I teach at Georgia Southern University in the Writing and Linguistics Department, and I study literacy, or literate acts, really.  How do individuals “read” situations, in social interactions, while delivering a speech, or  discovering the appropriate moves for a small gathering.  When would the people involved in an exchange, a set of social rituals, mark it as successful, and why?  What prohibits the exchange of ideas?  What welcomes the exchange?  Whether in the traditional approaches to the study of literacy, i.e., the written word, limited exclusively to the alphabet rich text, or in the more broadly defined terms of literate acts that draw in the multimodal, multimedia exchanges of multiple stages/levels of speech acts, I’m curious about how a nation-state articulates its values, how state power moves through a nation’s institutions.  I’m interested in how the individual experiences those nation-state framings, and how the individual attempts and understands agency in the midst of an often shifting set of economic and social realities.

This desire to understand these underlying issues associated with literate acts becomes specific in current research about how communities articulate appropriate relations to risk taking (both in ceramics communities and bicycling ones), or how instruction sets are shaped in the frames of individuals’ authority.  It takes the form of a research study on contemporary literacy narratives in social media venues, or the politics and ethics associated with selecting online portfolio resources for a writing program, or the challenges for developing curriculum appropriate to the changing  definitions of what it means to write.