Grassroots Literacy Research Articles

From grassroots literacy to transliteracies in the educational context of the Moldavian Csángó

ABSTRACT This paper investigates literacies in the Moldavian region of Romania, where bilingual speakers produce writings in a contested language they call the ‘Csángó mode of speaking’. The speakers sometimes define their language as collateral both with Standard Hungarian and Romanian. Our research question is the following: How are locally constructed collateral literacy practices transformed or neglected in standardising educational contexts? The theoretical question we raise in this article is whether Blommaert’s concept of grassroots literacy or the newer transliteracies framework is better suited to describe the process of a collateral language becoming literate. The collateral language, the Csángó mode of speaking, is no longer passed onto children by the parents, who still might use it among themselves, thus the children still might acquire a passive knowledge of it. Since 2001, a relatively popular educational programme teaching Standard Hungarian literacy has evolved. As our data, we use texts produced by c. 100 participants of the Moldavian Csángó Hungarian Educational Programme from eight villages. Our contribution is to investigate how transliteracies can constitute a resource not only for local ways of speaking, but also for the development of general literacy skills instead of skills bound to a single language.

Teachers using technology for co-teaching and crowdsourcing: The case of Global Read Aloud collaboration

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have increased opportunities for potentially beneficial teacher collaboration across schools. One manifestation of this can be found in the Global Read Aloud (GRA), a grassroots literacy project in which teachers and students from various schools, regions, and countries use ICT to connect around common readings. This research used surveys (N = 436) and interviews (N = 21) to explore the teacher collaboration associated with the GRA. We found that GRA collaboration involved crowdsourcing and co-teaching of various degrees of depth. Participants benefited from access to resources and like-minded educators, and were challenged by logistical and internal barriers.

Black Youth Poetry of 2020 and Reimagined Literacies

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in The Black Panther newspaper, these poems, many of which call for a “revolution,” are reflective of young people’s critical engagements with the world and the word. With critical literacy as a framework, I engage in critical discourse analysis to determine how the young poets reimagine literacy as they protest anti-Black policing and racism. By focusing on young people’s own grassroots literacy initiatives, which call for the reimagination of blackness and whiteness, and demand truth, justice, and reimagined futures, I demonstrate how educators can reimagine literacy practices to center students’ criticalities and prioritize racial justice.

Resonating embodiment

The Safaliba are an Indigenous Ghanaian ethnolinguistic group of 7,000–9,000 people (Sherris, Schaefer and Mango Aworo, 2019). They mostly inhabit their traditional lands in a rural area of Ghana’s Savannah Region. There are seven towns and villages where Safaliba (the name of both their language and themselves as a people) is a dominant communicative language resource, as well as another seven towns where Safaliba as a communicative language resource is subordinate (see Fig. 1) to approximately eleven additional Indigenous Ghanaian languages (e.g., Birifor, Choruba, Dagaare, Deg, Gonja, Jula, Kamara, Lobiri, Siti, Vagla, and Waali). Safaliba is a Gur language with an expanding and vibrant, although small, grassroots literacy activity in five government primary schools, two private primary schools, and one informal adult education program. Safaliba storytellers, poets, and teenagers in the communities are using the language in booklets, newsletters, and in some experimental attempts at Safaliba Hip Hop. The purpose of this paper is to document Safaliba metaphors that have as their source domain the human body and their target domain everyday human interactions. We argue that these target domains, although abstract, transform the limits of embodiment and thereby resonate with similar materiality. For instance, if we look at the verb phrase le o? baya poo, which literally means /fall between someone’s legs/, in conceptual metaphor theory that would be the source domain. Its target domain is its figurative meaning, which for the Safaliba is /to beg someone for help or something/. The target domain resonates with components of the original embodied state of something or someone falling between the legs of another, yet is transformed to mean, metaphorically, an abstraction – to supplicate, beg, plead. Another example would be dibi nye?a, which as a source domain means /press chest/, and its target domain is the figurative /console, comfort/.

