Investigating Ethics in Sociocultural Literacy Studies

Abstract

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people’s ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this article shows how the author’s earlier study of activists’ literacies was limited by an underdeveloped theory of ethics. The article reviews ideas from recent work in the anthropology of ethics that can draw out and draw together literacy studies’ largely implicit concepts of ethics. Through this discussion, the article presents a clearer theory of the ethical dimension of literacy. The article concludes by using this new theory to study the ethics in the literacy practices of an LGBTQIA activist.

In this conceptual article, I address theories of ethics in literacy studies. By ethics or morality, I mean people’s ways of pursuing the good, that is, people’s ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives (Lambek, 2015). For instance, a person might read an article accusing a politician of shirking her duty, write a card thanking a friend for her generosity, or talk with a student about which career might make him happiest. Each of these actions includes an ethical component (duty, the virtue of generosity, and reflecting on happiness). Through different actions, people may pursue different ethics that construe the good in different ways.

Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. It is often unclear in literacy studies exactly how ethics factors into the ways people read, write, speak, think, and listen (see the section below titled “Ethics in SCLS”; on the downplaying of ethics across the social sciences, see Laidlaw, 2014). Because ethics is often an important dimension of literacy and wider social experience, researchers may limit their views of literacy when they underexamine ethics. Thus, the field of literacy studies could benefit from working out ways of making explicit and developing the field’s largely implicit ways of talking about ethics.

To clarify the ethical dynamics of literacy, I adapt ideas developed in the new anthropology of ethics (NAE; see Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014; Keane, 2016; Laidlaw, 2014; Lambek, 2015; Robbins, 2016). NAE emerged out of ongoing debates in the social sciences regarding the place of ethics in social life (see the section below titled “NAE”). NAE resists tendencies in the social sciences to define ethics as a superficial or illusory part of social life, treating ethics instead as a pervasive, important, and varied dimension of human experience. Anthropologists working in this movement seek to explain how different people actually pursue the good, not how people ought to pursue the good. Furthermore, NAE does not assume people always act ethically, even according to their own ideas about good lives. Rather, NAE assumes people are concerned about good lives and good actions, variously defined, and they often evaluate themselves and others in such terms. These ideas, I show, can be adapted to highlight the ethical dynamics of literacy.

Below, I place NAE theories in dialogue with sociocultural theories of literacy. By sociocultural theories of literacy, I mean theories that emphasize how literacy practices shape and are shaped by their social and cultural contexts. Although much of this work is part of, or inspired by, the New Literacy Studies (e.g., Gee, 1990/2008; Graff, 1979/1991; Heath, 1983/1999; Street, 1984), I use the term sociocultural literacy studies (SCLS) to avoid the difficulty of calling a well-established field “new.” Therefore, SCLS can simply be read as New Literacy Studies and recent ideas and research it inspired. I focus on SCLS because it is a prominent part of literacy studies and it is broadly compatible with NAE insofar as both approaches emphasize people’s creative efforts to interpret and navigate the world (vs. focusing on, say, individuals’ cognitive capabilities). I bring together these two fields to find common ground on which to develop a theory of ethics for literacy research.

To develop my argument, I work through the following questions: (1) What can SCLS gain by addressing ethics more directly?; (2) What NAE ideas are relevant to SCLS?; (3) When NAE and SCLS are placed in dialogue, what theory of the ethical dynamics of literacy emerges?

In presenting a theory of the ethical dynamics of literacy, I hope to help reinvigorate in literacy studies a broader conversation about ethics. Although I hope researchers might develop new ways of seeing literacy’s ethical dimension, I do not assume ethics is always the most important part of any literacy practice. In my view, ethics ought to be theorized not as the driver of literacy, but as one factor in literacy, along with, for example, identity, politics, and social relationships. Upon investigation, it may turn out that some literacy practices should be seen as largely ethical undertakings, but other literacy practices may turn out to have only modest ethical dimensions. The ideas I present below might help literacy researchers make such determinations.

An Illustration of the Need for a Theory of Ethics in SCLS

Overview

Before examining theories of ethics in SCLS and NAE, I review my SCLS study of the writing practices of a high school’s Amnesty International club. I show how I missed the ethical dimension of members’ writing and I explain how an ethics-focused analysis can offer a richer account of the life of the club. In this way, I point to the need in SCLS for more overt theories of ethics.

The Study

In 2013, I studied the literacy practices of an Amnesty club at a high school in a suburb of a city in the northeastern United States (Collin, 2014). Each week, 20 to 30 Amnesty members—mostly White and middle class—met after school in their advisor’s classroom. The club ended each meeting by writing urgent action letters (UALs). UALs are one- to two-page letters calling on state agents and other parties to uphold the rights of specific individuals. Amnesty’s central office sends out UAL calls that outline particular cases and prompt Amnesty members to write UALs to particular parties.

At each meeting, as members wrote UALs, the club’s advisor walked around the room and urged members to “put some heart into” their letters. In an interview, he explained why he wanted members to write personal, passionate UALs. When writing UALs, he said, “you’re thinking these thoughts through and processing and sorting out and weighing, and to me, that’s a big part of what this group is all about. It’s about making changes in the people in the group.”

Likewise, five student leaders told me that although they suspected recipients counted but did not read UALs, the leaders still thought it was important to write personal letters. One leader explained, “As you go through Amnesty, you kind of become more passionate about the cause and you become more emotional about it. And you put your own, like, piece into the letter.” To show new members how to write engaged letters, leaders paired off with novices and talked through their writing, explaining, for instance, how to signal passion with particular words (e.g., “I am imploring,” “We are demanding”). By modeling personal, passionate writing, leaders demonstrated for novices how to perform as the club’s kind of activist.

