Éclosions in Literacy Research: Rereading Brandt and Clinton’s “Limits of the Local”

Abstract

In processing the impact of the pandemic amidst other global crises, we found rereading Brandt and Clinton's “The Limits of the Local” article, published 20 years ago next year, to offer much, both theoretically and practically. Written within its own tumultuous time, according to its editors, it argues for transcontextualizing accounts of literacy and employing thingness as a means to subvert local/global dichotomies in literacy studies. In this essay, we reflect on this work 20 years later, and propose an extension of Brandt and Clinton's transcontextualizing perspective through an affirmative ontology of éclosion. We hope this actualization will provide an orientation for furthering transcontextual literacy studies that meet the urgency of our own tumultuous times.

Our initial conceit for this manuscript—to review Brandt and Clinton's (2002) “Limits of the Local” article 20 years after it was published in the Journal of Literacy Research—did not last beyond our first outline. This was not for lack of the article's significance. As one of the first applications of Latourian theories of nonintentional agency to literacy studies, the piece invited readers to consider what we may now refer to as an early sociomaterial approach to literacy. As such, Brandt and Clinton (2002) illuminated the traveling, integrative, and enduring qualities of literacies across local and global contexts, through a “transcontextual” perspective. To map, then, the impact of this perspective in literacy studies, particularly evident in sociomaterial, posthuman, and postqualitative inquiries, was not the part of a 20-year retrospective that seemed troublesome. Rather, it was how to address the last year, one that we are still processing, and whose weight looms heavily over us.

In many ways, living and working through the convergence of what Ladson-Billings (2021) has called four pandemics—COVID-19, racial injustice, economic instability, and climate change—has forced us to reckon more viscerally with the very transcontextualizing moments that Brandt and Clinton (2002) described, to attune more carefully to “what is localizing and what is globalizing in what is going on” (p. 347) in our daily practices and our outlook on literacy research and teaching. Consider, for instance, the juxtaposition of the flourishing of new learning platforms for school literacies with the inequalities exacerbated by their implementation. Access to wireless Internet, laptops, and data plans, in addition to technical skill for logging children onto virtual meeting platforms unfamiliar to most before the pandemic, divided many students further. Yet, autonomous ideologies of literacy, critiqued by Brandt and Clinton and others, were still commonplace, as evinced in news stories of pandemic learning gaps and the insistence to uphold annual standardized testing protocols to measure them (Goldstein, 2021).

In 2002, the editors of the Journal of Literacy Research situated Brandt and Clinton's article within its own tumultuous time, “as reports of dangerous international crises fill our newspapers and affect our daily lives” (Sturtevant et al., 2002, p. xi). We, too, have found rereading Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) article generative in pondering future literacy studies amidst multiple global crises. Thus, in this Insights Essay, we explore one extension of their work, and reflect on the thinking it has generated for us, in research and practice, around studying literacies within and across global crises. In doing so, we wish to renew an urgency for expanding and activating transcontextual ontologies to meet our own tumultuous times.

From the Social to Transcontextual Literacies

Brandt and Clinton prefaced “The Limits of the Local” as a response to a “social practice” model of literacy, which itself was a critique of literacy models indifferent to social context. While the social practices scholars countered these autonomous models with diverse and richly contextualized accounts of local literacies, Brandt and Clinton (2002) warned how this might unintentionally partition local and global contexts for literacy. Instead, they posited that “literacy is not wholly produced or reproduced in local practice but rather is a contributing actor in it and that its meanings live on beyond any immediate stipulations entailed in localizing it” (p. 353).

A transcontextual literacy perspective, then, could trace both the “localizing moves” and “globalizing connects” (Brandt & Clinton, 2002) that shape, and are shaped by, literacy practices. Doing so requires, via Bruno Latour (1994), an attention to materials as agents, and their ability to connect our practices to actors in other places and times. This particular move marks one of several expansive orientations researchers have since sought in addressing the persistence of certain dichotomies—human and material, physical and digital—in literacy studies.

Further Transcontextualizing the Local and Global

In our own work as early-career scholars, we have learned greatly from transcontextualizing literacy perspectives, especially those that have built upon Brandt and Clinton's strategies for navigating across local and global contexts (Kell, 2015; Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016). And yet, in processing our present global crises, we wonder whether we have attended to this enough—not because these crises are new, but rather, because the stakes of not addressing the “limits of the local” (and the global) are growing. Honestly, we wonder whether it can be exaggerated enough how porous the local has become to the global, and how localized global crises have become.

One place where this assessment may also be found is in Latour's (2018) evolving writing about the local and the global, arguing recently that outbreaks of deregulation, global inequality, and climate change denial in the last 20 years have further disoriented our working understandings of both terms. While local frameworks, such as those in social practices research, have successfully highlighted diverse perspectives (what Latour described as local-plus), they have also increasingly been folded into nationalistic and supremacist ideologies (local-minus). Similarly, while global frameworks, at best, may highlight interconnectedness and inclusive networks (global-plus), too often they homogenize by overshadowing inequality and privilege, benefiting an increasingly smaller elite (global-minus). Even scarier, Latour contended, is the rise of an “out-of-this-world” ideology that refuses to acknowledge how continued stratifications from globalization, inequality, and climate have come home to roost.

