Domestic work, learning and literacy practices across transnational space

Abstract

This paper explores the learning experiences and literacy practices of a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal, reporting on ethnographic data collected between 2008 and 2013. Drawing on the conceptualisation of literacy as a social practice, as well as the notion of translocational positionality, it examines the way in which the women’s emerging literacy practices in English interacted with their experiences as migrant workers. It argues that understanding the transnational nature of the women’s lives is essential to understanding the complex ways in which literacy was threaded through their social and material practices. In doing so it points to the need for a more complex conceptualisation of context and of the relationship between the local and global within literacy research, which pays attention to the way in which literacy practices interact with processes entailing movement and positioning across boundaries and between different transnational spaces.