Book Review: John Trimbur, Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record: A Textual History of Asbestos Activism in South Africa

Book Review: John Trimbur, <i>Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record: A Textual History of Asbestos Activism in South Africa</i>

Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey

Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey

Navigating COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in Vancouver’s North Shore: official signs, grassroots literacy artefacts, monolingualism, and discursive convergence

ABSTRACT This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area’s parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province’s lockdown. Following the principles of visual, walking ethnography, I walked through numerous locations, observing and recording the visual representations of the province’s policies and discourses of lockdown and social distancing. Examples of change were most evident in the rapid addition to social space of top-down signs, characterised mainly by multimodality and monolingualism, strategically placed in ways that encouraged local people to abide by social-distancing. However, through this process of observation and exploration, I noticed grassroots semiotic artefacts such as illustrated stones with images and messages that complemented the official signs of the provincial government. As was the case with the official signs and messages, through a process of discursive convergence, these grassroots artefacts performed a role of conveying messages and discourses of social distancing, public pedagogy, and community care.

Translanguaging instead of standardisation: Writing Romani at school

AbstractIn most public education in the western world the existence of a standardized language variety is still regarded as a precondition of teaching writing. This stance generates a problem in situations where no standardized variety matches the children’s home language practices and no traditions of an extended and standardised literacy exist. Roma students in Hungary have to acquire writing skills in the majority language (Hungarian), since the teaching of writing cannot rely on a standardized Romani language. In this way, school writing activities seem unrelated to the local discoursal practices of their own community. This puts Romani-speaking children at a disadvantage in learning to write, and reduces their chances of academic success. This paper reports on an ongoing project in Tiszavasvári, Hungary, designed to offer an alternative to approaches that wish to eliminate the disadvantages of Roma students by creating a standardized language. It explores the possibility of applying a translanguaging approach to the teaching of writing, arguing that if teachers allow students to draw on their local Romani-bounded non-standardised language practices, including the grassroots literacy activities occurring in the community, their general writing skills can be improved. For this to happen, teachers must be trained in translanguaging pedagogy, so that they can transcend the boundaries staked out by monolingual ideologies. The hitherto prevailing view that posits an indissoluble connection between standard, school and writing should be set aside. It should also be realized that general linguistic competences can, and should, be separated from language-specific competences. A key endeavour of the Tiszavasvári project has been to convert teachers to the translanguaging stance, and some promising signs can be reported. The introduction of local translanguaging practices into the teaching of writing fostered new learning practices among the students and began to change the pedagogical stance of teachers participating in the project.

At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community by Frank Salomon

