© Copyright 2019 Alison Cardinal i How Literacy Flows and Comes to Matter: A Participatory Video Study Alison Cardinal A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2019 Reading Committee: Anis Bawarshi, Chair Emma Rose Juan Guerra Nancy Bou Ayash ii Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English University of Washington Abstract How Literacy Flows and Comes to Matter: A Participatory Video Study Alison Cardinal Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Anis Bawarshi Department of English Using participatory video methods, an intersectional feminist methodology, this dissertation offers a visual portrait of how university students’ literate activity matters and moves. Drawing on the video and audio data 18 university students created over the course of four years, this study investigates how students’ literacies flow as they physically move across the shifting contexts of school, home, community, and work. Through video production, student collaborators showed how they create meaning and connection between and within unstable literate landscapes through their emergent material/discursive practices of writing, reading, communicating, and translating. This study also explores how these literacy flows are regulated iii and valued as they move and how the persons who use them come to matter. In this study, three key findings emerge: 1) Feminist and anti-oppressive research methods, such as participatory video, open up space for participants to negotiate their racial and gendered representations, giving them control over how they matter and what they create matters to the discipline 2) Through the process of filming, literacies emerge as mattering, both in how they materialize and hold personal significance. Filming choices create conditions for mattering. 3) Taken together, videos show how students navigate and create literascapes, empowering them to create new directions of their literacy flows across spaces and modalities. I also offer implications for teaching writing, specifically how to help students recognize, navigate, and redirect the flows of literacy in their lives. This dissertation contributes to current conversations in writing and literacy studies that seek to understand literacies across spatialtemporal landscapes that account for entanglements of technology, language, gender, race, mobility, affect, materiality, and power. iv v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Literacy as Flows .......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Participatory Video Methdology ................................................................................. 33 Chapter 3. Literacy Mattering Through Filming .......................................................................... 85 Chapter 4. Literascapes, Modal Flows and Literate Trajectories ............................................... 145 Chapter 5. Discussion ................................................................................................................. 192 References ................................................................................................................................... 219 Appendix 1. Research Philosophy .............................................................................................. 236 Appendix 2. Stretch Syllabus ...................................................................................................... 238 Appendix 3. Autoethnography Syllabus ..................................................................................... 248 Appendix 4. In-Class Activities .................................................................................................. 251 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank all of the student collaborators who participated in the project. I am overwhelmed and humbled by the generosity of my students for all the work they put into their videos and for their willingness to share their experiences, lives, and literacies. Without your time, work, and vulnerability, this project would not be possible. I hope this project honors your work and amplifies the knowledge you created. I want to give a special thanks to Aliyah Jones and Melissa Atienza, who co-authored the methods chapter. Your insights into the method(ology) enriched my understanding of the method. I also want to thank Minh Nguyen for all our conversations over the course of three years about literacy as we created the film about students’ literacies. Our conversations enriched my understanding, and I am humbled by all the time you took to help me think through literacy flows. I would lastly like to thank Daisy, whose brilliant video compositions taught me so much about the nature of literacy. Your creativity made this dissertation possible. I would like in particular to thank my advisor, dissertation chair, and long-time mentor Anis Bawarshi, who through these last seven years has patiently helped, supported, and challenged me to do my best work. It’s hard to describe how grateful I am for the hundreds of hours you have spent helping me to fully develop as a scholar and teacher. I strive to be the kind of mentor and scholar you model. Another special thanks goes to my colleague, mentor and collaborator Emma Rose. Your ground-breaking work with participatory video inspired this work and made this project possible, and I incredibly lucky to get to work with you and learn from you. Thank you as well to my other committee members – Juan Guerra, Nancy Bou Ayash, and Emma Rose – for pushing my work forward and mentoring me throughout this complex project throughout its various stages. I would also like to thank the cohort of scholars and mentors who helped me in a variety of ways. Thanks to Bill Kunz for encouraging me to take on graduate school and for advising me on the video production portion of my project. My project also benefitted greatly from my time at KairosCamp!, led by Cheryl Ball and Doug Eyman, and through conversations I was able to have with the cohort of scholars there. Thanks to Misty Anne Winzenreid for all our methods conversations and for teaching me how to design and put together a research project early in my career. Thanks to the folks in my field who gave me the opportunity to share my work early – especially Laura Gonzales, and Elvira Carizal-Dukes – and thus push my thinking forward. I am forever grateful as well to Autumn Knowlton for helping me with the final push of this manuscript. I also want to especially thank my partner, Anthony Warnke, for endlessly helping me think through my ideas, reading my work, giving feedback, and encouraging me. It is hard to express my gratitude for all the ways you have supported me. It truly does take a village of scholars and mentors to write a dissertation, and I am so grateful for those who invested their time and energy into helping me conceive of and finally finish this project. I couldn’t have completed this dissertation without all the emotional support and encouragement I have gotten over the years. Thanks to my colleagues at UW Tacoma – especially Randy Nichols, Andrea Modarres, JM Miller, Ali Modarres, Tony Perone (#Haus594), and Bill Kunz – who have endlessly encouraged me throughout the process and helped me to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks to my Feisty Pottery Bitches who kept me grounded– Molly Hueffed, Marilyn Hoppe, Molly Chin, Maggie McKnight, Nancy Parrish, Sara Hospador, Beth Farrow, Marie Tornow. Never gonna give you up. I’m also incredibly grateful for all of the badass women scholars in my life who cheered me on – Abby Murray, Ann Shivers-McNair, Laura Gonzales, Misty Anne Winzenried, Kirsten Higgins, and Mandy Macklin. And especially viii I’d like to thank Emma Rose, who has been the most incredible friend and intellectual model, and just overall one of the most stellar humans I know. I’d also like to thank my family for all their support through the process, and especially to my parents, Cindy and Paul Cardinal, for always believing in me and encouraging my educational pursuits. Most importantly, I want to thank my partner Anthony Warnke, an endlessly supportive, grounded, kind, funny and brilliant person who encouraged me every step of the way. ix CHAPTER 1. LITERACY AS FLOWS At a time when digital technologies and global capitalism have made the movement of people, goods, and information more possible than ever, we are simultaneously seeing policies and ideologies that increasingly work to restrict people’s mobility and fix them in place, from immigration policies to income inequality to assaults on the rights of disabled persons, women, people of color and LGBTQ people. The literacy studies paradigm, which assumes stable sets of literacies emerge out of communities, has limited explanatory power amid such movement, mass displacement, and deportation on both a local and global scale. So too does an approach to literacy that focuses primarily on the discursive. In the midst of violence on marginalized bodies, there is new urgency to account for the material elements and consequences of literacy alongside the discursive. In response to this shifting mobile, material, and embodied landscape, my project revisits and retheorizes literacy to investigate how bodies-in-flux create meaning in the shifting everyday, engaging in mobile literate activity despite the threats they face locally and systemically. To this end, my study returns anew to some