Although about two thirds of the members at each meeting wrote engaged UALs, others wrote brief, relatively impersonal letters (e.g., letters with few words signaling passion and lots of text borrowed from the call). Most writers of impersonal UALs were new members of the group or members who did not consistently attend meetings. Clark (a pseudonym) was an exception to this rule. Clark was an established member who attended all meetings, spoke often about the importance of human rights, volunteered to join or lead several group initiatives, and always wrote brief, impersonal letters. Clark told me he wrote short letters because he assumed recipients did not read UALs closely. Notably, the club’s five leaders also assumed recipients only counted UALs, but they still wrote personal, passionate letters. Clark and his letters looked like outliers in my data.

In my analysis, I took an SCLS tack and viewed UAL writing in terms of Amnesty’s social relations and cultural norms. Specifically, I described how veteran members of the group socialized newcomers into the club’s ways of writing. Drawing on Gee’s (2005) theory of situated literacy, I argued the ways of writing into which veterans socialized new members were Amnesty-normed ways of construing social contexts. Amnesty’s ways of interpreting the world, including its ways of imagining human rights as possessions of individuals, appeared most accessible to White, middle-class students raised to emphasize the needs of individuals over the needs of groups (I return to this argument below in the section “Ethics Involves Literacy”). Club members socialized into Amnesty’s way of being in the world, its “big-D Discourse” (Gee, 1990/2008, p. 2), were able to write personal, passionate UALs that defined the world according to the club’s beliefs. By learning to write engaged UALs, in turn, members were integrated more fully into the group. Clark did not fit this argument, but I thought of him as the exception who proved the rule.

A Second Look

In the years since my study, I discovered NAE and began reflecting upon my research in light of NAE’s claim that humans are often trying to work out and work toward visions of good lives. Turning to my study of Amnesty, it was clear that group members took the defense of human rights as ethically good. In the spirit of NAE, I went further and asked how members defined and pursued this vision of the good. For group leaders, pursuing the good of human rights through composing UALs centrally involved reconfirming personal commitments to human rights and cultivating virtues consonant with human rights (e.g., virtues of empathy and hope). Because the club’s leaders saw UAL composition as an occasion for recommitting to their cause and cultivating virtues, the inattention of UAL recipients was not enough to stop them from writing personal, passionate letters. Leaders’ focus on commitment and virtue helped keep them engaged in writing personal letters.

Just because group leaders pursued human rights ethics by composing personal UALs does not mean Clark, a writer of impersonal letters, had no ethics. Clark had an ethic of human rights and that ethic, unlike that of the leaders, was oriented to the consequences of actions. On this view, personal commitments and virtues are less important than actions’ outcomes. Viewed in terms of the outcome of prompting a state to protect someone’s human rights, an impersonal UAL sent to an office where it will only be counted is no better or worse—no more or less ethically sound—than a personal UAL sent to the same office. Both types of letters will only be counted, not read, so they stand the same chance of bringing about an ethical outcome. Clark’s focus on actions’ consequences does not necessarily make him any more practical than the group’s leaders; it just means he uses a different ethical scale for weighing the outcomes of actions against other factors such as the cultivation of virtues. In sum, Clark’s impersonal letters are not signs of weak commitment to the group or to human rights. Rather, his impersonal letters are products, in part, of his outcome-focused ethics, just as leaders’ personal UALs are products, in part, of their commitment- and virtue-focused ethics.

This NAE reading of the Amnesty study suggests that ethics can make a difference in how people read, write, speak, think, and listen. This rereading also suggests it is difficult to account for ethics with standard SCLS theories. In the following section, I review what SCLS does and does not say about ethics.

Ethics in SCLS

Although ethics is seldom theorized overtly in SCLS research, ethics was an important concern in the genesis of the field. SCLS emerged as a critique of the Global North’s dominant theory of literacy, which says there is one way to read and write, and by reading and writing the right texts in the right way, one may become more intelligent, more productive, and more ethical. In his seminal book The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century, Graff (1979/1991) shows how the North’s dominant approach to literacy served not to help working people, but to place them in subordinate roles in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. Graff (1979/1991) explains how the dominant theory of literacy supported a “moral economy” (p. 24) that defined as good those people who accepted the status quo and its ways of distributing resources. Far from being the one correct definition of literacy, Graff shows, the dominant theory was just one idea used by ruling groups to block other groups’ ideas about literacy and good lives.

Critiquing the dominant theory of literacy from different directions, Heath (1983/1999) and Street (1984) show in rich ethnographic detail how the character and outcomes of literacies are shaped by and shape their social contexts. Contra the dominant theory, they show literacy is not a unitary phenomenon that has autonomous effects on individuals or societies. Notably, Heath and Street do not offer overt theories of the ethical dimension of literacy. Both authors, however, show how different people use and adapt literacies to pursue different kinds of good lives. For instance, in Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, Heath (1983/1999) shows how adults in Trackton and Roadville communicated ideas of right and wrong through storytelling. In Literacy in Theory and Practice, Street (1984) shows how some villagers in Cheshmeh, Iran, drew upon their knowledge of Islamic texts to frame and evaluate current events. In both studies, ethics, bound up with literacy, is a local affair dependent upon the social and material resources at hand.

Building on the work of Graff, Street, and Heath, Gee (1990/2008) argues in Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses that literacy is less about technical skill in prescribed forms and more about the control of “big-D Discourses” (p. 2), or group-normed ways of being in the world. Although Gee (1990/2008) says “values” and “morals” are parts of Discourses (pp. 1-2), he does not define these terms in detail or explain how ethics shape literacy practices. Likewise, Barton and Hamilton (2000) define literacy practices as “general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives . . . However, practices are not observable units of behavior since they also involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships” (p. 7). Similar to Gee, Barton and Hamilton do not offer a specific theory of values, so it is not fully clear whether and how they see ethics operating as a distinct force in literacy practices.

