Literate Activity is committed to sharing scholarship about how people act-with textual practices in the world. Prior (1998) defined literate activity as “cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that [are] strongly motivated and mediated by texts” (p. 138). As a unit of analysis, literate activity offers a way to address the rich variety of cultural, semiotic resources, practices, and activities entangled throughout people’s engagements with what are typically referred to as “writing" and “reading.” However, as a unit of analysis, it is useful for highlighting “writing” without privileging it above other semiotics that confluence along dialogic trajectories around texts, including talk, artifacts, gesture, bodily movement, touch, visual images, sounds, and affective intensities (Prior et. al., 2023). We see literate activity as textuality in the most situated, and broadest senses. For the former, it includes moment-to-moment activity in the production and/or composition of written text-artifacts; for the latter, it also encompasses textual and semiotic activity broadly distributed across sociocultural action. Perhaps the wider frame for our scholarly space is semiotic/literate activity, or semio-literate activity with gravitational pulls to or from texts-artifacts, broadly conceived as coherent complexes of signs (Ware, 2022). We see scholarship on literate activity as a way of keeping in play the situated and dispersed complexities of how people act with text-artifacts in the world, and we publish scholarship that embraces complexity in theoretical and methodological approaches needed to make such actions visible. For representative scholarship on semio-literate activity see our references list below.
Though its roots are in Writing Studies, literate activity is not simply a different way of saying “writing,” and we aim to showcase scholarship around literate activity as cultural ways of being not just in the classroom, in disciplines, in workplaces, but across lifeworlds and throughout the lifespan. That is, we appreciate literate activity as a unit of analysis for those specialized spaces, but also for the seemingly mundane cultural activities with which people make their lives, for making more readily visible people’s seemingly ordinary uses of texts and the roles and functions such texts play in people’s everyday meaning-making. Attention to literate activity also invites serious attention to a capacious array of what are often referred to as “inscriptions,” (Latour, 1990. Latour & Woolgar, 1979) a term used to describe a wide variety of material representations—from written alphabetic annotations to photographs, drawings, diagrams, charts, tables, lists, graphs, equations, instrument readings, and more–which can tend to be overlooked when researchers privilege people’s engagement with ‘writing’ in terms of extended alphabetic prose. To that end, we aim to be a leading international, digital, open-source space for scholarship that explores the situated, mediated, and dispersed complexities (Prior, 1998) of literate activity and the making of cultural textualities in the world. How we frame literate activity overlaps with a number of disciplinary spaces that address textually-mediated action, and we encourage scholars outside of Writing Studies interested in texts/textuality/text action to consider submitting their work. To that end, we are interested in publishing a wide range of original scholarship that explores literate activity and textuality in the world, and that stands to expand ways of conceptualizing, studying, and representing what people do with texts. Submissions should seek to maintain and examine the complexity of textual practices, rather than smoothen them away, and to represent the richness and vibrant dynamism of people’s actings with texts as they unfold in the blink of an eye and across the work of a lifetime.
People create and use texts for a variety of purposes across the richly literate landscapes they navigate, and so we are interested in submissions offering inquiry and/or case studies across varied sites and disciplines, as well as seemingly mundane lifeworld spaces that account for the rich variety of embodied resources, practices, and activities implicated in events of semiosis, especially as those have relationships to textual activity. As part of our mission, we are not interested in reifying hardened norms around publication, and we welcome submissions that engage shapes beyond the typical “IMRaD” format.
Prospective authors might consider the following, though not comprehensive, set of frames for scholarship on literate activity and/or textual action:
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: four essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans; M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bellwoar, H. (2012). Everyday matters: Reception and use as productive design of health-related texts. Technical Communication Quarterly, 21(4), 325-345.
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brandt, D. (1990). Literacy as involvement: The acts of writers, readers, and texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Buck, A. (2012). Examining digital literacy practices on social network sites. Research in the Teaching of English, 47(1), 9-38.
Cushman, J. (2015). ‘Write me a better story’: Writing stories as a diagnostic and repair practice for automobile technicians. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 45(2), 189-208.
Durst, S. (2019). Disciplinary and literate activity in civil and environmental engineering: A lifeworld perspective. Written Communication, 36(4), 471-502.
Hanimov, L. (2021). Beyond type one. Grassroots Writing Research Journal, 12(1), 21-28.
Hanks, W. (1996). Language and communicative practices. Boulder: Westview Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kell, C. (2015). “Making people happen”: Materiality and movement in meaning-making trajectories. Social Semiotics, 45(4), 423-445.
