Abstract
Locating itself broadly within the 'sociolinguistics of mobility' (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to 'trace resonance' in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging 'literacy sponsorscapes' (Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary culture. Despite its variance and recent resurgence (Lillis and Scott, 2007), academic literacies continues to be reduced to: (1) an instrumentalist and pragmatic pedagogy, and (2) the ability to navigate academic conventions and practices of higher education (Lea and Street, 1998), in particular the writing classroom (Castelló and Donahue, 2012). This centred focus, however, is limiting, and silences the more innocuous and less tangible sponsors of academic literacies: mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies. Set against the backdrop of globalization, and grounded in two case studies, this article considers how academic literacies are not an 'and' but an 'elsewhere', thereby emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic space in academic literacy development. In it, we chart new directions for scholarship and underscore how ideologies shift with mobilities (Pennycook, 2008; Pennycook, 2012), are indexed by identities (De Costa and Norton, 2016; Hawkins, 2005), and extend through technologies (Lam, 2009; Rymes, 2012). By outlining a literacy sponsorscapes framework for studying academic literacies, this article highlights the purchasing power of seeing academic literacies not solely as a field or set of practices, but rather as a locating mechanism for studying a range of hybridized repertoires that are shaped and constituted by the physical and social spaces that contemporary youth inhabit.
Highlights
For well over 30 years, academic literacies has remained a significant interdisciplinary field and study of communicative practices across higher education
The literacy sponsorscapes model we propose above demands that educators respond to the ever-shifting communicative landscapes of academic literacies.As a theoretical and methodological tool, it responds to the call to trace literacies across the more mobile and technological lived realities of our contemporary time
To date, the rich body of critical ethnographic work on academic literacies has illustrated how literacy development is a social enterprise that is inextricably linked to issues surrounding social justice and equity
Summary
For well over 30 years, academic literacies has remained a significant interdisciplinary field and study of communicative practices across higher education. Borrowing from Brandt (1998), literacy sponsorscapes are a conceptual neologism that utilizes Appadurai’s (1996) dimensions of -scapes (for example, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes) to highlight the convergence of community and the local across an increasingly global and connected world It takes into account how mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies are always already steeped in the more formal understanding of literacy sponsors. Literacy sponsorscapes are a theoretical endeavour, working to locate the mobilities, identities, ideologies, and technologies inherent in learning the particular skills and knowledge of a discipline, and an outlook on tracing experience.Working to leverage the compositional fluency and communicative repertoires that all composers already possess, literacy sponsorscapes work to provide what Latour (2005) would call a ‘backstage view’ of production It traces the experiences students have with sponsors and the range of repertoires used to navigate the multiple literacy contexts in which they work, live, and learn
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