Reviewed by: At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community by Frank Salomon Catherine J. Allen Frank Salomon, At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community. London: Routledge, 2017. 252 pp. At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community, the latest addition to Frank Salomon's distinguished oeuvre, continues a trajectory beginning in the 1970s with ethnohistorical research on Inka-period polities in Ecuador (cf. Salomon 2009). Next came the monumental annotated translation from Quechua of the colonial Huarochirí Manuscript (Salomon and Urioste 1991). Fascinated by Huarochirí's mythic landscape, Salomon turned his research interests to the ethnography and historiography of this mountainous region in the Peruvian province of Lima. In 1994, in the village of Tupicocha, he happened upon an anthropological gold mine—a full set of patrimonial khipus, complex string devices of the type used to administer the Inca's far flung empire. These Tupicocha khipus—unique in the Andean ethnographic record for their complexity and degree of preservation—became the subject of his next book. In The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (2004), Salomon draws on a broad swath of semiotic theory to contextualize the khipus within the social organization and dynamics of village life. Intrigued by the persistence of khipus in a contemporary context dominated by alphabetic literacy, Salomon teamed up with sociolinguist Mercedes Niño-Murcía to explore how "two pristinely different graphic technologies" have interacted to produce a distinctly local tradition of writing in the villages of the Huarochirí region (Salomon and Niño-Murcía 2011:83). The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing (Salomon and Niño-Murcía 2011), provides a fascinating look at grassroots literacy and the performative contexts in which it occurs. [End Page 931] While conducting research in Tupicocha, Salomon got wind of another village in the same region with a large complex of khipus. This was Rapaz where, in 2004, he found khipus enshrined in "a working temple of Andean mountain veneration" (1), a little stone and adobe house, called Kaha Wayi. At the Mountains' Altar tells of Salomon's eight-year encounter "with the people who conduct rites in the Kaha Wayi, about a partnership with the community that treasures it, and about the continuing enigma of its origin" (1). Unlike his previous work, this book is explicitly intended to be read by students in anthropology courses. Each chapter explores aspects of the Kaha Wayi from a different theoretical vantage point, in order to "put before students' eyes one case, an Andean temple, and treat it as an example for pondering the possibly pan-human matter of sacred ritual… Why is there any religion as opposed to no religion? In other words, how shall we study Anthropology of Religion" (9)? Salomon designs the book as an advanced course in the anthropology of religion, presenting different facets of a single ethnographic case, each with a different theoretical "handle" (15). The result is a deft inter-weaving of anthropological theory with history, archaeology, social organization, and poetics. He aims not to argue for any single theory, but to present theoretical perspectives in conversation with each other. As in The Cord Keepers, Salomon marshals different theories as they prove useful, without privileging one over the others. That the book is geared to students should not imply that it is an "easy read." Salomon has advanced students in mind, possibly sophisticated upper-level undergrads but mainly graduate students; this is clear from such asides as, "If you go this route, you are likely to hear a member of your doctoral advisory committee charge…" (214). I think anyone with a theoretical bent, at any level, will find much food for thought in Salomon's "take" on the various schools of thought running through today's anthropological discourse. His appreciative overview carries us through the sweep of socio-cultural theory, while the final chapters appraise contemporary developments, placing the often abstruse discourse of the "ontological turn," "new materialism," and "post-humanism" in a concrete ethnographic context. The ethnography itself is fascinating, especially to an Andeanist like myself, written in evocative prose that draws the...

Muslim Societies’ Ambivalence to Arabic: Reasons, Manifestations and Consequences