These early SCLS scholars’ rejection of ethnocentric ethics and disinclination to use ethics as a major category in their own studies fits Laidlaw’s (2014, Chapter 1) account of the place of ethics in mid- to late-20^th century social science: Many social scientists at the time saw ethics as something to be critiqued or seen through, not as a pervasive and important part of social life (among the social scientists Laidlaw names as underplaying ethics are Bloch, 1989; Bourdieu, 1977; Ortner, 1984; Sahlins, 1976). Below, I revisit early SCLS work and I use contemporary ideas from anthropology to draw out this work’s suggestive ideas about ethics and literacy.

Inspired, in part, by early SCLS scholars’ rejection of ethnocentrism and emphasis on diversity (see, for example, Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Gee, 1990/2008; Graff 1979/1991; Heath, 1983/1999; Street, 1984), later SCLS scholars studied and promoted people’s efforts to use literacy to pursue social justice (see, for example, Alexander, 2008; Blackburn, 2002; Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2016; Gomez, Rodriguez, & Agosto, 2008; Grey & Williams-Farrier, 2017; Logan, 2008; Power-Carter, 2006; Pritchard, 2017). In an important sense, these critical studies of literacy and antiracism, antisexism, LGBTQIA rights, and so on are studies of ethics: They explore how people use literacies in struggles to define and live good lives in different ways. Few of these studies, however, mobilize overt theories of ethics. Thus, although these studies show people using literacies to pursue the good, they do not explain such efforts with specific theories of what ethics is, how it works, or how it interacts with other literacy dynamics (e.g., ideology). To be clear, the studies cited above, as well as many other studies carried out in SCLS, offer invaluable insights into literacy and its social dynamics. As I demonstrate below, researchers interested in ethics can learn much from these studies and can draw out and develop the parts of these studies most relevant to ethics.

Although SCLS offers few resources for describing and analyzing people’s ethics, it offers some ideas of how people should pursue good lives through literacy. For example, some SCLS scholars ratify Freire’s (1970) argument that literacy should be animated by love, or concern for humans’ reciprocal flourishing (see, for example, Lankshear & McLaren, 1993). Other scholars explore Bakhtin’s (1990) idea that dialogue might ground literacy ethics (see, for example, Hicks, 2000; Juzwik, 2004). Gee (1990/2008) argues that clarifying and stating one’s tacit theories is a key ethical task of communication. Other scholars seek to develop norms that might guide literacy research (see, for example, Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2015; Figueroa, 2016). Although many of these arguments are compelling, they do not offer—and were not designed to offer—ways of analyzing how different people use literacy practices to work out and work toward good lives.

Rhetoric and composition studies present modes of ethical analysis that are useful, but rarely taken up in SCLS. Duffy (2017), for example, describes how ethical dimensions of composition can be illuminated by Aristotle’s virtue ethics. In Aristotelian philosophy, virtues are qualities cultivated in and necessary for social practices. Virtue ethics, then, focuses on how humans develop the virtues that sustain the socially meaningful practices that help make up good, flourishing lives. Thus, in composition studies, one might ask how a novelist cultivates virtues such as perseverance and open mindedness to sustain the practice of novel writing through which she flourishes. Several NAE scholars, such as Asad (2003), find virtue ethics useful for describing the ethical practices of disparate groups. Other NAE scholars, including Laidlaw (2014) and Keane (2014, 2016), acknowledge the conceptual power of virtue ethics, but insist no single philosophy of ethics can explain all forms of ethical practice.

In sum, SCLS offers limited, but suggestive, ideas of how people use literacy to pursue the good. In the following section, I introduce NAE and use some of its ideas to draw out and draw together some of SCLS’ theories of ethics. Further below, I combine insights from SCLS and NAE to develop a new theory of the ethics of literacy.

NAE

Overview

NAE emerged out of ongoing debates in anthropology about the functions, importance, and diversity of ethics in social life. In his reviews of social science literature on ethics, Laidlaw (2014, 2017), a leading anthropologist of ethics, notes social scientists often discuss ethics in terms of (a) relativism, where members of a given group follow one ethic distinct from the ethics of other groups (see, for example, Boas, 1928), and (b) socialization, where ethics is primarily a means by which people are called to conform to the ways of society (see, for example, Durkheim, 1937/1957; for a compatible review of the field, see Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014). Laidlaw argues that although these perspectives shed some light on ethics—ethics often vary across groups and ethics often serve to bind groups together—they can make it difficult to see how people frequently borrow ethical ideas and practices from other groups, develop new and diverse ethics within groups, and pursue ethics that serve more than socializing functions.

Dissatisfied with their field’s standard views of ethics, growing numbers of anthropologists are working out new ways of studying how people define and pursue the good. Laidlaw (2014, 2017) notes that scholarship conducted in NAE assumes ethics is a pervasive, important, and varied part of human lives; ethics are not epiphenomena thrown up by more basic phenomena (e.g., biological or economic processes); ethics are not always bound within groups; and ethics can serve more than socializing functions (see also Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014). Working from NAE’s assumptions, anthropologists have studied how people develop different ethics in different contexts. They have studied, for example, the ethics of American girls playing on playgrounds (Goodwin, 2006), Muscovites debating public health (Zigon, 2010), Muslims in Cairo navigating city life (Hirschkind, 2006), and lesbians in India forming activist communities (Dave, 2012). These studies show how, for people in diverse times and places, in ways big and small, ethics makes a difference in what they think and do.

