Description: Current research on literacy often conceives space as a container within which social practice occurs. In sharp contrast, this edited collection argues that literary practice and social space are produced in relation to one another. Contributors to this collection consider how a spacial analysis provides entirely new information for the interpretation of literary practice. Traversing geography and literacy studies, drawing on Bakhtin, Deleuze and Guattari, Lefebvre, Soja, and a range of other theorists, contributors analyze space/literacy relations in diverse settings, including classrooms, prisons, streets, institutional programs, homes, and the popular media.
Review Quotes: «How do literacy practices turn spaces into places? How do the spaces we make and resist both contain us and also let us slip outside, and in-between? This timely book takes the 'spatial turn' in social theory for a spin around our emerging social views of literacy and identity, to unsettle them and us. It projects lines of flight through the lived literacy spaces of schools, neighborhoods, prison cells, and online sites along which researchers are learning as much from the placemakers as about them. This is not just 'spatialized' literacy research, it is challenging and insightful literacy research.» (Jay L. Lemke, Professor of Education, University of Michigan)