From Events to Assemblages:

This paper recalls the shift, starting in the 1980s, from seeing literacy as a mental process to understanding it as constitutive of the social world, researchable through an ethnographic approach, focussed on situated texts, practices and events. How we had to re-think the study of literacy since then? Two changes have challenged literacy researchers: firstly the proliferation of on-line and social media and the consequent re-organization of work and daily life; secondly the increase in global mobility, now countered around the world by a securitization of borders, particularly against the poor, as a consequence of paranoid nationalism. Transborder literacy mediation and advocacy shows how literacy activity functions as an assemblage across time/space, involving mediation.