Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy

by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

Overview

Winner of the ’ CCCC Outstanding Book Award.


In this book, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants' literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. Writing on the Move builds a theory of literate valuation, in which socioeconomic values shape how multilingual migrant writers do or do not move forward in their lives. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822965053
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/20/2018
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface: Traveling Literacies xi

Introduction: Why Writing Matters 3

Chapter 1 Studying Writing on the Move 18

Chapter 2 Fluidity: When Writing Moves 32

Chapter 3 Fixity: When Writing Stalls 66

Chapter 4 Friction: When Writing Stalls in Motion 92

Chapter 5 Deep Contradictions in the Value of Literacy 123

Appendixes 135

Notes 143

Bibliography 157

Index 177

Editorial Reviews

Writing on the Move is an important contribution to transnational literacy studies. It not only complicates our understanding of literate repertoires performed in everyday life by migrant women with rich and resonant lives; it also extends our vocabulary of motive by critically examining how fixity, friction, and fluidity inform their literate values. A must-read in a time of great peril for immigrants in the United States.

University of Washington at Seattle Juan C. Guerra

How is literacy revalued as it moves across borders and boundaries? What forms does literate mobility take? What functions does the process of literate valuation perform? Refreshingly insightful and profoundly original, Writing on the Move offers an indispensable framework for theorizing about these questions and for understanding how competing social and economic forces shape, recognize, and regulate migrant literate lives.

Miami University LuMing Mao

How is literacy revalued as it moves across borders and boundaries? What forms does literate mobility take? What functions does the process of literate valuation perform? Refreshingly insightful and profoundly original, Writing on the Move offers an indispensable framework for theorizing about these questions and for understanding how competing social and economic forces shape, recognize, and regulate migrant literate lives.”
—LuMing Mao, Miami University


“Writing on the Move is an important contribution to transnational literacy studies. It not only complicates our understanding of literate repertoires performed in everyday life by migrant women with rich and resonant lives; it also extends our vocabulary of motive by critically examining how fixity, friction, and fluidity inform their literate values. A must-read in a time of great peril for immigrants in the United States.”
—Juan C. Guerra, University of Washington at Seattle

From the Publisher