To develop their ideas about ethics, some anthropologists have engaged arguments from moral philosophy (i.e., the branch of philosophy where scholars examine and advance standards of ethical conduct). The most prominent philosophies of ethics on the contemporary scene are deontology, which construes ethics as a matter of rational duty (see, for example, Kant, 1785/2012); consequentialism, which says the outcomes of actions, more so than actors’ intentions, determine actions’ ethical character (see, for example, Bentham, 1789/1988); and virtue ethics, which discusses ethics in terms of human character and its cultivation (see, for example, Aristotle, 1976; Confucius, 2008). Other philosophies define ethics as a matter of participating in religious life (see, for example, Dorff & Crane, 2016; Hashmi, 2002), deepening reciprocity with others (see, for example, Battle, 2009), caring for others (see, for example, Noddings, 1984), and improving society through reflection and experiment (see, for example, Dewey, 1922). Instead of adopting one philosophy and using it to explain the many and varied ways people see the good, anthropologists of ethics often view philosophies of ethics as offering models of how some people might see the good. Anthropologists of ethics often, but do not always, draw upon and adapt philosophical models to describe the unique ethics they observe in their fieldwork.

Across a growing number of studies, anthropologists have developed compelling ideas about ethics. Three of these interlocking ideas, discussed below, are particularly useful for highlighting the ethical side of literacy: Ethics is about ultimate values and ends, ethics is a dimension of situations, and ethics involves literacy. These ideas can help draw out and draw together some of SCLS’ largely implicit ways of addressing ethics. After discussing these ideas and showing how they build off each other, I bring them together in a new theory of the ethical dimension of literacy.

Ethics Is About Ultimate Values and Ends

In Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories, Keane (2016) argues ethics is about “values and ends that are not in turn defined as the means to some further ends” (p. 4). In other words, ethics involves ultimate values and ends, or values and ends people construe as good in and of themselves. Note here that ultimate simply means “good in its own right,” not “most important” or “universally true.” Members of the Amnesty club, for example, believe human rights have ultimate value. If someone asked club members why human rights are important, they might say, “Human rights just are important. They are parts of a good life.” To take a more mundane example, Haviland (1997) describes two roommates debating how people should live out the ultimate value of supporting their friends. If someone asked why supporting one’s friends is important, the roommates might say, “It just is important.” Thus, ethics involves working out and pursuing what is of ultimate importance, from the momentous (e.g., defending human rights) to the mundane (e.g., supporting one’s friends).

By focusing on ultimate values and ends, NAE illuminates some ethical endeavors that might otherwise escape notice. Indeed, it might seem too grand to ask about the vision of the good life informing the small argument described by Haviland, but it is not too much to ask what the roommates took to be important in its own right. Likewise, by focusing on ultimate values and ends, one can more clearly see the ethics in SCLS studies that do not address ethics directly. For instance, in Ways With Words, Heath (1983/1999) does not overtly address ethics, but she shows in rich detail how people use language to work out and pursue ultimate values and ends. Heath (1983/1999) shows how adults in Trackton often “talked junk” and bantered with children for no further reason than to show they care (pp. 166-174). Following Noddings (1984), then, one might argue an “ethic of care”—a view of the good that foregrounds humans’ reciprocal, caring relationships—informs some of the literacy practices shared between children and adults in Trackton. Thus, everyday literacies, such as those described in widely read SCLS ethnographies (e.g., Heath, 1983/1999; Street, 1984), can carry ethical weight insofar as they serve as ways for people to work out and pursue what they take to be of ultimate importance.

NAE’s focus on ultimate values and ends can also highlight the ethics in some literacy studies focused on the liberation of historically marginalized people. For example, in Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy, Pritchard (2017) builds out from research on the literacies and liberation of African Americans (e.g., Logan, 2008; Williams, 2005), Black women (e.g., McHenry, 2002; Pough, 2004), and LGBTQIA people (e.g., Alexander, 2008; Driskill, 2010) to study how those he identifies as “Black Queers” use literacy to free themselves from oppression. Pritchard (2017) shows how research participants combat literacy normativity, or “the use of literacy to create and impose normative standards and beliefs onto people who are labeled alien or other” (p. 28), with restorative literacies, or

forms of cultural labor through which individuals tactically counter acts of literacy normativity through the application of literacies for self- and communal love manifested in a myriad of ways and across a number of sites and contexts toward the ends of making a life on one’s own terms. (p. 33)

Pritchard (2017) describes, for instance, how some Black men who identify as fat and gay, bisexual, or questioning created an online social network that bars the kinds of “antifat rhetoric [they found] on online Black gay social networks” (p. 202). Notably, Pritchard writes that such restorative literacies ratify what bell hooks calls a love ethic, or an ethic that “presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well” (hooks, as cited in Pritchard, 2017, p. 38). Although Pritchard does not develop this argument with a larger theory of ethics, his ideas exemplify NAE theory insofar as the love ethic takes love as an ultimate value and freedom and flourishing as ultimate ends. Thus, Pritchard’s study can be read through an NAE lens that focuses on the different ways people define, redefine, and embody an ethic of love. At the same time, Pritchard’s arguments and the arguments of others who study literacy and liberation can strengthen NAE by adding to the latter’s ideas of how ethics (e.g., hooks’ love ethic) develop in interaction with—indeed, often in struggle against—other ethics (e.g., the ethics in literacy normativity).