Literacy has been an essential part of Islam since its inception (Lydon 2010). Indeed, the first verse that was revealed of the Holy Quran demanded that the Prophet Muhammad and the first chapter revealed was called al-Qalamor the Pen (Lydon 2010). This dispositioned Muslims to seek knowledge even if it were located in China. The words of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, who advised Muslims to learn Arabic so as to sharpen their wisdom, resonate strongly with this Islamic disposition and indicate that the invocations of Allah echoed through the young and growing Muslim nation. In fact, the efforts of Muslims to transform these entreaties to read and to learn Arabic into a way of life fashioned a significant body of written works that covered scientific, literary and practical topics (Lydon 2010).In this regard, Lydon (2010) identifies that Muslim leaders, were quite distinguished from the leaders of other faith groups because they were devoted to equipping Muslims with Arabic, especially the recently converted. This ought to be seen as the earliest grassroots literacy campaign, which solidified Arabic's position as a Lingua Franca of the Muslim civilization for hundreds of years (Lydon 2010). Consequently, Lydon (2010) notes that while Islam developed a distinct pedagogical framework, its mission to promote Arabic literacy led to an inherent flexibility that resulted in the development of various teaching methods. For example, the renowned scholar Ibn Khaldun notes that in Muslim Spain, West Africa and Morocco students acquired Arabic literacy through the mastering of whole words whereas in Cairo and other parts of the Middle East this was done by learning individual letters of the alphabet (Lydon 2010).This is highly telling of the Muslims' active attempts to optimize acquisition and their commitment to entrenching knowledge of Arabic. Accordingly, the Muslim civilization was at the cutting-edge of many linguistic sciences such as, phonology, lexicography and grammar. Indeed, Arabic linguistics became an established science that attracted innovation and scholarship by the 800s CE (Meri 2006). Corpus collection, error analysis, random data collection and field research were common pursuits among the linguistic community of Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, a lexicographer and philologist extraordinaire, best known for his codex Kitab al-'Ayn (Meri 2006).Naturally, with such attentions to advancing Arabic prevalent in the society, the early Muslims developed a curriculum for Arabic. Hall and Stewart (2010) surveyed West African Islamic manuscripts from 1625 - 1925. It was concluded that the presence and absence of particular texts in various collections was strongly indicative of an empirical process of text selection that determined which texts were to be studied by students and which were more suited for scholars. Accordingly, these texts constituted an essential curriculum for Arabic, in which lexicography, syntax, phonology, rhetoric and prosody were set subjects with recommended readings associated with them.Unfortunately, the apple seems to have fallen very far from the tree. Literacy in some parts of the Arabic-speaking Muslim world is as low as 40% (Hammoud 2006). In fact, the most literate Arabic-speaking nations toy with an 80% literacy rate (Hammoud 2006). However, more importantly, it would seem that non-Arabic speaking Muslim societies are far less inclined to learn Arabic today than in the past. For although, some would argue that the preservation of Islam is dependent on the continued promotion of Arabic (Ahmad 2001), the reality is that Arabic has lost its position as a Muslim lingua Franca with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. The position of Arabic among Muslims has been further weakened by various factors, such as the rise of English as the new lingua Franca; the huge translation movements of religious Arabic texts; the rise of nationalism and globalism. As such the question about the place of Arabic in Islamic Education in the non-Arab Islamic world is a pressing one. …

Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey by Serkan Görkemli

Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey by Serkan Görkemli

From the Book &amp; New Media Review Editor's Desk

From the Book & New Media Review Editor's Desk Jessica Shumake As a journalist for my college newspaper, I frequently found myself tasked to initiate conversations with people attending campus events. I recall an assignment to write a story about residence hall move-in day. As I stood in a busy corridor, a Pentax camera strap around my neck, I attempted to initiate conversations with housing staff, parents, and new students as they carried cardboard boxes, plastic grocery bags, and rolled aluminum dollies. Few people wanted to talk with a student reporter on move-in day, though nearly all accepted the offer of an extra pair of hands to carry a load of stuff. After twenty minutes spent hesitating, I worked up the courage to ask a senior residence life advisor a question. Without a hint of irony, I ask if he had any "profound" thoughts to share with Captain's Log readers regarding being an RA. He looked at me, blinked a few times, and said "profound" with a rising intonation and an abrupt exhalation of air. Had I asked him to tell me a story about a day he felt challenged as an RA, about his biggest pet peeve, or about his hall's bulletin board design, the conversation may have gone in a useful direction. Instead, he turned away. With this misstep, the conversation ended before it ever really began: "move along, aspiring journalist, there's nothing 'profound' here worth discussing and people have real work to do." Even as a green reporter, I understood that a good quote, from the right source, is the lifeblood of a story worth reading. If no one I spoke with had anything substantial to say, there was no story. What I struggled with most as a reporter assigned to write a story about move-in day was my own confidence in drawing out strangers' stories. In fact, I did not write the student move-in article assigned to me and instead covered a soccer game as a photographer. As I reflect on the "profoundest" article I never wrote, it is the ordinariness of the situation that I turn over in my mind over twenty years later. As I read the reviews assembled in this issue, I am inspired by the firmness of purpose I know to be required in putting one's words into the world. Christopher M. Brown's review of Kelly Ritter's Reframing the Subject offers significant insight into post-WWII Coronet instructional films as proto-MOOCs (massively open online courses). Brown's review explores how these films addressed increasing enrollment and college access demands placed on educators due to the GI Bill. For large numbers of students, these films replaced "meaningful teacher-student interaction with oneway regurgitation of tasks modeled on-screen." Educational access narratives that require literacy instruction to be packaged as a commodity, through mass-delivery [End Page 74] systems, according to Brown's reading of Ritter, are more likely to be impediments to "social and economic mobility" than the salve they profess to be. Sandra Shattuck deploys a rhetoric of slowness and explores how our sense of time changes in the face our culture's obsession with speed in her review of Berg and Seeber's The Slow Professor. Rachel Buck's review of Composition in the Age of Austerity likewise explores labor and knowledge-building practices in writing studies and the impact of an increasingly stark fiscal landscape on the literacy needs and goals of our local communities. In Madelyn Pawlowski's review of Grassroots Literacies, she examines sexual literacy, collective action, and the normative narrative arcs through which LGBT and queer subjects navigate a politics of invisibility and becoming in Turkey. Sally Benson's review of The Desire for Literacy explores the unarticulated values and assumptions that constitute what literacy means for adults who seek to further their literacy learning in domains outside of formal school contexts. Eric A. House's review of Freedom Writing is keenly attentive to the function spirituality, music, and singing played in grassroots literacy education and civil rights activism for black people at the Sea Island Citizenship School in South Carolina. All of these reviews, and...

