Literacy and the Other: Towards Understanding in Relation

This paper proposes a framing of literacy not as a skillset or ability but as an orientation towards understanding and being understood by others. We argue that literacy practices are continual efforts to attune to the marks and meanings of those with whom we share a world, mediated by an array of technologies and techniques. Levinas’s concept of the Other is extended into the postdigital to highlight the ethics inherent in literacy practices and to acknowledge the involvement of both human and other-than-human interlocutors in mutual recognition and understanding. This view bridges the divide between descriptive and prescriptive framings of literacy, instead showing that literacy skills are not gained via grammatical rules, but by achieving understanding in relation. We use ethnographic fiction as a method for examining encounters between diverse selves and others via the technologies and techniques of contemporary life and explore themes and tensions that have direct implications for designing for literacy in a postdigital world. Finally, we put forward a heuristic for teaching relational-ethical literacy, inviting learners and educators to examine the ways in which Self-Other relations shape and are shaped by the technologies, techniques, experiences and choices involved in literacy practices.