What this poses for us, in further conceptualizing transcontextual literacies, is the need to attune our methodological perspectives to reflect both our dividedness and our interconnectedness together, as the further entanglement of localizing and globalizing forces carries more dire consequences for the planet. While we recognize the scope of this work is vast, we focus here on its relations to our experiences in 2020 as teacher educators of literacy courses.

Toward an Ontology of Éclosions

As an elaboration on Brandt and Clinton's transcontextualizing perspective, we propose an affirmative ontology of éclosion. Coming from French origins in the mid-18th century and now used metaphorically and literally, the term proves useful as it encapsulates pluriversal meanings to address local/global paradigms. When used to mean “hatching,” éclosion refers to the sudden action of a chick's birth after days of incubation. Another meaning refers to flowers “blooming,” breaking the confines of an originally closed flower bud. A more relevant signification, however, is associated with outbreaks and how a virus emerges without notice through propagation and contagion. One use of this term in contemporary collective consciousness is the French translation, Éclosion, of the title of the recently revived film, Outbreak. The interweaving of these two etymologies brings together the synchronous sprouting↔pathogenic nature of the word, embracing both local and global contexts.

Éclosion as Sprouting

The notion of éclosion as sprouting reflects the aspects of individual events that take the form of localized changes to everyday literacies. It might point to new ways of doing work at home, relocating offices, co-sharing living spaces for work and other activities. Éclosion as sprouting may also point to added work and care responsibilities, or a localized moment of teaching in a new space, with attention to the changes in teaching delivery, demeanor, voice, tone, style, and so on to “unflatten” teaching through a screen. Éclosion as sprouting aligns with Brandt and Clinton's notion of localizing moves, as framing or partitioning interactions.

Éclosion as Pathogenic

Thinking of éclosion as pathogenic, or viral, reflects how these individual sprouting moments may become reinvested in literacies sprawled across the globe. The attention here is on the action of expanding and extending local literacies’ boundaries and translating to new contexts. For many teachers and students, the pandemic shifted boundaries between schools and personal living spaces to minimize viral transmission. Such reorganizations not only blurred work–life boundaries but also made people access different homes, across time zones, to be able to socialize and collaborate. As such, the pathogenic or viral nature of éclosion pushes for ways of wanting to reach and collaborate with others starting from a local computer while inviting others, quite literally, into one's own space through online platforms. This concept extends Brandt and Clinton's (2002) idea of globalizing connects, or the ways local events carry “globalizing tendencies and globalizing effects” (p. 347).

Our intention is to exemplify this term's varying nuances in our commentary, sharing two moments of éclosion in a dynamic sprouting↔pathogenic continuum amidst the transcontextual realities of teaching literacy courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. As two literacy researchers and teacher educators living in different Global North countries, we both experienced considerable shifts in our everyday after the first lockdown. When meeting virtually to discuss this article, we sat in makeshift offices within our homes. Next to books and papers, one could glimpse a guitar, a cat, or a pile of clothes, or hear young children or spouses from just beyond the gaze of the video camera. Working from home while parenting, adapting to the overlapping of responsibilities, and trying to teach and write about schools that were also adjusting to new learning platforms, produced local adjustments to the everyday literacies of home and work, but also invited the global in.

Over time, these sprouting adjustments began to shape, and become shaped by, larger ordering systems. Dress codes either accepted hidden sweats as work attire or, as in the case of some schools, attempted to enforce prior norms (Retta, 2020). Discussions of whether one's video must be turned on were contentious in newly formed online classes. The popularity of the “room rater” avatar on social media—evaluating and broadcasting the bookshelves, plants, and lighting of people's backgrounds working from home—encapsulated the sense that a line between private and public had broken down further than it had in years past. And while teleworking may have invited the global in for teachers and students, others who, through essential work or otherwise, worked outside of their homes risked greater potential exposure to the virus itself.

In much the same way as a breakdown of a system may expose the myriad “silent entities” (Latour, 1994, p. 37) that keep it functioning, we view moments of éclosion as an analytical tool that exposes, in a moment, literacies through a nexus of local and global movements. That is to say, the literacies of schooling during the pandemic expose the futility in delineating them as either local or global, and instead show their potential to sprout locally and sprawl globally, to bloom and to boom. But more importantly, they may also reveal the consequences of sprouting and sprawling literacies unevenly distributed across contexts, producing or further exacerbating inequalities. With this orientation in mind, we will articulate our own visceral éclosions as experienced while teaching two literacy courses during the pandemic.