Ethics Is a Dimension of Situations

Situations

Appiah (2008), a contemporary philosopher cited by NAE researchers including Keane (2016) and Laidlaw (2014), argues ethics is, in large part, a matter of defining situations:

In the real world, the act of framing—the act of describing a situation, and thus determining that there’s a decision to be made—is itself a moral task. It’s often the moral task. Learning how to recognize what is and isn’t an option is part of our ethical development. (emphasis in original, p. 196)

Here, situations are discursive–material complexes people build through interaction. For example, at their meetings, the Amnesty club built and enacted the situation “activists petitioning state agents.” On Gee’s (2005) account, situations include the following dimensions: identities, relationships, actions, connections, sign systems, significance, and politics. Gee (2005) acknowledges that these seven dimensions involve “values” and ideas about what is “right” and “good” (pp. 11-12), but he does not define these ethical terms or explain whether and how ethics constitutes a force of its own in social situations. Going further than Gee, NAE says situations include an “ethical dimension” (Laidlaw, 2014, p. 1; Lambek, 2015, p. x) that coevolves with—that shapes and is shaped by—situations’ other dimensions.

Coevolution

By noting how ethics coevolves with the other dimensions of a situation, NAE defines ethics as more than a matter of saying certain values and ends are of ultimate importance. NAE says ethics is also a matter of orienting the other dimensions of a situation (identities, relationships, actions, etc.) toward ultimate values and ends, and vice versa. For instance, just noting the Amnesty club took the defense of human rights as an ultimate end does not explain the differences in how members pursued this end through composing UALs. To account for this difference, one must ask how different members built and related dimensions of the situation “activists petitioning state agents.” Leaders, for instance, set the defense of human rights as the situation’s primary ethic. They oriented the situation’s identities, relationships, and actions toward human rights ethics by performing as activists who, through writing UALs to state agents, recommit themselves to human rights and cultivate virtues consonant with human rights. In so doing, they redefined human rights ethics as, in part, a matter of commitment and virtue. Clark also set the defense of human rights as the situation’s main ethic. Unlike the leaders, however, Clark oriented the situation’s identities, relationships, and actions toward human rights by performing as an activist who petitions state agents only in ways likely to bring about desired outcomes. In so doing, he sought to focus human rights ethics on actions’ consequences. As the example shows, ethics is a matter of remaking and reorienting different dimensions of the social world.

NAE’s view of coevolution shows how ethics shape and are shaped by specific institutional and historical contexts. In other words, the available identities, relationships, actions, and so forth in a given time and place shape, but do not fully determine, the kinds of ethics people can develop through literacy. For example, in the Global North in the decades following the Second World War, some advocates for human rights adapted their ethics to take on some of the assumptions of the bureaucratic states they addressed (e.g., advocates framed human rights, in part, as possessions of individual citizens; see Stuurman, 2017). Advocates were not forced to adapt their ethics in this way—other advocates developed human rights ethics in other directions—but their adaptations were conditioned by the assumptions of the state agents to whom they wrote and spoke. If they construed the world in ways unrecognizable to state agents, advocates assumed, they would fail to convince states to recognize human rights. Thus, ethics is not a matter of totally free creation, but a process conditioned by social and historical patterns of thought and action.

Relative autonomy

In their accounts of coevolution, anthropologists including Laidlaw (2014) and Lambek (2015) insist ethics is one dimension among others in a situation. That is, ethics is not just a subpart of identities, sign systems, politics, or other dimensions of the world. Laidlaw and Lambek emphasize the relative autonomy of ethics because, as Laidlaw (2014) observes, social scientists often follow Durkheim in saying ethics “is just the corpus of socially authorized rules and values, and it is a function of social structure” (p. 19). On the latter view, one would be able to account fully for any ethics by tracing it back to its origins in whatever one takes to be society’s real dimensions (e.g., group identities, social relations, or labor practices). The Durkheimian view, however, has difficulty accounting for the presence of multiple ethics in one setting: If all people in one setting operate in the same structures, the same dimensions of the social world, they should follow more or less the same ethics (i.e., the same “corpus of socially authorized rules and values”). However, as the Amnesty example shows, people in the same social location can pursue different ethics. Furthermore, the ethical diversity in the club cannot be explained as a sign of undersocialization or deviance: Clark was a socialized, accepted member of the club who pursued ethics different from the ethics pursued by club leaders. Accounting for the kind of ethical diversity apparent in the Amnesty club requires seeing ethics as one of several relatively autonomous yet interacting dimensions of the social world.

Ethics’ relative autonomy has long been assumed in parts of feminist social science, if not in social science as a whole. Sayer (2011), a prominent sociologist of ethics, notes how many feminist researchers “deal not only with the micro-politics of inequality and what Bourdieu terms ‘soft domination,’ but with people’s wellbeing and their evaluative [i.e., ethical] orientation to the world, particularly through their relations to others” (p. 10). These feminist researchers resist defining people’s ethical orientations—how they imagine and pursue good lives—as pure effects of social structures, defining them instead as real and relatively autonomous dynamics in human experience. For example, in literacy studies, Baker-Bell (2017) construes Black feminist–womanist storytelling as a practice through which Black women reflect on their well-being and heal themselves and the wider world (see also Grey & Williams-Farrier, 2017; Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, & Sealey-Ruiz, 2016). Quoting Carey, Baker-Bell defines storytelling-as-healing as “a means for Black women to enact their agency in resisting or repairing the conditions that wound them” (p. 532). Thus, Black feminist–womanist storytelling can be an ethical practice of reflecting on one’s own life and remaking the world so more people can define and pursue their visions of good lives. Baker-Bell argues that although this ethical practice of storytelling is shaped by social conditions, including “the conditions that wound” storytellers, it is not determined in full by those conditions. The relative autonomy of ethics helps open spaces in which people can work to reshape their own lives and the wider world.

