Literacies as Mobilities and Flows: Spatializing Meaning-Making in a Community Technology Center

This ethnographic case study examined a community technology center serving a neighborhood in a Northeastern U.S. city. Drawing on activity theory, this article explored how people, material artifacts, and technology platforms in the center interacted to mediate a variety of literacy practices rooted in the participants’ local community. Data included 70 hours of participant observation as a center volunteer; interviews with staff and patrons; and fieldnotes, flyers, documents, and photographs collected during 6 months of fieldwork. Findings show that the center functioned not only as a site for skills-based literacies related to workforce development, but also as a community hub where local knowledge was mediated through dialogue, physical texts and objects, and digital platforms. Implications highlight the tensions between community-based literacy practices and more autonomous, skills-based literacies, as well as the difficulty of sustaining community literacies that meaningfully evade datafication and surveillance in an increasingly platformized digital landscape.