Weaving Relationship Webs: Tracing how IMing Practices Mediate the Trajectories of Chinese International Students

Abstract Over the past decade has been a dramatic increase in the international student population at U.S. universities with the total enrollments at many colleges having doubled or quadrupled within the span of a few years. Despite the size and scale of these transformations, there remains little situated research attending to how this population's home languages or grassroots literacies mediate their transitions into the university. To understand this process, this study attends to ways an online chat room called QQ mediates the students’ transition into a large Midwestern public university. In performing this work, the present study contributes to current scholarship on IMing and to what Haas, Carr, and Takayoshi (2011) characterize as interactive networked writing (INW). Given the centrality of INWs in students’ everyday lives, attention to this area is key for understanding how their out-of-school literacies afford and constrain their academic socialization and learning. This exigency is particularly critical in relation to transnational students, as the extant INW scholarship has focused primarily on English with limited attention to practices in other languages beyond North American borders.

Life encapsulated: Addressivity in Japanese life writing

This paper explores the ‘graphic artifacts’ (Hull, 2012) of jibunshi (‘personal history’), Japanese life writing, as semiotic time capsuling. By semiotic time capsuling, I mean a material process of effacement and resurfacing that mediates ‘non-adjacent timescales’ (Lemke, 2000). I focus on one grassroots literacy movement (original formulator of the genre name, jibunshi) and its ideology of addressivity, a fantasy of tele-communication that conjures up other times, other lives, and other values. The movement's practical philosophy of the life-historical ‘record’ as a time capsule-like sign addressed to distanced addressees offers its participants an unlikely tool for politicizing everyday life against hegemonic nationalist nostalgia.

Writing with an Accent: Orthographic Practice, Emblems, and Traces on Facebook

This article considers writing practices on Facebook and examines the use of otherwise stigmatized dialect features on social network sites. Whereas youth from Kenya's Lamu Archipelago avoid Swahili dialects in spoken interaction, they infuse digital exchanges with phonological qualities associated with these vernaculars. I propose that such acts of “writing with an accent,” and particularly orthographic signs' ambiguous status as either unintended traces of grassroots literacy or strategic emblems of identity enable a simultaneous appeal to local rootedness and a transcendence of that rootedness. Analyzing the strategic indeterminacy of such orthographic “accents” provides insight in the renegotiations of belonging that social media enable.