Kelvie, A. (2018). More than preaching to the choir: Religious literate activity and civic engagement in older adults. Literacy in Composition Studies, 6(2), 117-135.
Latour, B. (1990). Drawing things together.” Representation in scientific practice, edited by Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, MIT Press. pp. 19-68.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The scientific construction of scientific facts. Sage.
Luff, P., Heath, C., & Pitsch, K. (2009). Indefinite precision: Artefacts and interaction in design. In Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, C. Jewitt (Ed.). pp. 213-224.
Marotta, C. (2021). Regulated and non-regulated writing: A qualitative study of university custodians’ workplace literacy practices. Research in the Teaching of English, 55(3), 289-310.
Miller, E. L. (2016). Literate misfitting: Disability theory and a sociomaterial approach to literacy. College English, 79(1), 34–56.
Mbodj-Pouye, A. (2013). Writing the self in rural Mali: Domestic archives and genres of personal writing. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 83(2), 205-225.
Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Prior, P. (2004) Tracing process: How texts come into being. In C. Bazerman, & P. Prior. (Eds.). What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp. 167-200). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Prior, P. (2008). Flat CHAT? Reassembling Literate Activity. Paper presented at Writing Research Across Borders, Santa Barbara 2008.
Prior, P. (2018). How do moments add up to lives: Trajectories of semiotic becoming vs. tales of school learning in four modes. In R. Wysocki. & M Sheridan. (Eds.) Making future matters (n.p.). Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Received from http://ccdigitalpress.org/makingfuturematters
Prior, P. & Hengst, J., Eds. (2010). Exploring semiotic remediation as discourse practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Prior, P., Hengst, J. A., Kovanen, B., Mazuchelli, L., Turnipseed, N., & Ware, R. (2023). Rearticulating theory and methodology for perezhivanie and becoming: Tracing flat CHAT assemblages and embodied intensities. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 24(1), 4–44.
Roozen, K., & Erickson, J. (2017). Expanding literate landscapes: Persons, practices, and sociohistoric perspectives of disciplinary development. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/expanding/
Roozen (2020) Coming to act with tables: Tracing the laminated trajectories of an engineer-in-the-making. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 24(1), n.p.
Rose, M. (2003). Words in action: Rethinking workplace literacy. Research in the Teaching of English, 38(1), 125-128.
Sterponi, L., Zucchermaglio, C., Alby, F, & Fatigante, M. (2017). Endangered literacies? Affordances of paper-based literacy in medical-based practice and its persistence in the transition to digital technology. Written Communication, 34(4), 359-386.
Stornaiuolo, A., & Monea, B. (2023). Pocket writing: How adolescents’ self-sponsored writing circulates in school. Written Communication, 40(3), 792–821.
Suchman, L. (2000). Embodied practices of engineering work. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(1&2), 4-18.
Thiel, J. (2020). Red circles, embodied literacies, and neoliberalism: The art of noticing an unruly placemaking event. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20(1), 69-89.
Tusting, K., & Papen, U. (2008). Creativity in everyday literacy practices: The contribution of an ethnographic approach. Journal of Literacy and Numeracy Studies, 16(1), 5-23.
Voloshinov, V. (1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Vossoughi, S., Nzinga, K., Berry, A., Irvine, F., Mayorga, C., & Gashaw, M. (2021). Writing as a social act: The feedback relation as a context for political and ethical becoming. Research in the Teaching of English, 56(2), 200–222.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). Problems of general psychology including the volume Thinking and Speech: The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1. New York: Plenum Press.
Wang, X. (2019). Tracing connections and disconnects: Reading, writing, and digital literacies across contexts. College Composition and Communication, 70(4), 560-589.
Ware, R. (2022) “God’s absence took its toll”: Dialogic tracing of literate activity and lifespan trajectories of semiotic (un)becoming. Written Communication, 39(1), 129-165.
Wargo, J. M. (2017). Rhythmic rituals and emergent listening: Intra-activity, sonic sounds and digital composing with young children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 392–408.
White-Farnham, J. (2014). ‘Revising the menu to fit the budget’: Grocery lists and other rhetorical heirlooms. College English, 76(3), 208-226.
Wickman, C. (2015). Locating the semiotic power of writing in science. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 29(1), 61–92.
Zapata, A., Kuby, C., & Thiel, J. (2018). Encounters with writing: Becoming-with posthumanist ethics. Journal of Literacy Research, 50(4), 478-501.