Literacies as Éclosions: Sprouting Within Breakdowns

In Canada, the shift to emergency remote online learning in higher education suddenly surfaced on March 16, 2020. This series of abrupt moments oscillating between the sprouting and the pathogenic forced students and professors alike to function through available devices and Internet connections, transposing the dynamics of teaching and learning through flat screens. In the classes I (Amélie) taught, student video presentations uploaded on Microsoft Stream replaced scheduled, in-person student presentations and in-class discussion leader sessions. These material-discursive and affective shifts set the tone for éclosions to take place in individual spaces, as well as in collective virtual spaces. Here, the remote office serves as an example of a sprouting environment and the online classroom as a pathogenic ecosystem. It seemed, back then, like a dystopian effort to require students to abide by the principles of synchronous learning, with its relentless dynamic video-audio interactions and the continuous pressures of forcing conversations with each other through a screen. That is, synchronous learning created éclosions that could be overwhelming, or what some coined as “Zoom fatigue,” but could also energize communities, if used diligently. For example, if I used elements of laughter and surprise in my teaching, students might have responded, at times, using real-time feedback or chat responses.

Continuing with fully online learning in fall 2020, teaching evaluations pointed to an appreciation for asynchronous learning at the graduate level, while synchronous classes were preferred by undergraduates. In studies conducted with faculty, asynchronous video lessons had potential to maintain effective connections with students, but ultimately generated more work overall for all parties (Watermeyer et al., 2021). University students also unwillingly took on added home and family responsibilities during the pandemic, in addition to precarity statuses in employment and health (Green et al., 2020). In the midst of newly imposed sanitary restrictions, supply shortages, heightened anxieties, and modes of survival, it seemed essential in our case to adopt asynchronous teaching practices with adapted learning outcomes. Trying this teaching disposition for the first time, I felt students could breathe and have space to develop their thinking more privately—necessary supports for living environments where dire interruptions from outside were happening more frequently. Yet, what could be understood about the pathogenic éclosions, the contagious moments of interaction spreading from one screen to another in real time, that, too, were generative moments for teaching and learning?

Literacies as Éclosions: Breaking Out of Institutions

Similarly, in the Washington DC metropolitan area, in-person learning in schools and universities was suspended in March 2020. After an extended spring break, all courses were rebooted into online formats, including the literacy methods course that I (Daniel) was teaching. As part of this course, requisite with teacher certification requirements, students were to plan a read-aloud lesson that, under prior circumstances, would have been implemented in person through a field-experience placement. But after the closing, and then the tenuous and uneven reopening of schools in the area, the assignment was changed to creating a video of an asynchronous read-aloud experience, which may or may not be designed and shared with actual students. The concession, here, for students to invent lessons out of context—an autonomous lens—allowed for some reprieve from the constantly shifting circumstances of the present moment in schools.

These changes carried over into the following semester, when, just after our first class, protests for racial justice held in DC, over 140 American cities, and hundreds more internationally had reached historic peaks of participation. Despite pandemic protocols to avoid crowds, masses of people demonstrated, in many cases at risk to physical harm from police, but also the rapidly spreading virus. By extension of protestors’ phones, footage spread to millions more, sprouting requisite actions of support with immediate local effects: record donations to local mutual aid groups, the proliferation of antiracist book clubs, and individuals sharing personal statements in support of racial justice. There was also evidence of global reverberations of such actions—an influx of corporations making public statements, record sales of books on antiracism. These sprawling éclosions, often collectively referred to as a “racial reckoning,” ricocheted back into universities worldwide, in my case as faculty task forces to study areas of inequity within college systems, and as course adoptions, workshops, and new faculty positions focused on racial justice.

They also ricocheted back into the literacy course and the read-aloud assignment. With so many conversations circulating about what adults and students should be reading, and how teachers can and should engage in the moment through curriculum, the context-optional read-aloud assignment now felt, at best, like a missed opportunity for crafting pedagogies around actual students. At worst, it evaded the larger movement for more just literacy pedagogies booming around us.

As Éclosions Keep Happening: An Ongoing Discussion

Given our particular roles as literacy researchers and intermediaries between future teachers and their students, we are resolved to actualize transcontextual orientations to literacy studies that better attune to the myriad consequences literacies may carry through éclosions to distant others. This sentiment is not unique to Brandt and Clinton's (2002) hope for transcontextualizing literacy studies to “illuminate the processes by which diversity and inequity in literacy are actually sustained” (p. 354), or to scholars more recently advocating in this journal for “attending to the ways in which mobilities must be read with/against immobilities” (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017, p. 84). The stakes of this work have only gotten higher. As breakdowns in local/global systems become more commonplace, these critical transcontextual orientations are fundamental to understand the multiplicities of literacies and their entangledness in local/global effects as we seek ways to alleviate potential harm.

Also of imminent concern to us, but not yet realized 20 years ago, are how networked technologies (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) and automated artificial intelligence (e.g., face recognition, algorithms) have used literacies to generate an enlarged, actualized sense of dynamic éclosions. With this, we wonder how to prioritize transcontextualizing perspectives that extend the nature of these localizing and globalizing effects in light of our volatile political contexts, countering the perpetuation of detrimental out-of-this-world (Latour, 2018) literacies. What a renewed ethics of transcontextualizing ontologies and methodologies will offer in further shaping literacy studies, postpandemic and beyond, will rest on attuning our work to these concerns.