The pastoral home school: rural, vernacular and grassroots literacies in early Soviet Mongolia

Literacy before and after the 1921 People's Revolution in Mongolia has been largely represented by socialist historiography and post-socialist urban perspectives, which have rendered unofficial and non-pragmatic literacies invisible. This study explores rural, vernacular and grassroots literacy theories to recontextualize the pre-revolutionary category of Mongolian home schooling and to offer a new perspective – pastoral literacy – which enables historians and other researchers of Central Asia to represent the literacy practices of non-urban semi-nomads more accurately and vividly. This study applies the pastoral literacy perspective to literacy narratives extracted from University of Cambridge Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia interviews and demonstrates that pastoral home schooling was a socially and culturally salient domain for acculturating young Mongolians into the 1960s. Mongolian pastoral home schooling consisted largely of personal, male teacher–student relationships, authoritative teaching models, alphabet-based curricula, as well as texts and materials adapted from dominant religious and state literacies.

Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric by Adela C. Licona (review)

Reviewed by: Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric by Adela C. Licona Jenna Vinson Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric Adela C. Licona Albany: SUNY P, 2012. 207pp. In her 2011 review of rhetorician Adela C. Licona’s documentary work, Marianna Grohowski hoped readers of the Community Literacy Journal would be inspired by Licona’s efforts to make visible non-academic community literacies while also performing multimodal, community-relevant composition. Readers of the CLJ will be happy to learn that Licona’s latest publication continues to emphasize the value and impact of community literacies. Her book, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric, provides activists, researchers, and educators with 1) a new theoretical framework through which to analyze community literacies and coalitional practices and 2) a vibrant genre to consider for community literacy projects and rhetorical analysis: zines. Zines are self-published and often locally-circulated booklets that are made up of words and images. The term “zine” derives from magazines and fanzines. However, as Licona explains, zines are a distinct genre characterized by content that challenges societal norms and dominant ways of thinking. In addition, the authors of zines—or zinesters—refuse “to wait for permission or acceptance” to write, publish, or circulate these texts (20). In conducting research for this book, Licona analyzed zines from the 1980s and 1990s that were donated to the Sallie Bingham Center Special Collections Library at Duke University. In her book, Licona argues for the value of third-space zines as sites for rhetorical study, coalitional community building, and the “hopeful potential” of social change. “Third space” is a tricky concept that Licona describes as “the abyss beyond dualisms” (8). Licona explains that third space can reference a physical location (e.g., a place in-between two other places such as a borderland), a methodology (i.e., a way of reading a text to look for ambiguities or challenges to established dichotomies), and a practice (i.e., being conscious of both/and possibilities as opposed to either/or distinctions). Licona asserts that the tactics, or borderlands rhetorics, of third-space zinesters move us past marginalizing and reductive binaries to [End Page 92] both/and consciousness and productive ambiguities. Zines potentially resist dominant dichotomies, build coalition, share lived knowledge, and promote grassroots literacies. The book includes five chapters. In the first chapter, “Borderlands Rhetorics and Third-Space Sites,” Licona introduces readers to zines and carefully delimits the scope of her study. She explains that she searched the Duke University collection for zines that were collaboratively authored by what she calls third-space subjects—authors who are feminist, queer, and/or of-color and who use the genre to articulate shared goals for egalitarian social change. By focusing on third-space print zines, Licona writes that she can analyze the spatialized literacy practices of people collectively working toward social justice in the specific areas where the zines circulate. Then, Licona sets up the theoretical framework of her study, drawing from the critical terms and insights of Chicana scholars Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Emma Pérez as well as feminist cultural geographer Doreen Massey. Scholars who similarly seek to assess the contributions and strategies of marginalized rhetorics will appreciate Licona’s distinctions between criticism and coalitional consciousness, dichotomies and third space, and homogeneity and community. In the second chapter, “The Role of Imagination in Challenging Everyday Dominations,” Licona builds on Chandra Mohanty and Gloria Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the importance of imagination as a coalition-building tool. She examines how zinesters imagine new ways they (and others in their communities) can connect via lived experience, shared knowledges, and collective resistance to social injustice. Licona illustrates different strategies zinesters use to invite and inspire coalitional activism including visual/discursive interventions in issues that readers across lines of difference would find upsetting (e.g., Nike’s exploitation of Vietnamese laborers). Licona describes how zinesters’ explicit calls for multi-racial collaboration on an issue or action and code switching practices allow multiply literate readers to engage. Readers of CLJ will especially enjoy the section “Community Scribes: Lived and Relational Knowledges and Community Literacies” as Licona powerfully and persuasively demonstrates...