Although ethics is a distinct dimension of life, people can try to subordinate ethics to other dimensions. For instance, in The Literacy Myth, Graff (1979/1991) shows how the dominant ethic of literacy in 19th-century Canada helped elites control nonelites in a range of institutions. Thus, Graff shows how literacy ethics—those of 19th-century Canada and, by implication, those of other times and places (see, for example, LeBlanc, 2017)—can be made to function mostly as political ideologies that integrate people into unequal socioeconomic orders. Graff does not argue, however, that in all times and places, the dimension of ethics is subordinate to the dimension of politics. Although the ethic described in The Literacy Myth functioned largely as a political ideology, it appears possible on Graff’s account for other ethics to function as more than mere ideologies (although all ethics are ideological in part).

Ethics Involves Literacy

Because ethics are not simply derived from other dimensions of situations, people must build ethics out of the discursive and material resources available to them. That is, to define ultimate values and ends and to orient other dimensions of situations toward those values and ends, people take up, adapt, and invent resources. Resources include narratives, theories, discourses, definitions, genres, texts, physical tools, devotional objects, and more. For example, to build the ethics and the other dimensions of the situation “activists petitioning state agents,” the leaders of the Amnesty club took up resources including Amnesty’s definition of human rights, a story of activist development (i.e., making personal commitments), concepts of virtue, UAL calls, the genre of the formal protest letter, and a fax machine. By bringing together these discursive and material resources, the club’s leaders focused their human rights ethic on commitment and virtue and oriented the other dimensions of the situation toward that ethic. At the same time, they shaped their ethic to fit the dimensions of the situation. As this example shows, building situations’ ethical dimensions requires knowing how to texture together discursive and material resources in socially meaningful ways. Put differently, ethics involves literacy (i.e., literacy in the broad sense of socially meaningful ways of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening). Here, literacy research can contribute to NAE by showing how everyday ethics are not automatically achieved, but are created and recreated through human efforts including literacy practices (a point not always clear in NAE, as noted in Lempert, 2013). Reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening, in other words, are some of the ways people construe and materialize the ethical dimensions of situations.

SCLS researchers show how people draw resources and literacies from their groups’ cultural repertoires, or what Gee (1990/2008) calls groups’ “identity kits” (p. 155). That is, groups offer members resources—ideas, vocabularies, stories, definitions, and so on—and ways of using resources to build and navigate situations, including the ethical dimensions of situations. Groups’ repertoires change over time as members create new resources and literacies, borrow from other groups, and work out new ways of using old resources to navigate changing conditions. For example, established human rights groups such as Amnesty International have taken up new ideas, vocabularies, and goals shaped by contemporary discourses of cultural difference (see Stuurman, 2017). Although such novelty is possible in ethics and literacy—people are not always fully controlled by their groups’ prevailing norms—other interested parties may not recognize novel ethics and literacies as legitimate. For instance, longtime Amnesty members might reject discourses and initiatives that frame human rights as something other than the possessions of individuals. Through these kinds of disagreements, groups develop, maintain, or break up their ethics and literacies.

Framing ethics in terms of literacy invites questions about power and history raised, especially, by SCLS researchers who study literacy and liberation (see, for example, Baker-Bell, 2017; Pritchard, 2017). These questions include the following: Who can acquire and develop what literacies to build ethics in what kinds of ways? Who can get their ways of doing ethics through literacy recognized as legitimate? What histories and what social, political, and economic conditions enable and constrain people’s ethics and literacies? For example, high school Amnesty clubs and their ethics and literacies are made most available to middle-class students who do not have to work after school and whose schools can afford to pay advisors’ stipends. Less privileged students and schools can still run Amnesty clubs and take up Amnesty’s ethics and literacies, but to do so, they must make proportionately larger sacrifices than their middle-class peers. Furthermore, UALs and Amnesty’s other genres may best match the sensibilities of middle-class students raised by professionals comfortable with using bureaucratic genres (e.g., letters of appeal) to make demands of state agents and other officials (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1991). Less privileged students can still use UALs and other Amnesty genres, but to do so, they may have to stretch further than their middle-class peers. Finally, Amnesty’s ways of writing and talking about human rights ethics in global terms may alienate underprivileged students with more local and immediate ethical concerns such as poverty and racism. The latter students, conversely, may find it difficult to get their concerns heard and answered by privileged Amnesty members who speak in global terms that occlude local problems. Here, as researchers influenced by Bakhtin might point out, literacy ethics is a question of dialogue and answerability, or who can be heard and answered by whom and in what ways (see, for example, Hicks, 2000; Juzwik, 2004). Thus, by taking an SCLS view, one can see how, through ongoing struggles over power and access, different ethics and literacies are valued differently and made more available to some people than to others.

A Theory of the Ethical Dynamics of Literacy

Here, then, is a concise theory of the ethical dynamics of literacy that draws together the SCLS and NAE arguments discussed above. When people perform literacy practices, they construe and navigate a situation’s ethical dimension, along with its other dimensions: identities, relationships, actions, connections, sign systems, significance, and politics. A situation’s ethical dimension comprises values and ends people define as good in and of themselves. Through literacy practices, people orient a situation’s other dimensions toward ultimate values and ends, and vice versa. Thus, ethics and the other dimensions of a situation are made to shape each other. One dimension of a situation can be subordinated to another dimension (e.g., ethics can be subordinated to politics), but such subordination cannot be assumed prior to investigation. Ethics’ relative autonomy from other dimensions helps open spaces for people to “enact their agency” through literacy (Baker-Bell, 2017, p. 532). Because ethics are not simply derived from other dimensions of situations, people must build ethics through texturing together discursive and material resources in socially meaningful ways. Given ongoing struggles over power and access, the resources and literacies through which people build ethics are valued and distributed in unequal manners by a range of stakeholders. When people seek to enact particular ethics through literacy, they often respond to other ethics circulating in a given context. In sum, ethics is a pervasive, important, and varied aspect of social life, in general, and literacy, in particular.

