Arguably, the biggest impact on the field has been the New Literacy Studies, led by James Gee, David Barton, and Brian Street. The New Literacy Studies offers the view that meaning-making, specifically reading and writing, only make sense when considered in the context of political, social and cultural practices. While the view of literacy as a social practice has generated a great deal of research concerned with ideological and historical contexts, few theorists have considered the importance of physical contexts, i.e. spaces and places, to literacy practices. How then, is place and space attended to in literacy scholarship? How does where things occur matter to the formation of community and meaning-making? What is gained (or lost) when these physical spaces go virtual?
Now, the answer to this is probably an entire dissertation, but somehow I’ll be addressing it in about 15 pages…
The most useful thing that I’ve read is The Production of Space–although I’m still looking for other seminal space-geography books to cram into my head before tackling the question…
