Mobility and academic literacies: An epistolary conversation

In what follows, we explore the implications of a mobilities perspective for the conceptualization, teaching, and study of academic literacies. Mobility has come to serve as a catalyst for rethinking scholarly work in a variety of fields – most provocatively, the assumed stability as well as uniformity of what is studied and the location and products of acts and actors of study. The concept of academic literacies aligns with a mobilities perspective in its challenge to a still-dominant conception of ‘literacy’ as singular, universal, uniform, and stable. However, in recognition that any attempt to define mobility, academic literacies, or ‘mobility and academic literacies’ may itself be antithetical to the inherent mobility of all concepts, including ‘mobility’ and ‘academic literacies’, our exploration takes the form of an epistolary conversation whose movement – its turns, eddies, currents – may illustrate both the potential directions and navigational challenges of taking a mobilities perspective on academic literacies.