Using this theory of the ethical dynamics of literacy, one can ask interrelated questions about the ethics of literacy practices, including the following:

1. How do people’s ultimate values and ends shape literacy practices, and vice versa?

2. How do people’s ways of orienting situations’ other dimensions toward ultimate values and ends shape literacy practices, and vice versa?

3. How do ongoing struggles over power shape people’s literacy practices—including the ethical dimensions of their literacy practices—and vice versa?

Answers to these questions require social scientific data (e.g., data generated through observations, interviews, and document collection). That is, these questions cannot be answered in advance of research by appealing only to philosophies of ethics. Although some people’s ethical actions may fit established philosophies—such philosophies circulate through cultural spaces and are taken up and adapted by people in their everyday actions—not all ethical actions fall into established categories. It is up to researchers to describe and analyze people’s ethical ideas and actions in ways that are supported by empirical data.

In the following section, I ask the questions listed above of some of the literacy practices of an LGBTQIA activist. In so doing, I demonstrate what a new theory of ethics can reveal about the ethical dynamics of literacy.

Ethics in One Literacy Event

Overview

In 2012, I studied the literacies of a Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) at a high school in a largely Latinx and African American working-class neighborhood of a city in the northeastern United States (Collin, 2013). For members of the GSA, a key literacy practice was the composition of a large bulletin board in their school’s main hallway. Julieta (a pseudonym) was in charge of the bulletin board at the time of my study. Using and adapting the GSA’s resources for composing its bulletin board, Julieta filled the board with texts and images including the name of the club in large multicolored letters; rainbow flags; gender symbols interlocking in different combinations; signs promoting the Day of Silence and other Pride Week events; signs with pro-LGBTQIA slogans (e.g., “What Part of LOVE Don’t You Get?”); a sign reading “Victory over AIDS”; the September 8, 1975, Time magazine cover of Air Force Sgt. Leonard Matlovitch, with the caption “I Am a Homosexual/The Gay Drive for Acceptance”; a statement from the GSA announcing its support of LGBTQIA members of the armed forces; a sign with a silhouette of a woman (i.e., the image posted on women’s restrooms), a plus sign, another silhouette of a woman, an equal sign, and a heart (i.e., woman plus woman equals love); and a sign with male silhouettes saying man plus man equals love. All in all, the texts and images on the bulletin board added up to a colorful, inviting display.

In an interview, Julieta explained why she composed the bulletin board as she did. Discussing the board’s eye-catching images and slogans, she said, “I felt if it was kind of fun, [students] would think, ‘Okay, let me go to a meeting, see how it is.’” Continuing, Julieta said she included items that signaled the GSA’s openness to everyone:

I wanted it to be that, like, it could be neutral, that people were like, “Okay, it’s not just for gay men, it’s not just for lesbians—it’s for everybody.” Like, no matter what you like, no matter what you do, at the end of the day, it’s still love, so you’ve got to respect it.

By composing the bulletin board in this way, Julieta carried out two of the GSA’s main objectives: announcing support for LGBTQIA people and opening the GSA to students of any sexual orientation.

An Incident

Shortly before Pride Week, someone ripped from the board the image of the male silhouettes (man plus man equals love). Julieta recreated and reposted the image, but once again, it was torn down. Julieta reposted the image and added a sign stating, “Respect the Love,” but the image was ripped up again.

Deliberating over how to respond, Julieta said she thought her antagonist was probably a male student trying to embody her school’s key virtue of toughness. Julieta explained,

Because in this school, like, um, I feel like, everybody, every guy and even every girl, like, they’re set out to be like, “I’m tough, you can’t do nothing to me, like, I’m just a tough person.” Especially the guys are just like, “I don’t want to deal with gay men.” Like, when you think of gay men, you don’t think “tough.” At least they don’t. I know a couple gay men that are pretty tough, so, but um . . . I guess they just don’t respect it. Two girls is fine for them, but two guys, even though it’s on a paper [i.e., on the bulletin board], it still bothers them.

In separate interviews, the GSA’s copresidents agreed with Julieta’s reading of her antagonist’s likely motives.

Not wanting to back down, but not wanting to provoke a harsher reaction from her antagonist during Pride Week, Julieta decided to leave the male silhouettes off the board, but then decorate the school’s entire main hallway with rainbow streamers. Describing the outcome of her actions, Julieta recalled,

In Pride Week, when I had the decorations up, the rainbow decorations down the hallway, everyone was really proud of the fact that, even though they ripped off the men, they didn’t rip off the rainbow streamers that I had on the ceiling. So everybody was just like, “So maybe we are kind of trying to accept it.”

Thus, Julieta believed her strategy paid off in signs of growing support at the school for people who identify as LGBTQIA.

Ethics-Focused Analysis

Question1: How do people’s ultimate values and ends shape literacy practices, and vice versa?

Julieta’s story is in crucial respects a story about the ethical dynamics of literacy. The central literacy practice is Julieta’s composition of the GSA’s bulletin board. By filling the board with rainbow flags and other signs of sexual diversity, Julieta defined inclusion as one of the club’s ultimate ends. Moreover, by posting slogans such as “What Part of LOVE Don’t You Get?” Julieta defined love as an ultimate value and a reason for inclusion. Thus, by composing the bulletin board as she did, Julieta worked out and ratified an ethic of love and inclusion.