Grassroots literacy and the written record: Asbestos activism in South Africa

This article uses two key terms – ‘grassroots literacy’ and the ‘written record’ – to examine writing produced by the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG), a community organization in Kuruman, South Africa. The article considers the formation of theAIG's grassroots literacy in terms of the unequal distribution of semiotic resources in a stratified world system, with particular attention to how the allotment of the means of representation enables and constrains the capacity of texts to move across social locations. The article analyzes how theAIGnegotiates the paperwork of state, legal, and medical bureaucracies in compensation cases for asbestos‐related disease. It examines how theAIG's grassroots texts, such as monthly reports and handwritten/drawn maps, manage or not to circulate translocally, to take on semiotic mobility by making theAIG's interests known in the written record.Lekwalonyana le, le dirisa mareomagolo a mabedi – ‘go ruta baagi go buisa le go kwala’ le ‘rekoto e e kwadilweng’ – go lekola mokwalo o o tlhagisitsweng ke Abestos Interest Group (AIG), mogatlho wa set haba kwa Kuruman, Aforika Borwa. Lekwalonyana le, le sekaseka go tlhamiwa ga go ruta baagi go buisa le go kwala keAIGgo ya ka go aba ga tiriso ya didiriswa tsa matshwao ka mokgwa o o sa lekalekaneng mo bathong go lebeletswe thata mokgwa wa go aba ka kemedi e e kgotshang le go thibela bokgoni ba dipolelwana tse di kgonang go fitlhelela batho mo ba nnang. Lekwalonyana le, le sekaseka mokgwa oAIGe buisanang le tiro ya dikwalo tsa puso, tsa semolao le maparego a boitekanelo mo go neeleng ditlhapiso mo dikgetseng tse di amanang le abesetose e e tlholang bolwetsi jwa mafatlha. [Setswana]

The old man and the letter: repertoires of literacy and languaging in a modern multiethnic Gambian village

Recent developments mark a ‘human turn’ in sociolinguistics, i.e., a move away from languages as linguistic systems used by people, toward language or languaging as a sociolinguistic system performed by people. This article inscribes itself in that tradition and offers a micro‐ethnographic analysis of a literacy event in rural Gambia. The incident relates to a letter that was ‘written’ by an old illiterate villager in the process of arranging a family member’s marriage. Although the event in itself is fairly insignificant and trivial, it is mobilised to gain an insight into the social and cultural organisation of literacy and languaging in this village. The old man’s letter is a typical moment of ‘grassroots literacy’ and is not ‘orthographic’ but ‘heterographic’ (reflecting more than one prescriptive regime) and ‘exographic’ (drawing on imported normativity). Local languaging here is not the sum of the local languages (Mandinka plus Jola plus Fula plus English) but is a complexly regimented repertoire in which different functions of language are distributed differently across languages and individuals.

Small print: reflections on multilingual literacies in the global south

Reflecting on the contributions in this volume, this paper engages with the development of widespread concepts of literacy, and gradually moves towards a view in which different literacy systems are seen, and have to be seen, as relatively autonomous. The papers in this volume engage with such a relatively autonomous system, that of grassroots literacy. And when we consider this system in relation to others in the context of an increasingly globalizing world, we notice that grassroots literacy represents the ‘small print’ of literacy‐in‐the‐world.