The inclusion ethic ratified by Julieta’s GSA and by GSAs across the country emerged in particular institutional and historical contexts (see Collin, 2013; Faderman, 2015). Similar to some activists in the civil rights, women’s, and disability rights movements, some activists in the LGBTQIA rights movement (e.g., members of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) worked in the field of education for inclusion, that is, getting LGBTQIA students recognized as unique and as students among other students who deserve the full experience of schooling. These activists did not argue for radical difference and full separation (e.g., sending all LGBTQIA students to separate schools where their distinct strengths and needs could be addressed). Instead, these activists helped start and popularize initiatives such as GSAs that emphasize, in Julieta’s words, “It’s for everybody.” Through such initiatives, activists circulated through schools and beyond an ethic of inclusion for young people who identify as LGBTQIA.

Question2: How do people’s ways of orienting situations’ other dimensions toward ultimate values and ends shape literacy practices, and vice versa?

In pursuing an ethic of love and inclusion, Julieta worked to remake the dimensions of her school. Specifically, she sought to make visible and to validate LGBTQIA identities and relationships. Julieta also argued LGBTQIA identities and relationships are significant insofar as they are matters of love and sources of pride (signaled by the posters for Pride Week). And, by posting the Time cover of Sgt. Matlovitch and the poster calling for “Victory over AIDS,” she connected the GSA to longer political struggles for recognition, respect, and care. Conversely, by working to rebuild her school’s identities, relationships, forms of significance, and politics in these manners, Julieta refined the GSA’s ethic of love and inclusion and placed that ethic in an unfolding history of activism.

Question3: How do ongoing struggles over power shape people’s literacy practices—including the ethical dimensions of their literacy practices—and vice versa?

The GSA’s ethic of love and inclusion coevolved with an ethic of respect circulating among students. The latter ethic, Julieta explained, defined respect as an outcome of projected toughness. Many students who followed this ethic believed gay men cannot be tough—they believed gay men cannot fend off those who would harass them—so they thought gay men were not to be respected. Julieta believed this ethic of respect led her antagonist to see the male silhouettes as symbols of nontoughness and nonrespectability. By tearing down the silhouettes—a kind of literacy act—Julieta’s antagonist reasserted the respect ethic and remade the school as a place where gay male identities and relationships could not safely be embodied.

Instead of just rejecting the respect ethic full stop, Julieta sought through her literacy practices to rework the respect ethic and use it to advance the GSA’s project. On Julieta’s version of this ethic, respect is still an ultimate value, but it is an outcome of loving others and being seen as loving others: “It’s still love, so you’ve got to respect it.” In addition, when her antagonist ripped up the male silhouettes, she posted a sign reading, “Respect the Love.” Notably, in her version of the respect ethic, Julieta matched the assertive tone of the ethic’s other version: She said, “You’ve got to respect it” and she ordered others to “Respect the Love.” This assertive tone resonated with other items Julieta placed on the bulletin board, such as the sign asking, “What Part of LOVE Don’t You Get?” and the rainbow flags signaling not just acceptance of, but pride in LGBTQIA identities and relationships. In her efforts to compose the bulletin board, then, Julieta worked to combine elements of the respect ethic with the GSA’s ethic of love and inclusion.

Despite the creativity of her strategy to draw together rival ethics, Julieta struggled to respond to the ongoing vandalism of the bulletin board. On one hand, Julieta did not want to back down—she wanted to demand respect for people who identify as LGBTQIA. On the other hand, Julieta saw that each time the silhouettes were torn down, gay male identities and relationships were disrespected further in the school. To resolve this dilemma, Julieta backed down a little by leaving the male silhouettes off the board, but then pushed forward with the assertive move of covering the school’s entire main hallway in rainbow streamers, symbols of pride in diverse sexual orientations, including male homosexuality. Although Julieta was disappointed she could not find a way to keep up the silhouettes, she thought her actions helped move the school, at least a little, in the direction of love and inclusion.

Reflection

The story about Julieta and the bulletin board, similar to the story about Amnesty and UALs, shows ethics is often a crucial part of literacy and literacy is often a crucial part of ethics. Indeed, without ways of registering how Julieta ratified ethics of love, inclusion, and respect, literacy researchers can understand only parts of Julieta’s efforts to compose the bulletin board. And, without ways of seeing how Julieta adapted and enacted literacies to build and navigate situations, anthropologists of ethics can understand only parts of Julieta’s efforts to work toward her vision of the good. By studying ethics and literacy together, scholars from a range of fields can better understand how people living in different times and places try to rebuild their worlds and make their ways through their worlds.

Conclusion

My ultimate aim with this article is to help reinvigorate a broader conversation in literacy studies about ethics. This kind of broad conversation might feature arguments different from the ones presented above. Within NAE, for example, researchers including Laidlaw (2014) and Zigon (2010) adapt Foucault’s ethics to consider how humans use their reflective capabilities to transform their thinking and themselves. Taking this tack, literacy researchers might explore how reflection and refashioning play out in portfolio writing and journaling. Or researchers might consider contemporary work on Confucian ethics (see, e.g., Yu, Tao, & Ivanhoe, 2011) and ask how people seek to cultivate virtues and good relations with others through literacy practices. Critical scholars might read Levinas’s (2005) ethics and study how people are construed as Others in different kinds of narratives. Literacy researchers interested in religion might study religious ethics (see, e.g., Dorff & Crane, 2016; Hashmi, 2002) and think about the significance of literacy practices (e.g., memorizing the Qur’an) in different religions’ ethical systems. By engaging and adapting these and other theories of ethics, literacy scholars can explore the many different ways people work out and work toward good lives through literacy.